TERMS STARTING WITH
formula ::: 1. A prescribed form; a rule or model; any fixed or conventional method for doing something. 2. An established form of words or symbols for use in a ceremony or procedure. 3. Math. A general relationship, principle, or rule stated, often as an equation, in the form of symbols. 4. A representation of a substance using symbols for its constituent elements. formulas.
formula ::: 1. In logic, a sequence of symbols representing terms, predicates, connectives and quantifiers which is either true or false.2. (language, music) FORTH Music Language. An extension of FORTH with concurrent note-playing processes. Runs on Macintosh and Atari ST with MIDI output.[Formula: A Programming Language for Expressive Computer Music, D.P. Anderson et al Computer 24(7):12 (Jul 1991)].3. Preprocessor language for the Acorn Archimedes, allowing inline high-level statements to be entered in an assembly program. Written in nawk.
formula 1. In logic, a sequence of symbols representing terms, {predicates}, {connectives} and {quantifiers} which is either true or false. 2. "language, music" FORTH Music Language. An extension of {FORTH} with concurrent note-playing processes. Runs on {Macintosh} and {Atari ST} with {MIDI} output. ["Formula: A Programming Language for Expressive Computer Music", D.P. Anderson et al Computer 24(7):12 (Jul 1991)]. 3. Preprocessor language for the {Acorn Archimedes}, allowing inline high-level statements to be entered in an assembly program. Written in {nawk}.
formula: An equation that is specifically written to solve a particular problem.
formulae ::: pl. --> of Formula
formula ::: n. --> A prescribed or set form; an established rule; a fixed or conventional method in which anything is to be done, arranged, or said.
A written confession of faith; a formal statement of foctrines.
A rule or principle expressed in algebraic language; as, the binominal formula.
A prescription or recipe for the preparation of a medicinal compound.
formularies ::: pl. --> of Formulary
formularistic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or exhibiting, formularization.
formularization ::: n. --> The act of formularizing; a formularized or formulated statement or exhibition.
formularize ::: v. t. --> To reduce to a forula; to formulate.
formulary ::: a. --> Stated; prescribed; ritual. ::: n. --> A book containing stated and prescribed forms, as of oaths, declarations, prayers, medical formulaae, etc.; a book of precedents.
Prescribed form or model; formula.
formulas ::: pl. --> of Formula
formulated ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Formulate
formulate ::: to devise or develop, as a method, system, etc. or reduce to or express in a formula.
formulate ::: v. t. --> To reduce to, or express in, a formula; to put in a clear and definite form of statement or expression.
formulating ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Formulate
formulation ::: n. --> The act, process, or result of formulating or reducing to a formula.
Formula ALGOL ::: An ALGOL extension for symbolic mathematics, strings and lists, developed by A.J. Perlis and R. Iturriaga at Carnegie for the CDC G-20 in 1962.[An Extension of ALGOL for Manipulating Formulae, A.J. Perlis et al, CACM 7(2):127-130 (Feb 1964)].[Sammet 1969, p. 583]. (1995-02-15)
Formula ALGOL An {ALGOL} extension for {symbolic mathematics}, strings and lists, developed by A.J. Perlis and R. Iturriaga at {Carnegie} for the {CDC G-20} in 1962. ["An Extension of ALGOL for Manipulating Formulae", A.J. Perlis et al, CACM 7(2):127-130 (Feb 1964)]. [Sammet 1969, p. 583]. (1995-02-15)
Formula - A standard and systematic procedure or process for solving a class/variety of different mathematical problems.
FORMULA. ::: Every formula we form about God, though always true as a symbol, becomes false when we accept it as a sufficient formula.
Formula_investing ::: is a method of investing that rigidly follows a prescribed theory or formula to determine investment policy. Formula investing can be related to how an investor handles asset allocation, invests in funds or securities, or decides when and how much money to invest.
TERMS ANYWHERE
(2) From 200 to circa 450: With the catechetic school of Alexandria and in particular with Clement and Origen, the work of reconciliation between Hellenistic philosophy and the Christian religion formally begins. This period is characterized by the formulation of Christian truths in the terminology and frame work of Greek thought. It ends with the gigantic synthesis of Augustine (354-430), whose fusion of Neo-Platonic thought and Christian truth molded society and furnished the tradition, culture and mental background for Christian Europe up to the end of the 14th century.
(3) From 450 to the 18th century: During this period there is a general decline until the Carlovingian renaissance. Great names are not lacking, such as those of Pseudo-Denis the Areopagite, John Damascene, Boethius and Isidore of Seville. however, the originality and spiritual elevation of an Augustine are not to be found. The period is generally characterized by the elaboration and systematization of truths already formulated. Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences predominate, though Aristotle's logic holds an honored place throughout this pre-Scholastic era. Cf. Migne's Patrologiae Latinae -- H.Gu.
4. OPPOSITION, IMMEDIATE INFERENCE. The four traditional kinds of categorical propositions -- all S is P, no S is P, some S is P, some S is not P -- customarily designated by the letters A, E, I, O respectively -- may conveniently be represented in the functional calculus of first order (§ 3) by the four forms S(x) ⊃x P(x), S(x) ⊃x ∼P(x), S(xr) ∧x P(x), S(x) ∧x ∼P(x), S and P being taken as functional constants. (For brevity, we shall use the notations S, P, S(x) ⊃x P(x), etc., alike for certain formulas and for the propositional functions or propositions expressed by these formulas.)
ABC ALGOL "language" An extension of {ALGOL 60} with arbitrary data structures and user-defined operators, for {symbolic mathematics}. ["ABC ALGOL, A Portable Language for Formula Manipulation Systems", R.P. van de Riet, Amsterdam Math Centrum 1973]. (1994-10-28)
A formula of the pure functional calculus of first order which contains no free individual variables is said to be satisfiable if it is possible to determine the underlying non-empty domain of individuals and to give meanings to the propositional and functional variables contained -- namely to each propositional variable a meaning as a particular proposition and to each n-adic functional variable a meaning as an n-adic propositional function of individuals (of the domain in question) -- in such a way that (under the accepted meanings of the sentential connectives, the quantifiers, and application of function to argument) the formula becomes true. The meaning of the last word, even for abstract, not excluding infinite, domains, must be presupposed -- a respect in which this definition differs sharply from most others made in this article.
A bound variable, or apparent variable, in a given formula, is distinguished from a free variable by the fact that the meaning of the formula does not depend on giving the variable a particular value. (The same variable may be allowed, if desired, to have both bound occurrences and free occurrences in the same formula, and in this case the meaning of the formula depends on giving a value to the variable only at the places where it is free.) For examples, see Abstraction, and Logic, formal, § 3.
Abracadabra [possibly from Celtic abra or abar god + cad holy; Blavatsky from an elaboration of the Gnostic Abrasax or Abraxas, a corruption of a Coptic or Egyptian magic formula meaning “hurt me not”] Mystical word used as a charm by the Gnostic school of Basilides. The Gnostic physician Serenus Sammonicus (2nd-3rd century) prescribed it as a remedy for agues and fevers. On amulets the word is often inscribed as a triangle with the point down, beginning with all eleven letters, below which are the first ten, and so on down to the single letter at the point. The power of any charm lies, not in the word itself, but in the hidden science connecting sounds and symbols with the potencies in nature to which they correspond. See also ABLANATHANALBA
According to an important theorem of Gödel, the functional calculus of order omega with the axiom of infinity added, if consistent, is incomplete in the sense that there are formulas A containing no free variables, such that neither A nor ∼A is a theorem. The same thing holds of any logistic system obtained by adding new primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference, provided only that the effective (recursive) character of the formal construction of the system is retained. Thus the system is not only incomplete but, in the indicated sense, incompletable. The same thing holds also of a large variety of logistic systems which could be considered as acceptable substitutes for the functional calculus of order omega with axiom of infinity; in particular the Zermelo set theory (§ 9 below) is in the same sense incomplete and incompletable.
According to the common teaching of the Schoolmen, philosophy is able to demonstrate the existence of God, though any statement of his essence is at best only analogical. See Analogy. Aquinas formulated the famous five ways by which to demonstrate God's existence, as prime motor, first cause, pure act to be assumed because there has to be act for anything to come into existence at all, necessary being in which existence and essence aie one, as set over against contingent beings which may be or not be, as summit of the hierarchy of beings. A basic factor in these demonstrations is the impossibility of infinite regress. God is conceived as the first cause and as the ultimate final cause of all beings. He is pure act, ens realissimum and summum bonum. Thomism and later Scholasticism denied that any adequate statement can be made on God's essence; but earlier thinkers, especially Anselm of Canterbury indulged in a so-called "Christian Rationalism" and believed that more can be asserted of God by '"necessary reasons". Anselm's proof of God's existence has been rejected by Aquinas and Kant. See Ontologtcal argument. -- R.A.
A. Church, A formulation of the simple theory of types, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 5 (1940), pp. 56-68.
adjuvant ::: n. --> A substance added to an immunogenic agent to enhance the production of antibodies.
A substance added to a formulation of a drug which enhances the effect of the active ingredient.
An assistant.
An ingredient, in a prescription, which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient.
Agner Krarup Erlang "person" (1878-1929) A Danish mathematician. {Erlang} the language and unit were named after him. Interested in the theory of {probability}, in 1908 Erlang joined the Copenhagen Telephone Company where he studied the problem of waiting times for telephone calls. He worked out how to calculate the fraction of callers who must wait due to all the lines of an exchange being in use. His formula for loss and waiting time was published in 1917. It is now known as the "Erlang formula" and is still in use today. {Biography (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Erlang.html)}, {Biography (http://pass.maths.org.uk/issue2/erlang/index.html)}. (2005-02-26)
Agni2 (Agni; Agnih) ::: the god of Fire; in Sri Aurobindo"s interpretation of the Veda, the deva as the master of tapas, "the divine Consciousness formulating itself in universal energy"; he is the "secret inhabitant of Matter and its forms" and "the power of conscious Being, called by us will, effective behind the workings of mind and body"; 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".
Aham brahma asmi: Sanskrit for “I am brahman,” the formula of the Upanishad, denoting the full coincidence of the human and divine, arrived at not so much by a spontaneous mystic insight as by logical deduction from the nature of world and self.
Aham brahma asmi: (Skr.) "I am brahman", the formula of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10, denoting the full coincidence of the human and divine, arrived at not so much by a spontaneous mystic insight as by logical deduction from the nature of world and self. -- K.F.L.
Aish (Hebrew) ’Īsh Man; the name Jesus was said by Blavatsky to have been derived aish (BCW 9:228n). Regarding the symbology of the crucifixion, Blavatsky remarks that “the early compilers of the Christian Mysteries were well versed in Esoteric philosophy and the Hebrew occult metrology, and used it dexterously. Thus they took the word aish . . . and used it in conjunction with that of Shanah ‘lunar year,’ so mystically connected with the name of Jehovah, the supposed ‘father’ of Jesus, and embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula” (SD 2:561).
A-law "standard" The {ITU-T} {standard} for {nonuniform quantising logarithmic compression}. The equation for A-law is | A | ------- (m/mp) |m/mp| =" 1/A | 1+ln A y = | | sgn(m) | ------ (1 + ln A|m/mp|) 1/A =" |m/mp| =" 1 | 1+ln A Values of u=100 and 255, A=87.6, mp is the Peak message value, m is the current quantised message value. (The formulae get simpler if you substitute x for m/mp and sgn(x) for sgn(m); then -1 "= x "= 1.) Converting from {u-LAW} to A-LAW introduces {quantising errors}. u-law is used in North America and Japan, and A-law is used in Europe and the rest of the world and international routes. [The Audio File Formats FAQ] (1995-02-21)
“All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite’s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit’s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being,—an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves,—but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” The Life Divine
A logistic system need not be given any meaning or interpretation, but may be put forward merely as a formal discipline of interest for its own sake; and in this case the words proof, theorem, valid inference, etc., are to be dissociated from their every-day meanings and taken purely as technical terms. Even when an interpretation of the system is intended, it is a requirement of rigor that no use shall be made of the interpretation (as such) in the determination whether a sequence of symbols is a formula, whether a sequence of formulas is a proof, etc.
Also, the tonic or predominant note in a raga, a Hindu mode of musical notes or melodic sounds so formulated as to arouse intensity of emotion, often of a high order, appropriate to the different portions of the day and night.
ambrosian ::: a. --> Ambrosial.
Of or pertaining to St. Ambrose; as, the Ambrosian office, or ritual, a formula of worship in the church of Milan, instituted by St. Ambrose.
anandaṁ brahma ::: the formula expressing the realisation of the fourfold brahman, when one sees "all the universe as the manifestation of the One" (sarvaṁ brahma), "all quality and action as the play of his universal and infinite energy" (anantaṁ brahma), "all knowledge and conscious experience as the outflowing of that consciousness" (jñanaṁ brahma), and "all in the terms of that one Ananda" (anandaṁ brahma). sarvam anantaṁ jñanam anandaṁ brahma, iti brahmacatus.t.ayam (sarvam anantam jnanam anandam brahma, iti brahmachatushtayam)
"And if there is, as there must be in the nature of things, an ascending series in the scale of substance from Matter to Spirit, it must be marked by a progressive diminution of these capacities most characteristic of the physical principle and a progressive increase of the opposite characteristics which will lead us to the formula of pure spiritual self-extension. This is to say that they must be marked by less and less bondage to the form, more and more subtlety and flexibility of substance and force, more and more interfusion, interpenetration, power of assimilation, power of interchange, power of variation, transmutation, unification. Drawing away from durability of form, we draw towards eternity of essence; drawing away from our poise in the persistent separation and resistance of physical Matter, we draw near to the highest divine poise in the infinity, unity and indivisibility of Spirit.” The Life Divine
“And if there is, as there must be in the nature of things, an ascending series in the scale of substance from Matter to Spirit, it must be marked by a progressive diminution of these capacities most characteristic of the physical principle and a progressive increase of the opposite characteristics which will lead us to the formula of pure spiritual self-extension. This is to say that they must be marked by less and less bondage to the form, more and more subtlety and flexibility of substance and force, more and more interfusion, interpenetration, power of assimilation, power of interchange, power of variation, transmutation, unification. Drawing away from durability of form, we draw towards eternity of essence; drawing away from our poise in the persistent separation and resistance of physical Matter, we draw near to the highest divine poise in the infinity, unity and indivisibility of Spirit.” The Life Divine
" . . .and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers.” The Life Divine
“ . . .and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers.” The Life Divine
"An evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of consciousness is not considered admissible by the modern mind, because these exceed our present formulation of Nature and, to our ignorant preconceptions founded on a limited experience, they seem to belong to the supernatural, to the miraculous and occult; for they surpass the known action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force.” The Life Divine
“An evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of consciousness is not considered admissible by the modern mind, because these exceed our present formulation of Nature and, to our ignorant preconceptions founded on a limited experience, they seem to belong to the supernatural, to the miraculous and occult; for they surpass the known action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force.” The Life Divine
::: "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
an.i ::: van.i accompanied by or formulated in script.
Antilogism: If in the syllogism in Barbara the conclusion is replaced by its contradictory there is obtained the following set of three (formulas representing) propositions, M(x) ⊃x P(x), S(x) ⊃x M(x), S(x) ∧x ∼P(x), from any two of which the negation of the third may be inferred. Such an inconsistent triad of propositions is called an antilogism.
Apotropaism: Protective or defensive magic, i.e., the use of magic rituals, incantations or other esoteric formulae in order to ward off or to overcome evil influences.
Aristotelianism. In this group there are two broad currents of thought. The first attempted to harmonize Aristotle with St. Augustine and the Church's dogmas. This line was founded by St. Albert the Great (+1280), who amassed the then known Aristotelian literature but failed to construct any coherent synthesis. His pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274) succeeded to a remarkable degree. From the standpoint of clarity and formularization, St. Thomas marks the apex of medieval Scholasticism. Pupils and adherents worthy of note among Albert's, Hugo and Ulrich of Strassburg, this latter (+c. 1277), together with Dietrich of Freiberg (+c. 1310) revealing marked Neo-platonic tendencies; among Thomas', Aegidius of Lessines (+1304), Herveus Natalis (Herve Nedelec, +1318), John (de Regina) of Naples (+c. 1336), Aegidius Romanus (+1316), Godfrey of Fontaines ( + 1306 or 1309), quite independent in his allegiance, and the great Dante Alighieri (+1321).
Aristotle divides the sciences into the theoretical, the practical and the productive, the aim of the first being disinterested knowledge, of the second the guidance of conduct, and of the third the guidance of the arts. The science now called logic, by him known as "analytic", is a discipline preliminary to all the others, since its purpose is to set forth the conditions that must be observed by all thinking which has truth as its aim. Science, in the strict sense of the word, is demonstrated knowledge of the causes of things. Such demonstrated knowledge is obtained by syllogistic deduction from premises in themselves certain. Thus the procedure of science differs from dialectic, which employs probable premises, and from eristic, which aims not at truth but at victory in disputation. The center, therefore, of Aristotle's logic is the syllogism, or that form of reasoning whereby, given two propositions, a third follows necessarily from them. The basis of syllogistic inference is the presence of a term common to both premises (the middle term) so related as subj ect or predicate to each of the other two terms that a conclusion may be drawn regarding the relation of these two terms to one another. Aristotle was the first to formulate the theory of the syllogism, and his minute analysis of its various forms was definitive, so far as the subject-predicate relation is concerned; so that to this part of deductive logic but little has been added since his day. Alongside of deductive reasoning Aristotle recognizes the necessity of induction, or the process whereby premises, particularly first premises, are established. This involves passing from the particulars of sense experience (the things more knowable to us) to the universal and necessary principles involved in sense experience (the things more knowable in themselves). Aristotle attaches most importance, in this search for premises, to the consideration of prevailing beliefs (endoxa) and the examination of the difficulties (aporiai) that have been encountered in the solution of the problem in hand. At some stage in the survey of the field and the theories previously advanced the universal connection sought for is apprehended; and apprehended, Aristotle eventually says, by the intuitive reason, or nous. Thus knowledge ultimately rests upon an indubitable intellectual apprehension; yet for the proper employment of the intuitive reason a wide empirical acquaintance with the subject-matter is indispensable.
Aristotle's Illusion: See Aristotle's Experiment. Arithmetic, foundations of: Arithmetic (i.e., the mathematical theory of the non-negative integers, 0, 1, 2, . . .) may be based on the five following postulates, which are due to Peano (and Dedekind, from whom Peano's ideas were partly derived): N(0) N(x) ⊃x N(S(x)). N(x) ⊃x [N(y) ⊃y [[S(x) = S(y)] ⊃x [x = y]]]. N(x) ⊃x ∼[S(x) = 0]. F(0)[N(x)F(x) ⊃x F(S(x))] ⊃F [N(x) ⊃x F(x)] The undefined terms are here 0, N, S, which may be interpreted as denoting, respectively, the non-negative integer 0, the propositional function to be a non-negative integer, and the function +1 (so that S(x) is x+l). The underlying logic may be taken to be the functional calculus of second order (Logic, formal, § 6), with the addition of notations for descriptions and for functions from individuals to individuals, and the individual constant 0, together with appropriate modifications and additions to the primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference (the axiom of infinity is not needed because the Peano postulates take its place). By adding the five postulates of Peano as primitive formulas to this underlying logic, a logistic system is obtained which is adequate to extant elementary number theory (arithmetic) and to all methods of proof which have found actual employment in elementary number theory (and are normally considered to belong to elementary number theory). But of course, the system, if consistent, is incomplete in the sense of Gödel's theorem (Logic, formal, § 6).
As another corollary of this, or otherwise, we obtain also the following theorem about the propositional calculus: If A ≡ B is a theorem, and D is the result of replacing a particular occurrence of A by B in the formula C, then the inference from C to D is a valid inference. The dual of a formula C of the propositional calculus is obtained by interchanging conjunction and disjunction throughout the formula, i.e., by replacing AB everywhere by A ∨ B, and A ∨ B by AB. Thus, e.g., the dual of the formula ∼[pq ∨ ∼r] is the formula ∼[[p ∨ q] ∼r]. In forming the dual of a formula which is expressed with the aid of the defined connectives, |, ⊃, ≡, +, it is convenient to remember that the effect of interchanging conjunction and (inclusive) disjunction is to replace A|B by ∼A∼B, to replace A ⊃ B by ∼A B; and to interchange ≡ and +.
As corollaries of this we have proofs of the consistency of the propositional calculus (if A is any formula, A and ∼A cannot both be tautologies and hence cannot both be theorems) and of the completeness of the propositional calculus (it can be shown that if any formula not already a theorem, and hence not a tautology, is added to the list of primitive formulas, the calculus becomes inconsistent on the basis of the two rules, substitution and modus ponens).
A sub-formula of a given formula is a consecutive constituent part of the given formula which is itself a formula. An occurrence of an individual variable X in a formula is a bound occurrence of X if it is an occurrence in a sub-formula of either of the forms (X) [A] or (EX)[A]. Any other occurrence of a variable in a formula is a free occurrence. We may thus speak of the bound variables and the free variables of a formula. (Whitehead and Russell, following Peano, use the terms apparent variables and real variables, respectively, instead of bound variables and free variables.)
Atharva Veda (Sanskrit) Atharva Veda One of the principal Vedas, commonly known as the fourth; attributed to Atharvan or Atharva. The Rig-Veda states that he was the first to “draw forth fire” and institute its worship, as well as the offering of soma and prayers. Mythologically, Atharvan is represented as a prajapati, Brahma’s eldest son, instructed by his father in brahma-vidya: thus was he inspired to compose the Veda bearing his name. At a later period he is associated with Angiras and called the father of Agni. The Atharva-Veda, considered of later origin than the other three Vedas, comprises about 6000 verses, 760 being hymns, consisting of formulas and spells or incantations for counteracting diseases and calamities. The hymns are of slightly different character from those in the other Vedas: in addition to reverencing the gods, the worshiper himself is exalted and is supposed to receive benefits by reciting the mantras.
::: ". . . 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
Aum (Sanskrit) Aum The ancient Indians held that Om, when considered as a single letter was the symbol of the Supreme; when written with three letters — Aum — it stood among other things for the three Vedas, the three gunas or qualities of nature, the three divisions of the universe, and the deities of the Hindu Trimurti — Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — concerned in the creation, preservation, and destruction of the universe or the beings composing it. “The mystic formula, résumé of every science, contained in the three mysterious letters, AUM which signify creation, conservation, and transformation” (IU 2:31). These three letters are supposed by some Hindus to have correspondences as follows: “The letter A is the Sattva Guna, U is the Rajas, and M is the Tamas; these three qualities are termed Nature (Prakriti). . . . A is Bhurloka, U is Bhuvarloka, and M is Svarloka; by these three letters the spirit exhibits itself” (Laheri in Lucifer 10:147). This word is said to have a morally spiritualizing effect if pronounced during meditation and when the mind is at peace and cleansed of all impurities. See also OM
A view of the nature of mathematics which is widely different from any of the above is held by the school of mathematical intuitionism (q. v.). According to this school, mathematics is "identical with the exact part of our thought." "No science, not even philosophy or logic, can be a presupposition for mathematics. It would be circular to apply any philosophical or logical theorem as a means of proof in mathematics, since such theorems already presuppose for their formulation the construction of mathematical concepts. If mathematics is to be in this sense presupposition-free, then there remains for it no other source than an intuition which presents mathematical concepts and inferences to us as immediately clear. . . . [This intuition] is nothing else than the ability to treat separately certain concepts and inferences which regularly occur in ordinary thinking." This is quoted in translation from Heyting, who, in the same connection, characterizes the intuitionittic doctrine as asserting the existence of mathematical objects (Gegenstände), which are immediately grasped by thought, are independent of experience, and give to mathematics more than a mere formal content. But to these mathematical objects no existence is to be ascribed independent of thought. Elsewhere Heyting speaks of a relationship to Kant in the apriority ascribed to the natural numbers, or rather to the underlying ideas of one and the process of adding one and the indefinite repetition of the latter. At least in his earlier writings, Brouwer traces the doctrine of intuitionism directly to Kant. In 1912 he speaks of "abandoning Kant's apriority of space but adhering the more resolutely to the apriority of time" and in the same paper explicitly reaffirms Kant's opinion that mathematical judgments are synthetic and a priori.
axiomatic set theory "theory" One of several approaches to {set theory}, consisting of a {formal language} for talking about sets and a collection of {axioms} describing how they behave. There are many different {axiomatisations} for set theory. Each takes a slightly different approach to the problem of finding a theory that captures as much as possible of the intuitive idea of what a set is, while avoiding the {paradoxes} that result from accepting all of it, the most famous being {Russell's paradox}. The main source of trouble in naive set theory is the idea that you can specify a set by saying whether each object in the universe is in the "set" or not. Accordingly, the most important differences between different axiomatisations of set theory concern the restrictions they place on this idea (known as "comprehension"). {Zermelo Fränkel set theory}, the most commonly used axiomatisation, gets round it by (in effect) saying that you can only use this principle to define subsets of existing sets. NBG (von Neumann-Bernays-Goedel) set theory sort of allows comprehension for all {formulae} without restriction, but distinguishes between two kinds of set, so that the sets produced by applying comprehension are only second-class sets. NBG is exactly as powerful as ZF, in the sense that any statement that can be formalised in both theories is a theorem of ZF if and only if it is a theorem of ZFC. MK (Morse-Kelley) set theory is a strengthened version of NBG, with a simpler axiom system. It is strictly stronger than NBG, and it is possible that NBG might be consistent but MK inconsistent. {NF (http://math.boisestate.edu/~holmes/holmes/nf.html)} ("New Foundations"), a theory developed by Willard Van Orman Quine, places a very different restriction on comprehension: it only works when the formula describing the membership condition for your putative set is "stratified", which means that it could be made to make sense if you worked in a system where every set had a level attached to it, so that a level-n set could only be a member of sets of level n+1. (This doesn't mean that there are actually levels attached to sets in NF). NF is very different from ZF; for instance, in NF the universe is a set (which it isn't in ZF, because the whole point of ZF is that it forbids sets that are "too large"), and it can be proved that the {Axiom of Choice} is false in NF! ML ("Modern Logic") is to NF as NBG is to ZF. (Its name derives from the title of the book in which Quine introduced an early, defective, form of it). It is stronger than ZF (it can prove things that ZF can't), but if NF is consistent then ML is too. (2003-09-21)
axiom "logic" A {well-formed formula} which is taken to be true without proof in the construction of a {theory}. Compare: {lemma}. (1995-03-31)
axiom schema "logic" A {formula} in the language of an {axiomatic system}, containing one or more. These {metasyntactic variables} (or "{schematic variables}") that stand for terms or subformulae. An example is the {Axiom of Comprehension}. (2009-02-10)
bala1 (bala; balam) ::: strength; a term in the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "an abounding strength, energy and puissance of outgoing and managing force", an element of dehasakti.
Basic Sentences, Protocol Sentences: Sentences formulating the result of observations or perceptions or other experiences, furnishing the basis for empirical verification or confirmation (see Verification). Some philosophers take sentences concerning observable properties of physical things as basic sentences, others take sentences concerning sense-data or perceptions. The sentences of the latter kind are regarded by some philosophers as completely verifiable, while others believe that all factual sentences can be confirmed only to some degree. See Scientific Empiricism. -- R.C.
Behaviorism: The contemporary American School of psychology which abandons the concepts of mind and consciousness, and restricts both animal and human psychology to the study of behavior. The impetus to behaviorism was given by the Russian physiologist, Pavlov, who through his investigation of the salivary reflex in dogs, developed the concept of the conditioned reflex. See Conditioned Reflex. The founder of American behaviorism is J.B. Watson, who formulated a program for psychology excluding all reference to consciousness and confining itself to behavioral responses. (Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1914.) Thinking and emotion are interpreted as implicit behavior: the former is implicit or subvocal speech; the latter implicit visceral reactions. A distinction has been drawn between methodological and dogmatic behaviorism: the former ignores "consciousness" and advocates, in psychology, the objective study of behaviour; the latter denies consciousness entirely, and is, therefore, a form of metaphysical materialism. See Automatism. -- L.W.
Bennett and Baylis, Formal Logic, New York. 1937: 6. THEORY OF TYPES. In the functional calculus of first order, variables which appear as arguments of propositional functions or which are bound by quantifiers must be variables which are restricted to a certain limited range, the kinds of propositions about propositional functions which cannot be expressed in the calculus. The uncritical attempt to remove this restriction, by introducing variables of unlimited range (the range covering both non-functions and functions of whatever kind) and modifying accordingly the definition of a formula and the lists of primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference, leads to a system which is formally inconsistent through the possibility of deriving in it certain of the logical paradoxes (q. v.). The functional calculus of first order may, however, be extended in another way, which involves separating propositional functions into a certain array of categories (the hierarchy of types), excluding. propositional functions which do not fall into one of these categories, and -- besides propositional and individual variables -- admitting only variables having a particular one of these categories as range.
Bennett and Baylis, Formal Logic, New York, 1939. 5. CATEGORICAL SYLLOGISM is the name given to certain forms of valid inference (of the functional calculus of first order) which involve as premisses two (formulas representing) categorical propositions, having a term in common -- the middle term. Using S, M, P as minor term, middle term, and major term, respectively, we give the traditional classification into figures and moods. In each case we give the major premiss first, the minor premiss immediately after it, and the conclusion last; in some cases we give a third (existential) premiss which is suppressed in the traditional account. Because of the admission of singular propositions under the heads A, E, two different forms of valid inference appear in some cases under the same figure and mood -- these singular forms are separately listed.
Bezier curve "graphics" A type of curve defined by mathematical formulae, used in {computer graphics}. A curve with coordinates P(u), where u varies from 0 at one end of the curve to 1 at the other, is defined by a set of n+1 "control points" (X(i), Y(i), Z(i)) for i = 0 to n. P(u) = Sum i=0..n [(X(i), Y(i), Z(i)) * B(i, n, u)] B(i, n, u) = C(n, i) * u^i * (1-u)^(n-i) C(n, i) = n!/i!/(n-i)! A Bezier curve (or surface) is defined by its control points, which makes it invariant under any {affine mapping} (translation, rotation, parallel projection), and thus even under a change in the axis system. You need only to transform the control points and then compute the new curve. The control polygon defined by the points is itself affine invariant. Bezier curves also have the variation-diminishing property. This makes them easier to split compared to other types of curve such as {Hermite} or {B-spline}. Other important properties are multiple values, global and local control, versatility, and order of continuity. [What do these properties mean?] (1996-06-12)
Bezier "graphics" (After Frenchman Pierre Bézier from Regie Renault) A collection of formulae for describing curved lines ({Bezier curve}) and surfaces ({Bezier surface}), first used in 1972 to model automobile surfaces. Curves and surfaces are defined by a set of "control points" which can be moved interactively making Bezier curves and surfaces convenient for interactive graphic design. ["Principles of interactive computer graphics", William M. Newman, Graw-Hill]. (1995-04-04)
Bezier surface "graphics" A surface defined by mathematical formulae, used in {computer graphics}. A surface P(u, v), where u and v vary orthogonally from 0 to 1 from one edge of the surface to the other, is defined by a set of (n+1)*(m+1) "control points" (X(i, j), Y(i, j), Z(i, j)) for i = 0 to n, j = 0 to m. P(u, v) = Sum i=0..n {Sum j=0..m [ (X(i, j), Y(i, j), Z(i, j)) * B(i, n, u) * B(j, m, v)]} B(i, n, u) = C(n, i) * u^i * (1-u)^(n-i) C(n, i) = n!/i!/(n-i)! Bezier surfaces are an extension of the idea of {Bezier curves}, and share many of their properties. (1996-06-12)
formula ::: 1. A prescribed form; a rule or model; any fixed or conventional method for doing something. 2. An established form of words or symbols for use in a ceremony or procedure. 3. Math. A general relationship, principle, or rule stated, often as an equation, in the form of symbols. 4. A representation of a substance using symbols for its constituent elements. formulas.
formula 1. In logic, a sequence of symbols representing terms, {predicates}, {connectives} and {quantifiers} which is either true or false. 2. "language, music" FORTH Music Language. An extension of {FORTH} with concurrent note-playing processes. Runs on {Macintosh} and {Atari ST} with {MIDI} output. ["Formula: A Programming Language for Expressive Computer Music", D.P. Anderson et al Computer 24(7):12 (Jul 1991)]. 3. Preprocessor language for the {Acorn Archimedes}, allowing inline high-level statements to be entered in an assembly program. Written in {nawk}.
formulae ::: pl. --> of Formula
formula ::: n. --> A prescribed or set form; an established rule; a fixed or conventional method in which anything is to be done, arranged, or said.
A written confession of faith; a formal statement of foctrines.
A rule or principle expressed in algebraic language; as, the binominal formula.
A prescription or recipe for the preparation of a medicinal compound.
formularies ::: pl. --> of Formulary
formularistic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or exhibiting, formularization.
formularization ::: n. --> The act of formularizing; a formularized or formulated statement or exhibition.
formularize ::: v. t. --> To reduce to a forula; to formulate.
formulary ::: a. --> Stated; prescribed; ritual. ::: n. --> A book containing stated and prescribed forms, as of oaths, declarations, prayers, medical formulaae, etc.; a book of precedents.
Prescribed form or model; formula.
formulas ::: pl. --> of Formula
formulated ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Formulate
formulate ::: to devise or develop, as a method, system, etc. or reduce to or express in a formula.
formulate ::: v. t. --> To reduce to, or express in, a formula; to put in a clear and definite form of statement or expression.
formulating ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Formulate
formulation ::: n. --> The act, process, or result of formulating or reducing to a formula.
Bhaya bhakti: In bhakti yoga (q.v.), the worship of the deity through formulas, images, rites, etc.
b) The usual meaning of the term the doctrine of the Trinitarians who hold that the nature of God is one in substance and three in embodiment (Latin: persona). Upon the basis of Platonic realism (q.v.) which makes the universal fundamental and the particulars real in terms of the universal, the Christian Trinitarians made philosophically clear their doctrine of one Godhead and three embodiments, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three and yet one. The doctrine was formulated to make religiously valid the belief in the complete Deity of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit (referred to in the New and the Old Testaments) and to avoid the pitfalls of polytheism. Jesus had become the object of Christian worship and the revealer of God and thus it was felt necessary to establish (together with the H.S.) his real Deity along with monotheistic belief. A long controversy over the relationship of the three led to the formulation by the Council of Nicea in 325, and after further disputes, by the Council of Constantinople in 381 of the orthodox Trinitarian creed (the Niceno-Constantinopolitan). Roman and Greek Catholicism split on the doctrine of the status of the H.S. The Western church added the expression "filioque" (the H.S. proceeding "and from the Son") making more explicit the complete equality of the three; the Eastern church maintained the original text which speaks of the H.S. as "proceeding from thet Father." Orthodox Protestantism maintains the Trinitarian conception. -- V.F.
But all this must not be taken in too rigid and mechanical a sense. It is an immense plastic movement full of the play of possibilities and must be seized by a flexible and subtle tact or sense in the seeing conscioosness. It cannot be reduced to a too rigorous logical or mathematical formula. Two or three points must be pressed in order that this plasticity may not be lost to our view.
By way of connoting different types of society, many contemporary Marxists, especially in the U.S.S.R., building upon Marx's analysis of the two phases of "communist society" ("Gotha Program") designate the first or lower phase by the term socialism, the second or higher by the term communism (q.v.). The general features of socialist society (identified by Soviet thinkers with the present phase of development of the U.S.S.R.) are conceived as follows: Economic collective ownership of the means of production, such as factories, industrial equipment, the land, and of the basic apparatus of distribution and exchange, including the banking system; the consequent abolition of classes, private profit, exploitation, surplus value, (q.v.) private hiring and firing and involuntary unemployment; an integrated economy based on long time planning in terms of needs and use. It is held that only under these economic conditions is it possible to apply the formula, "from each according to ability, to each according to work performed", the first part of which implies continuous employment, and the second part, the absence of private profit. Political: a state based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat (q.v.) Cultural the extension of all educational and cultural facilities through state planning; the emancipation of women through unrestricted economic opportunities, the abolition of race discrimination through state enforcement, a struggle against all cultural and social institutions which oppose the socialist society and attempt to obstruct its realization. Marx and Engels held that socialism becomes the inevitable outgrowth of capitalism because the evolution of the latter type of society generates problems which can only be solved by a transition to socialism. These problems are traced primarily to the fact that the economic relations under capitalism, such as individual ownership of productive technics, private hiring and firing in the light of profits and production for a money market, all of which originally released powerful new productive potentialities, come to operate, in the course of time, to prevent full utilization of productive technics, and to cause periodic crises, unemployment, economic insecurity and consequent suffering for masses of people. Marx and Engels regarded their doctrine of the transformation of capitalist into socialist society as based upon a scientific examination of the laws of development of capitalism and a realistic appreciation of the role of the proletariat. (q.v.) Unlike the Utopian socialism (q.v.) of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen (q.v.) and others, their socialism asserted the necessity of mass political organization of the working classes for the purpose of gaining political power in order to effect the transition from capitalism, and also foresaw the probability of a contest of force in which, they held, the working class majority would ultimately be victorious. The view taken is that Marx was the first to explain scientifically the nature of capitalist exploitation as based upon surplus value and to predict its necessary consequences. "These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production by means of surplus value we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science . . ." (Engels: Anti-Dühring, pp. 33-34.) See Historical materialism. -- J.M.S.
caitanyakendra (chaitanyakendra) ::: centre of consciousness; the "true centre" which "is a luminous formulation of the one Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one Existence", supporting "the individual manifestation and action of the universal Force" and revealing "the true Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti".
canonical (Historically, "according to religious law") 1. "mathematics" A standard way of writing a formula. Two formulas such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in "canonical form" because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. Things in canonical form are easier to compare. 2. "jargon" The usual or standard state or manner of something. The term acquired this meaning in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in {Alonzo Church}'s work in computation theory and {mathematical logic} (see {Knights of the Lambda-Calculus}). Compare {vanilla}. This word has an interesting history. Non-technical academics do not use the adjective "canonical" in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns "canon" and "canonicity" (not "canonicalness"* or "canonicality"*). The "canon" of a given author is the complete body of authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). "The canon" is the body of works in a given field (e.g. works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for scholars to investigate. The word "canon" derives ultimately from the Greek "kanon" (akin to the English "cane") referring to a reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word "canon" meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-technical academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted body of work. Alongside this usage was the promulgation of "canons" ("rules") for the government of the Catholic Church. The usages relating to religious law derive from this use of the Latin "canon". It may also be related to arabic "qanun" (law). Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the {MIT AI Lab}, expressed some annoyance at the incessant use of jargon. Over his loud objections, {GLS} and {RMS} made a point of using as much of it as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word "canonical" in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob just used "canonical" in the canonical way." Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way *hackers* normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that "according to religious law" is *not* the canonical meaning of "canonical". (2002-02-06)
Cardinal number: Two classes are equivalent if there exists a one-to-one correspondence between them (see One-one). Cardinal numbers are obtained by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to equivalence, so that two classes have the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent. This may be formulated more exactly, following Frege, by defining the cardinal number of a class to be the class of classes equivalent to it.
Carl Friedrich Gauss "person" A German mathematician (1777 - 1855), one of all time greatest. Gauss discovered the {method of least squares} and {Gaussian elimination}. Gauss was something of a child prodigy; the most commonly told story relates that when he was 10 his teacher, wanting a rest, told his class to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. Gauss did it in seconds, having noticed that 1+...+100 = 100+...+1 = (101+...+101)/2. He did important work in almost every area of mathematics. Such eclecticism is probably impossible today, since further progress in most areas of mathematics requires much hard background study. Some idea of the range of his work can be obtained by noting the many mathematical terms with "Gauss" in their names. E.g. {Gaussian elimination} ({linear algebra}); {Gaussian primes} (number theory); {Gaussian distribution} (statistics); {Gauss} [unit] (electromagnetism); {Gaussian curvature} (differential geometry); {Gaussian quadrature} (numerical analysis); {Gauss-Bonnet formula} (differential geometry); {Gauss's identity} ({hypergeometric functions}); {Gauss sums} ({number theory}). His favourite area of mathematics was {number theory}. He conjectured the {Prime Number Theorem}, pioneered the {theory of quadratic forms}, proved the {quadratic reciprocity theorem}, and much more. He was "the first mathematician to use {complex numbers} in a really confident and scientific way" (Hardy & Wright, chapter 12). He nearly went into architecture rather than mathematics; what decided him on mathematics was his proof, at age 18, of the startling theorem that a regular N-sided polygon can be constructed with ruler and compasses if and only if N is a power of 2 times a product of distinct {Fermat primes}. (1995-04-10)
Cassirer, Ernst: (1874-) Has been chiefly interested in developing the position of the neo-Kantian Philosophy of the Marburg School as it relates to scientific knowledge. Looking at the history of modern philosophy as a progressive formulation of this position, he has sought to extend it by detailed analyses of contemporary scientific developments. Of note are Cassirer's investigations in mathematics, his early consideration of chemical knowledge, and his treatment of Einstein's relativity theory. Main works: Das Erkenntntsprobleme, 3 vols. (1906); Substanz-u-Funktionsbegriff, 1910 (tr. Substance and Function); Philosophie der Symbolischen Forme (1923); Phanom. der Erkenntnis, 1929; Descartes; Leibniz. -- C.K.D.
Categorical Imperative: (Kant. Ger. kategorischer Imperativ) The supreme, absolute moral law of rational, self-determining beings. Distinguished from hypothetical or conditional imperatives which admit of exceptions. Kant formulated the categorical imperative as follows "Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their object themselves as universal laws of nature." See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
Cause: (Lat. causa) Anything responsible for change, motion or action. In the history of philosophy numerous interpretations were given to the term. Aristotle distinguished among the material cause, or that out of which something arises, the formal cause, that is, the pattern or essence determining the creation of a thing, the efficient cause, or the force or agent producing an effect; and the final cause, or purpose. Many thinkers spoke also of the first cause, usually conceived as God. During the Renaissance, with the development of scientific interest in nature, cause was usually conceived as an object. Today, it is generally interpteted as energy or action, whether or not connected with matter. According to Newton, "to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes." But J. S. Mill contended, in his doctrine of the plurality of causes, that an effect, or a kind of effect (e.g. heat or death) may be produced by various causes. The first clear formulation of the principle was given by Leukippus "Nothing happens without a ground but everything through a cause and of necessity." -- R.B.W.
cell 1. "spreadsheet" In a {spreadsheet}, the intersection of a row a column and a sheet, the smallest addressable unit of data. A cell contains either a constant value or a {formula} that is used to calculate a value. The cell has a {format} that determines how to display the value. A cell can be part of a {range}. A cell is usually referred to by its column (labelled by one or more letters from the sequence A, B, ..., Z, AA, AB, ..., AZ, BA, BB, ..., BZ, ... ) and its row number counting up from one, e.g. cell B3 is in the second column across and the third row down. A cell also belongs to a particular sheet, e.g. "Sheet 1". 2. "networking" {ATM}'s term for a {packet}. (2007-10-22)
Characteristica Universalis: The name given by Leibniz to his projected (but only partially realized) "universal language" for the formulation of knowledge. This language was to be ideographic, with simple characters standing for simple concepts, and combinations of them for compound ideas, so that all knowledge could be expressed in terms which all could easily learn to use and understand. It represents an adumbration of the more recent and more successful logistic treatment of mathematics and science. It is to be distinguished, however, from the "universal calculus," also projected by Leibniz, which was to be the instrument for the development and manipulation of systems in the universal language. -- W.K.F.
charm ::: 1. An action or formula thought to have magical power. 2. A particular quality that attracts; a delight. charms.
Charm: Any magic word, formula, incantation, object, sign or amulet supposed to possess occult power.
Church has proved that the decision problem of the pure functional calculus of first order is unsolvable. Solutions exist, however, for several important special cases. In particular a decision procedure is known for the case of formulas containing only monadic function variables (this would seem to cover substantially everything considered in traditional formal logic prior to the introduction of the modern logic of relations).
clause 1. "logic" A {logical formula} in {conjunctive normal form}, which has the {schema} p1 ^ ...^ pm =" q1 V ... V qn. or, equivalently, ~p1 V ... V ~pn V q1 V ... V qn, where pi and qi are {atoms}. The operators ~, ^, V, =" are {connectives}, where ~ stands for {negation}, ^ for {conjunction}, V for {disjunction} and =" for {implication}. 2. "grammar" A part of a sentence (or programming language statement) that does not constitute a full sentence, e.g. an adjectival clause in human language or a WHERE clause in a {SQL} statement. (2004-05-28)
Closely related to (2), and applicable to logistic systems containing the pure propositional calculus (see Logic, formal, § 1) or an appropriate part of it, is the notion of consistency in the sense of E. L. Post, according to which a system is consistent if a formula composed of a single propositional variable (say the formula p) is not a theorem. -- A.C.
Closely related to the process of functional abstraction is the process of forming a class by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to a particular variable, say x. The formula A must be such that (under the given system of interpretation for the notations appearing in A) λx[A] denotes a propositional function. Then x∋(A) (Peano), or xˆ (A) (Russell), denotes the class, determined by this propositional function. Frege's ε (A) also belongs here, when the function corresponding to A (relatively to the variable ε) is a propositional function.
Cogito Argument, The: (Lat. cogito, I think) An argument of the type employed by Descartes (Meditation II) to establish the existence of the self. Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I exist") is an attempt to establish the existence of the self in any act of thinking, including even the act of doubting. The cogito ergo sum is, as Descartes himself insisted, not so much inference as a direct appeal to intuition, but it has commonly been construed as an argument because of Descartes' formulation. -- L.W.
Collective and Distributive Properties: A general term is taken in its collective sense when what is predicated of its applies to its designation as a whole, rather than to each of the individual members belonging to it; the distributive properties are those that apply only in the latter way. Colligation: (Lat. con + ligare, to bind) The assimilation of a number of separately observed facts to a unified conception or formula. The term was introduced by Whewcll who gives the eximple of the idea of an eliptical orbit which "unifies all observations made on the positions of a planet" (see Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, I Aphorism 1). J. S. Mill appropriates the term and carefully differentiates it from induction: whereas colligation is a simple "description" of observed facts, induction is an extension to the unknown and to the future. See Logic, III, ii, § 4. -- L.W.
Commercial Internet eXchange "networking, body" (CIX) The CIX is a non-profit, 501(c)6, trade association coordinating {Internet} services. Its member organisations provide {TCP/IP} or {OSI} data {internetwork} services to the general public. The CIX gives them unrestricted access to other worldwide networks. It also takes an interest in the development and future direction of the {Internet}. The CIX provides a neutral forum to exchange ideas, information, and experimental projects among suppliers of internetworking services. The CIX broadens the base of national and international cooperation and coordination among member networks. Together, the membership may develop consensus positions on legislative and policy issues of mutual interest. The CIX encourages technical research and development for the mutual benefit of suppliers and customers of data communications internetworking services. It assists its member networks in the establishment of, and adherence to, operational, technical, and administrative policies and standards necessary to ensure fair, open, and competitive operations and communication among member networks. CIX policies are formulated by a member-elected board of directors. {(http://cix.org/)}. (1995-01-13)
Completeness: A logistic system (q.v.) may be called complete if there is no formula of the system which is not a theorem and which can be added to the list of primitive formulas (no other change being made) without rendering the system inconsistent, in one of the senses of consistency (q.v.). The pure propositional calculus -- as explained under logic, formal, § 1 -- is complete in this sense.
Concerning Carnap's contention that philosophical questions should be replaced by, or reformulated as, syntactical questions, see scientific empiricism I C, and Carnap's book cited below. -- A.C.
Concomitance: (Latin concomitantia, accompaniment), literally the act or state of being associated, the term has received wide currency in logic, particularly since John Stuart Mill clearly formulated the method of concomitant variations, as the concurrent existence, appearance or disappearance of certain characters which, under circumstances, admit but do not necessarily postulate causal interrelatedness. -- K.F.L.
confessionalism ::: n. --> An exaggerated estimate of the importance of giving full assent to any particular formula of the Christian faith.
confession ::: n. --> Acknowledgment; avowal, especially in a matter pertaining to one&
Conjunctive Normal Form "logic" (CNF) A {logical formula} consisting of a {conjunction} of {disjunctions} of terms where no disjunction contains a conjunction. Such a formula might also be described as a product of sums. E.g. the CNF of (A and B) or C is (A or C) and (B or C). Contrast {Disjunctive Normal Form}. (1995-12-10)
connective "logic" An operator used in {first order logic} to combine two logical formulas. (2014-05-04)
Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range. There are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it uncons- cious, — supraroental or overmental and submental ranges.
By consciousness is meant something which is essentially the same throughout but variable in status, condition and operation, in which in some grades or conditions the activities we call consciousness exist cither in a suppressed or an unorganised or a differently organised state.
It is not composed of parts, it is fundamental to being and itself formulates any parts it chooses to manifest, developing them from above downward by a progressive coming down from spiri- tual levels towards involution in matter or formulating them In an upward working in the from what wc call evolution.
conspiracies ::: evil, unlawful, treacherous or surreptitious plans formulated in secret by two or more persons; plots.
Contradiction, law of, is given by traditional logicians as "A is B and A is not B cannot both be true." It is usually taken to be the theorem of the propositional calculus, ∼[p∼p]. In use, however, the name often seems to refer to the syntactical principle or precept which may be formulated as follows: A logical discipline containing (an applied) propositional calculus, or a set of hypotheses or postulates to be added to such a discipline, shall not lead to two theorems or consequences of the forms A and ∼A. The law is explicitly stated in a syntactical form, e.g. by Ledger Wood in his The Analysis of Knowledge (1940). -- A.C.
Conway's Law "project, humour" The rule (presumably formulated by {Melvin Conway}) that the organisation of software and the organisation of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". [{Jargon File}] (2015-12-30)
cosmic Spirit ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos — it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.” *Letters on Yoga
"[The Divine in one of its three aspects] . . . is the Cosmic Self and Spirit that is in and behind all things and beings, from which and in which all is manifested in the universe - although it is now a manifestation in the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the cosmic spirit, the one self inhabiting the universe, . . . .” *The Life Divine
"For the cosmic Spirit inhabits each and all, but is more than all; . . . .”The Life Divine
Crescas, Don Hasdai: (1340-1410) Jewish philosopher and theologian. He was the first European thinker to criticize Aristotelian cosmology and establish the probability of the existence of an infinite magnitude and of infinite space, thus paving the way for the modern conception of the universe. He also took exception to the entire trend of the philosophy of Maimonides, namely its extreme rationalism, and endeavored to inject the emotional element into religious contemplation, and make love an attribute of God and the source of His creative activity. He also expressed original views on the problems of freedom and creation. He undoubtedly exerted influence on Spinoza who quotes him by name in the formulation of some of his theories. See Jewish Philosophy. Cf. H. A. Wolfson, Crescas' Critique of Aristotle, 1929. -- M.W.
curse ::: n. 1. The expression of a wish that misfortune, evil, doom, etc., befall a person, group, etc. 2. A formula or charm intended to cause such misfortune to another. 3. An evil brought or inflicted upon one. 4. The cause of evil, misfortune, or trouble. 5. A profane or obscene expression or oath. curses. v. 6. To wish harm upon; invoke evil upon. 7. To invoke supernatural powers to bring harm to (someone or something). cursed.
cybernetics "robotics" /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems. The term was first proposed by {Norbert Wiener} in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. It aims to understand the similarities and differences in internal workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour. Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology". Related recent developments (often referred to as {sciences of complexity}) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are {artificial intelligence}, {neural networks}, {systems theory}, and {chaos theory}, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise. See also {robot}. {The Cybernetics Society (http://cybsoc.org)} of the UK. {American Society for Cybernetics (http://asc-cybernetics.org/)}. {IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (http://isye.gatech.edu/ieee-smc/)}. {International project "Principia Cybernetica" (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html)}. ["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948] (2002-01-01)
database query language "database" A language in which users of a {database} can (interactively) formulate requests and generate reports. The best known is {SQL}. (1998-04-15)
De Bruijn notation "language" A variation of {lambda notation} for specifying {functions} using numbers instead of names to refer to {formal parameters}. A reference to a formal parameter is a number which gives the number of lambdas (written as \ here) between the reference and the lambda which binds the parameter. E.g. the function \ f . \ x . f x would be written \ . \ . 1 0. The 0 refers to the innermost lambda, the 1 to the next etc. The chief advantage of this notation is that it avoids the possibility of {name capture} and removes the need for {alpha conversion}. [N.G. De Bruijn, "Lambda Calculus Notation with Nameless Dummies: A Tool for Automatic Formula Manipulation, with Application to the Church-Rosser Theorem", Indag Math. 34, pp 381-392]. (2003-06-15)
Declarative Memory ::: The part of long-term memory where factual information is stored, such as mathematical formulas, vocabulary, and life events.
defining experience"; this negation is "the affirmation by the Unknowable . . . of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, ::: freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself", not denying these terms "as a real expression of Itself", but denying "Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever".
Definition: In the development of a logistic system (q. v.) it is usually desirable to introduce new notations, beyond what is afforded by the primitive symbols alone, by means of syntactical definitions or nominal definitions, i.e., conventions which provide that certain symbols or expressions shall stand (as substitutes or abbreviations) for particular formulas of the system. This may be done either by particular definitions, each introducing a symbol or expression to stand for some one formula, or by schemata of definition, providing that any expression of a certain form shall stand for a certain corresponding formula (so condensing many -- often infinitely many -- particular definitions into a single schema). Such definitions, whether particular definitions or schemata, are indicated, in articles herein by the present writer, by an arrow →, the new notation introduced (the definiendum) being placed at the left, or base of the arrow, and the formula for which it shall stand (the definiens) being placed at the right, or head, of the arrow. Another sign commonly employed for the same purpose (instead of the arrow) is the equality sign = with the letters Df, or df, appearing either as a subscript or separately after the definiens.
Descriptions: Where a formula A containing a free variable -- say, for example, x -- means a true proposition (is true) for one and only one value of x, the notation (iota;x)A is used to mean thit value of x. The approximately equivalent English phraseology is "the x such that A" -- or simply 'the F," where F denotes the concept (monadic propositional function) obtained from A by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to x. This notation, or its sense in the sense of Frege, is called a description.
devise ::: v. t. --> To form in the mind by new combinations of ideas, new applications of principles, or new arrangement of parts; to formulate by thought; to contrive; to excogitate; to invent; to plan; to scheme; as, to devise an engine, a new mode of writing, a plan of defense, or an argument.
To plan or scheme for; to purpose to obtain.
To say; to relate; to describe.
To imagine; to guess.
Dewey, John: (1859-) Leading American philosopher. The spirit of democracy and an abiding faith in the efficacy of human intelligence run through the many pages he has presented in the diverse fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, psychology, aesthetics, religion, ethics, politics and education, in all of which he has spoken with authority. Progressive education owes its impetus to his guidance and its tenets largely to his formulation. He is the chief exponent of that branch of pragmatism known as instrumentalism. Among his main works are Psychology, 1886; Outline of Ethics, 1891; Studies in Logical Theory, 1903; Ethics (Dewey and Tufts), 1908; How We Think, 1910; Influence of Darwin on German Philosophy, 1910; Democracy and Education, 1916; Essays in Experimental Logic, 1916; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920; Human Nature and Conduct, 1922; Experience and Nature, 1925; The Quest for Certainty, 1929; Art as Experience, 1933; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1939. Cf. J. Ratner, The Philosophy of John Dewey, 1940, M. H. Thomas, A Bibliography of John Dewey, 1882-1939, The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, 1940). Dharma: (Skr.) Right, virtue, duty, usage, law, social as well as cosmic. -- K.F.L.
Dictum de omni et nullo: The leading principles of the syllogisms in Barbara and Celarent, variously formulated, and attributed to Aristotle. "Whatever is affirmed (denied) of an entire class or kind may be affirmed (denied) of any part." The four moods of the first figure were held to be directly validated by this dictum, and this was given as the motive for the traditional reductions of the last three syllogistic figures to the first. See also Aristotle's dictum. -- A.C.
Dilthey, Wilhelm: (1833-1911) A devoted student of biography, he constructed a new methodology and a new interpretation of the study of society and culture. He formulated the doctrine of Verstehungs-psychologie, which is basic to the study of social ends and values. He was the founder of Lebensphilosophie. Being the first humanistic philosopher historian of his age, he led in the comprehensive research in the history of intellectual development. Main works: Einlettung in die Geisteswessenschaften, 1883; Der Erlebnis und die Dtchtung, 1905; Das Wesen der Philosophie, 1907, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in der Geisteswissenschaften, 1910, Die Typen der Weltanschauung, 1911; Gesammelte Schriften, 9 vols., 1922-35. --H.H. Dimension: (scientific) 1. Any linear series or order of elements. 2. Any quantity of a given kind, capable of increase or decrease over a certain range, a variable. 3. In the physical system: mass, length and time. -- A.C.B.
D. Interpretations of Probability. The methods and results of mathematical probability (and of probability in general) are the subject of much controversy as regards their interpretation and value. Among the various theories proposed, we shall consider the following Probability as a measure of belief, probability as the relative frequency of events, probability as the truth-frequency of types of argument, probability as a primitive notion, probability as an operational concept, probability as a limit of frequencies, and probability as a physical magnitude determined by axioms. I. Probability as a Measure of Belief: According to this theory, probability is the measure or relative degree of rational credence to be attached to facts or statements on the strength of valid motives. This type of probability is sometimes difficult to estimate, as it may be qualitative as well as quantitative. When considered in its mathematical aspects, the measure of probable inference depends on the preponderance or failure of operative causes or observed occurrences of the case under investigation. This conception involves axioms leading to the classic rule of Laplace, namely: The measure of probability of any one of mutually exclusive and apriori equiprobable possibilities, is the ratio of the number of favorable possibilities to the total number of possibilities. In probability operations, this rule is taken as the definition of direct probability for those cases where it is applicable. The main objections against this interpretation are: that probability is largely subjective, or at least independent of direct experience; that equiprobability is taken as an apriori notion, although the ways of asserting it are empirical; that the conditions of valid equiprobability are not stated definitely; that equiprobability is difficult to determine actually in all cases; that it is difficult to attach an adequate probability to a complex event from the mere knowledge of the probabilities of its component parts, and that the notion of probability is not general, as it does not cover such cases as the inductive derivation of probabilities from statistical data. II. Probability as a Relative Frequency. This interpretation is based on the nature of events, and not on any subjective considerations. It deals with the rate with which an event will occur in a class of events. Hence, it considers probability as the ratio of frequency of true results to true conditions, and it gives as its measure the relative frequency leading from true conditions to true results. What is meant when a set of calculations predict that an experiment will yield a result A with probability P, is that the relative frequency of A is expected to approximate the number P in a long series of such experiments. This conception seems to be more concerned with empirical probabilities, because the calculations assumed are mostly based on statistical data or material assumptions suggested by past experiments. It is valuable in so far as it satisfies the practical necessity of considering probability aggregates in such problems. The main objections against this interpretation are: that it does not seem capable of expressing satisfactorily what is meant by the probability of an event being true; that its conclusions are more or less probable, owing to the difficulty of defining a proper standard for comparing ratios; that neither its rational nor its statistical evidence is made clear; that the degree of relevance of that evidence is not properly determined, on account of the theoretical indefinite ness of both the true numerical value of the probability and of the evidence assumed, and that it is operational in form only, but not in fact, because it involves the infinite without proper limitations. III. Probability as Truth-Frequency of Types of Arguments: In this interpretation, which is due mainly to Peirce and Venn, probability is shifted from the events to the propositions about them; instead of considering types and classes of events, it considers types and classes of propositions. Probability is thus the ability to give an objective reading to the relative tiuth of propositions dealing with singular events. This ability can be used successfully in interpreting definite and indefinite numerical probabilities, by taking statistical evaluations and making appropriate verbal changes in their formulation. Once assessed, the relative truth of the propositions considered can be communicated to facts expressed by these propositions. But neither the propositions nor the facts as such have a probability in themselves. With these assumptions, a proposition has a degree of probability, only if it is considered as a member of a class of propositions; and that degree is expressed by the proportion of true propositions to the total number of propositions in the class. Hence, probability is the ratio of true propositions to all the propositions of the class examined, if the class is finite, or to all the propositions of the same type in the long run, if the class is infinite. In the first case, fair sampling may cover the restrictions of a finite class; in the second case, the use of infinite series offers a practical limitation for the evidence considered. But in both cases, probability varies with the class or type chosen, and probability-inferences are limited by convention to those cases where numerical values can be assigned to the ratios considered. It will be observed that this interpretation of probability is similar to the relative frequency theory. The difference between these two theories is more formal than material in both cases the probability refers ultimately to kinds of evidence based on objective matter of fact. Hence the Truth-Frequency theory is open to the sime objections as the Relative-Frequency theory, with proper adjustments. An additional difficulty of this theory is that the pragmatic interpretation of truth it involves, has yet to be proved, and the situation is anything but improved by assimilating truth with probability.
Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) A logical formula consisting of a {disjunction} of {conjunctions} where no conjunction contains a disjunction. E.g. the DNF of (A or B) and C is (A and C) or (B and C). (1994-12-07)
dispensatory ::: v. t. --> Granting, or authorized to grant, dispensations. ::: n. --> A book or medicinal formulary containing a systematic description of drugs, and of preparations made from them. It is usually, but not always, distinguished from a pharmacop/ia in that it issued by private parties, and not by an official body or by
Divisibility: The property in virtue of which a whole (whether physical, psychical or mathematical) may be divided into parts which do not thereby necessarily sever their relation with the whole. Divisibility usually implies not merely analysis or distinction of parts, but actual or potential resolution into parts. From the beginning philosophers have raised the question whether substances are infinitely or finitely divisible. Ancient materialism conceived of the physical atom as an indivisible substance. Descartes, however, and after him Leibniz, maintained the infinite divisibility of substance. The issue became the basis of Kant's cosmological antinomy (Crit. of pure Reason), from which he concluded that the issue was insoluble in metaphysical terms. In recent decades the question has had to take account of (1) researches in the physical atom, before which the older conception of physical substance has steadily retreated; and (2) the attempt to formulate a satisfactory definition of infinity (q.v.). -- O.F.K.
Dogma: The Greek term signified a public ordinance of decree, also an opinion. A present meaning: an established, or generally admitted, philosophic opinion explicitly formulated, in a depreciative sense; one accepted on authority without the support of demonstration or experience. Kant calls a directly synthetical proposition grounded on concepts a dogma which he distinguishes from a mathema, which is a similar proposition effected by a construction of concepts. In the history of Christianity dogmas have come to mean definition of revealed truths proposed by the supreme authority of the Church as articles of faith which must be accepted by all its members. -- J.J.R.
Dots (frequently printed as bold, or bold square, dots) are used in the punctuation of logical formulas, to avoid or replace parentheses. There are varying conventions for this purpose.
Dyophysites: A term applied to the Catholics, who held that there are two natures in Christ, the Divine and the human, by the Monophysites, or the followers of Eutyches, who advanced the formula, "one nature after the union." -- J.J.R.
Economy, principle of: Is the modern name for the logical rule known also as Occam's Razor. Its original formula was: Entia non sunt multilicanda praeter necessitatem, i.e. of two or more explanations, which are of equal value otherwise, the one which uses the fewest principles, or suppositions, is true, or at least scientifically preferable. -- V.J.B.
entropy "theory" A measure of the disorder of a system. Systems tend to go from a state of order (low entropy) to a state of maximum disorder (high entropy). The entropy of a system is related to the amount of {information} it contains. A highly ordered system can be described using fewer {bits} of information than a disordered one. For example, a string containing one million "0"s can be described using {run-length encoding} as [("0", 1000000)] whereas a string of random symbols (e.g. bits, or characters) will be much harder, if not impossible, to compress in this way. {Shannon}'s formula gives the entropy H(M) of a message M in bits: H(M) = -log2 p(M) Where p(M) is the probability of message M. (1998-11-23)
Esse est percipi: Latin for to be is to be perceived. The maxim formulated by Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) expressing that a material world of bodies does not exist except in perceptibility—that things cannot exist unless perceived by some mind, and therefore only mind (divine mind) and mental content (ideas) exist.
Ethics, Absolute: A phrase which is sometimes used to designate an ethics which is put forth as absolute, see Absolutism, and sometimes, as by H. Spencer, to designate the formulation of the ideal code of conduct of an ideal man in the ideal society. See Relative Ethics. -- W.K.F.
Ethics, Relative: A term due to H. Spencer and used to designate any attempt to apply the ideal code of conduct formulated by Absolute Ethics to actual men in actual societies. See Absolute Ethics. -- W.K.F.
Ethics ::: The theosophical teachings are essentially and wholly ethical. It is impossible to understand the sublimewisdom of the gods, the archaic wisdom-religion of the ancients, without the keenest realization of thefact that ethics run like golden threads throughout the entire system or fabric of doctrine and thought ofthe esoteric philosophy. Genuine occultism, divorced from ethics, is simply unthinkable becauseimpossible. There is no genuine occultism which does not include the loftiest ethics that the moral senseof mankind can comprehend, and one cannot weigh with too strong an emphasis upon this great fact.Ethics in the theosophical philosophy are not merely the products of human thought existing as aformulation of conventional rules proper for human conduct. They are founded on the very structure andcharacter of the universe itself. The heart of the universe is wisdom-love, and these are intrinsicallyethical, for there can be no wisdom without ethics, nor can love be without ethics, nor can there be ethicsdeprived of either love or wisdom.The philosophic reason why the ancients set so much store by what was commonly known as virtusamong the Latins, from which we have our modern word "virtue," is because by means of the teachingoriginating in the great Mystery schools, they knew that virtues, ethics, were the offspring of the moralinstinct in human beings, who derived them in their turn from the heart of the universe -- from thekosmic harmony. It is high time that the Occidental world should cast forever into the limbo of explodedsuperstitions the idea that ethics is merely conventional morality, a convenience invented by man tosmooth the asperities and dangers of human intercourse.Of course every scholar knows that the words morals and ethics come from the Latin and Greekrespectively, as signifying the customs or habits which it is proper to follow in civilized communities.But this fact itself, which is unquestionable, is in a sense disgraceful, for it would almost seem that wehad not yet brought forth a word adequately describing the instinct for right and truth and troth andjustice and honor and wisdom and love which we today so feebly express by the words ethics or morals."Theosophist is who Theosophy does," wrote H. P. Blavatsky, and wiser and nobler words she neverwrote. No one can be a theosophist who does not feel ethic-ally and think ethically and live ethically inthe real sense that is hereinbefore described. (See also Morals)
euchology ::: n. --> A formulary of prayers; the book of offices in the Greek Church, containing the liturgy, sacraments, and forms of prayers.
execratory ::: a. --> Of the nature of execration; imprecatory; denunciatory. ::: n. --> A formulary of execrations.
Exorcism: The expulsion of malevolent spirits or demons from possessed persons, objects or places, by the utterance of an incantation or formula seeking the aid of a more powerful spirit or deity, usually invoked by name. The term is often applied also to any act or ritual, whether or not including the speaking of a formula, by which malevolent spirits are expelled.
Exoteric ::: This word, when applied particularly to the great philosophical and religious systems of belief, does notmean false. The word merely means teachings of which the keys have not been openly given. The wordseems to have originated in the Peripatetic School of Greece, and to have been born in the mind ofAristotle. Its contrast is "esoteric."Exotericism -- that is to say, the outward and popular formulation of religious and philosophic doctrines-- reveils the truth; the self-assurance of ignorance, alas, always reviles the truth; whereas esotericismreveals the truth.
Extensible HyperText Markup Language "hypertext, standard, web" (XHTML) A reformulation of {HTML} 4.01 in {XML}. Being XML means that XHTML can be viewed, edited, and validated with standard XML tools. At the same time, it operates as well as or better than HTML 4 in existing HTML 4 conforming user agents. The most important change is that all elements must be terminated, either with a closing tag or using the "tag.../" shorthand. So, instead of "input type=submit" you would write "input type="submit" /" The space before the "/" is required by some older browsers. Other differences are that tag and attribute names should be lower case and all attributes should be quoted. {XHTML Home (http://w3.org/TR/xhtml1/)}. {Quick Summary (http://technorealm.co.uk/design/html-to-xhtml-conversions.html)} (2006-01-19)
Externalization: (Lat. externus, external from exter, without) The mental act by which sensory data originally considered to be internal arc projected into the external world. See Introjection. The problem of externalization was formulated by Condillac in these words: "If one admits that sensations are only modifications of the mind, how does it come about that the mind apprehends them as objects independent of and external to it." Traite de sensations, Part III. -- L.W.
Fang shih: Chinese for man with formulae. A primitive Chinese priest-magician.
Fang shih: "Scholars with formulae," or priests and magicians who flourished in the Ch'in and Han dynasties (249 B.C-220 A.D.) and who offered divination, magic, herbs, charms, alchemy, breath technique, and other crafts (fang shu) and superstitions in terms of Yin Yang and Taoist philosophies, as means to immortality, inward power, restored youth, and superhuman ability. -- W.T.C.
fencepost error 1. (Rarely "lamp-post error") A problem with the discrete equivalent of a {boundary condition}, often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10). For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. The "obvious" formula exhibits a fencepost error. See also {zeroth} and note that not all {off-by-one errors} are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. (Rare) An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can (for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient {binary tree} or {hash coding} implementation. The error here involves the difference between expected and worst case behaviours of an {algorithm}. [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-01)
Finally we mention a variant form of the functional calculus of first order, the functional calculus of first order with equality, in which the list of functional constants includes the dyadic functional constant =, denoting equality or identity of individuals. The notation [X] = [Y] is introduced as an abbreviation for [=] (X, Y), and primitive formulas are added as follows to the list already given: if X is any individual variable, X = X is a primitive formula; if X and Y are any individual variables, and B results from the substitution of Y for a particular free occurrence of X in A, which is not in a sub-formula of A of the form (Y)[C], then [X = Y] ⊃ [A ⊃ B] is a primitive formula. We speak of the pure functional calculus of first order with equality when the lists of propositional variables and functional variables are complete and the only functional constant is =; we speak of a simple applied functional calculus of first order with equality when the lists of propositional variables and functional variables are empty.
first-order logic "language, logic" The language describing the truth of mathematical {formulas}. Formulas describe properties of terms and have a truth value. The following are atomic formulas: True False p(t1,..tn) where t1,..,tn are terms and p is a predicate. If F1, F2 and F3 are formulas and v is a variable then the following are compound formulas: F1 ^ F2 conjunction - true if both F1 and F2 are true, F1 V F2 disjunction - true if either or both are true, F1 =" F2 implication - true if F1 is false or F2 is true, F1 is the antecedent, F2 is the consequent (sometimes written with a thin arrow), F1 "= F2 true if F1 is true or F2 is false, F1 == F2 true if F1 and F2 are both true or both false (normally written with a three line equivalence symbol) ~F1 negation - true if f1 is false (normally written as a dash '-' with a shorter vertical line hanging from its right hand end). For all v . F universal quantification - true if F is true for all values of v (normally written with an inverted A). Exists v . F existential quantification - true if there exists some value of v for which F is true. (Normally written with a reversed E). The operators ^ V =" "= == ~ are called connectives. "For all" and "Exists" are {quantifiers} whose {scope} is F. A term is a mathematical expression involving numbers, operators, functions and variables. The "order" of a logic specifies what entities "For all" and "Exists" may quantify over. First-order logic can only quantify over sets of {atomic} {propositions}. (E.g. For all p . p =" p). Second-order logic can quantify over functions on propositions, and higher-order logic can quantify over any type of entity. The sets over which quantifiers operate are usually implicit but can be deduced from well-formedness constraints. In first-order logic quantifiers always range over ALL the elements of the domain of discourse. By contrast, second-order logic allows one to quantify over subsets. ["The Realm of First-Order Logic", Jon Barwise, Handbook of Mathematical Logic (Barwise, ed., North Holland, NYC, 1977)]. (2005-12-27)
F. Logos: (Gr. logos) A term denoting either reason or one of the expressions of reason or order in words or things; such as word, discourse, definition, formula, principle, mathematical ratio. In its most important sense in philosophy it refers to a cosmic reason which gives order and intelligibility to the world. In this sense the doctrine first appears in Heraclitus, who affirms the reality of a Logos analogous to the reason in man that regulates all physical processes and is the source of all human law. The conception is developed more fully by the Stoics, who conceive of the world as a living unity, perfect in the adaptation of its parts to one another and to the whole, and animated by an immanent and purposive reason. As the creative source of this cosmic unity and perfection the world-reason is called the seminal reason (logos spermatikos), and is conceived as containing within itself a multitude of logoi spermatikoi, or intelligible and purposive forms operating in the world. As regulating all things, the Logos is identified with Fate (heimarmene); as directing all things toward the good, with Providence (pronoia); and as the ordered course of events, with Nature (physis). In Philo of Alexandria, in whom Hebrew modes of thought mingle with Greek concepts, the Logos becomes the immaterial instrument, and even at times the personal agency, through which the creative activity of the transcendent God is exerted upon the world. In Christian philosophy the Logos becomes the second person of the Trinity and its functions are identified with the creative, illuminating and redemptive work of Jesus Christ. Finally the Logos plays an important role in the system of Plotinus, where it appears as the creative and form-giving aspect of Intelligence (Nous), the second of the three Hypostases. -- G. R.
FOCAL 1. FOrmula CALculator. An interactive system written by Rick Merrill of {DEC} in 1969 for {PDP-5} and {PDP-8}. It was a descendant of {AID}/{JOSS}. Versions: FOCAL-69, FOCAL-1971, FOCAL-11 (for {PDP-11} under {RT-11}). (1994-12-21) 2. Forty-One CAlculator Language. The programming language of the HP-41 calculator line. (1994-12-21)
For convenience of statement, we confine attention to the pure functional calculus of first order. The first step in the extension consists in introducing quantifiers such as (F1), (EF1), (F2), (EF3), etc., binding n-adic functional variables. Corresponding changes are made in the definition of a formula and in the lists of primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference, allowing for these new kinds of bound variables. The resulting system is the functional calculus of second order. Then the next step consists in introducing new kinds of functional variables; namely for every finite ordered set k, l, m, . . . , p of i non-negative integers (i = 1, 2, 3, . . .) an infinite list of functional variables Fklm . . .p, Gklm . . .p, . . . , each of which denotes ambiguously any i-adic propositional function for which the first argument may be any (k-1)-adic propositional function of individuals, the second argument any (l-1)-adic propositional function of individuals, etc. (if one of the integers k, l, m, . . . , p is 1 the corresponding argument is a proposition -- if 0, an individual). Then quantifiers are introduced binding these new kinds of functional variables; and so on. The process of alternately introducing new kinds of functional variables (denoting propositional functions which take as arguments propositional functions of kinds for which variables have already been introduced) and quantifiers binding the new kinds of functional variables, with appropriate extension at each stage of the definition of a formula and the lists of primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference, may be continued to infinity. This leads to what we may call the functional calculus of order omega, embodying the (so-called simple) theory of types.
FORMAC FORmula MAnipulation Compiler. J. Sammet & Tobey, IBM Boston APD, 1962. An extension of {Fortran} for {symbolic mathematics}. Versions: PL/I-FORMAC and FORMAC73. ["Introduction to FORMAC", J.E. Sammet et al, IEEE Trans Elec Comp (Aug 1964)]. [Sammet 1969, pp. 474-491].
FORMAL 1. FORmula MAnipulation Language. An early {Fortran} extension for {symbolic mathematics}. ["FORMAL, A Formula Manipulation Language", C.K. Mesztenyi, Computer Note CN-1, CS Dept, U Maryland (Jan 1971)]. 2. A data manipulation language for nonprogrammers from {IBM} {LASC}. ["FORMAL: A Forms-Oriented and Visual-Directed Application System", N.C. Shu, IEEE Computer 18(8):38-49 (1985)]. (1994-12-06)
Formalism (mathematical) is a name which has been given to any one of various accounts of the foundations of mathematics which emphasize the formal aspects of mathematics as against content or meaning, or which, in whole or in part, deny content to mathematical formulas. The name is often applied, in particular, to the doctrines of Hilbert (see Mathematics), although Hilbert himself calls his method axiomatic, and gives to his syntactical or metamathematical investigations the name Beweistheorie (proof theory, (q. v.). -- A.C.
For many purposes, however, it is necessary to add to the functional calculus of order omega the axiom of infinity, requiring the domain of individuals to be infinite. -- This is most conveniently done by adding a single additional primitive formula, which may be described by referring to § 3 above, taking the formula, which is there given as an example of a formula satisfiable in an infinite domain of individuals but not in any finite domain, and prefixing the quantifier (EF) with scope extending to the end of the formula. This form of the axiom of infinity, however, is considerably stronger (in the absence of the axiom of choice) than the "Infin ax" of Whitehead and Russell.
Formula ALGOL An {ALGOL} extension for {symbolic mathematics}, strings and lists, developed by A.J. Perlis and R. Iturriaga at {Carnegie} for the {CDC G-20} in 1962. ["An Extension of ALGOL for Manipulating Formulae", A.J. Perlis et al, CACM 7(2):127-130 (Feb 1964)]. [Sammet 1969, p. 583]. (1995-02-15)
FORMULA. ::: Every formula we form about God, though always true as a symbol, becomes false when we accept it as a sufficient formula.
formule ::: n. --> A set or prescribed model; a formula.
formulization ::: n. --> The act or process of reducing to a formula; the state of being formulized.
formulize ::: v. t. --> To reduce to a formula; to formulate.
Fortran "language" (Formula Translation) The first and, for a long time, the most widely used programming language for numerical and scientific applications. The original versions lacked {recursive} procedures and {block structure} and had a line-oriented {syntax} in which certain columns had special significance. There have been a great many versions. The name is often written "FORTRAN", harking back to the days before computers were taught about lower case, but {ANSI} decreed, in about 1985 via the ANSI {FORTRAN} Technical Committee {TC}, that it should be "Fortran". See also: {Fortrash}. [Was {Fortran I} the first version?] (2000-07-07)
::: "For what we understand by law is a single immutably habitual movement or recurrence in Nature fruitful of a determined sequence of things and that sequence must be clear, precise, limited to its formula, invariable.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“For what we understand by law is a single immutably habitual movement or recurrence in Nature fruitful of a determined sequence of things and that sequence must be clear, precise, limited to its formula, invariable.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Frege, (Friedrich Ludwig) Gottlob, 1848-1925, German mathematician and logician. Professor of mathematics at the University of Jena, 1879-1918. Largely unknown to, or misunderstood by, his contemporaries, he is now regarded by many as "beyond question the greatest logician of the Nineteenth Century" (quotation from Tarski). He must be regarded -- after Boole (q. v.) -- as the second founder of symbolic logic, the essential steps in the passage from the algebra of logic to the logistic method (see the article Logistic system) having been taken in his Begriffsschrift of 1879. In this work there appear tor the first time the propositional calculus in substantially its modern form, the notion of propositional function, the use of quantifiers, the explicit statement of primitive rules of inference, the notion of an hereditary property and the logical analysis of proof by mathematical induction or recursion (q. v.). This last is perhaps the most important element in the definition of an inductive cardinal number (q.v.) and provided the basis for Frege's derivation of arithmetic from logic in his Grundlagen der Anthmetik (1884) and Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. 1 (1893), and vol. 2 (1903). The first volume of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is the culmination of Frege's work, and we find here many important further ideas. In particular, there is a careful distinction between using a formula to express something else and naming a formula in order to make a syntactical statement about it, quotation marks being used in order to distinguish the name of a formula from the formula itself. In an appendix to the second volume of Grundgesetze , Frege acknowledges the presence of an inconsistency in his system through what is now known as the Russel paradox (see Paradoxes , logical), as had been called to his attention by Russell when the book was nearly through the press. -- A.C.
Frege held it to be desirable in a formalized logistic system that every formula should have not only a sense but also a denotation -- as can be arranged by arbitrary semantical conventions where necessary. When this is done, Frege's sense of a sentence nearly coincides with proposition (in sense (b) of the article of that title herein). -- Alonzo Church
Frege meets the same difficulties, without construing descriptions as incomplete symbols, by distinguishing two kinds of meaning, the sense (Sinn) and the denotation (Bedeutung) of an expression (formula, phrase, sentence, etc.). Scott and the author of Waverley have the same denotation, namely the man Scott, but not the same sense. The King of France has a sense but no denotation; so likewise the sentence, The King of France is bald. Two expressions having the same sense must have the same denotation if they have a denotation. When a constituent part of an expression is replaced by another part having the same sense, the sense of the whole is not altered. When a constituent part of an expression is replaced by another having the same denotation, the denotation of the whole (if any) is not altered, but the sense may be. The denotation of an (unasserted) declarative sentence (if any) is a truth-value, whereas the sense is the thought or content of the sentence. But where a sentence is used in indirect discourse (as in saying that so-and-so says that . . ., believes that . . ., is glad that . . ., etc.) the meaning is different in such a context the denotation of the sentence is that which would be its sense in direct discourse. (In quoting some one in indirect discourse, one reproduces neither the literal wording nor the truth-value, but the sense, of what he said.)
Functional variables and functional constants are together called functional symbols (the adjective functional being here understood to refer to propositional functions). Functional symbols are called n-adic if they are either functional variables with subscript n or functional constants denoting n-adic propositional functions of individuals. The formulas of the functional calculus of first order (relative to the given lists of symbols (1), (2), (3), (4)) are all the expressions determined by the eight following rules: all the propositional variables are formulas; if F is a monadic functional symbol and X is an individual variable, [F](X) is a formula; if F is an n-adic functional symbol and X1, X2, . . . , Xn are individual variables (which may or may not be all different), [F](X1, X2, . . . , Xn) is a formula; if A is a formula, ∼[A] is a formula; if A nnd B are formulas, [A][B] is a formula; if A and B are formulas, [A] ∨ [B] is a formula; if A is a formula and X is an individual variable, (X)[A] is a formula; if A is a formula and X is an individual variable, (EX)[A] is a formula. In practice, we omit superfluous brackets and braces (but not parentheses) in writing formulas, nnd we omit subscripts on functional variables in cases where the subscript is sufficiently indicated by the form of the formula in which the functional variable appears. The sentential connectives |, ⊃, ≡, +, are introduced as abbreviations in the same way as in § 1 for the propositional calculus. We make further the following definitions, which are also to be construed as abbreviations, the arrow being read "stands for": [A] ⊃x [B] → (X)[[A] ⊃ [B]]. [A] ≡x [B] → (X)[[A] ≡ [B]]. [A] ∧x [B] → (EX)[[A][B]]. (Here A and B are any formulas, and X is any individual variable. Brackets may be omitted when superfluous.) If F and G denote monadic propositional functions, we say that F(X) ⊃x G(X) expresses formal implication of the function G by the function F, and F(X) ≡x G(X) expresses formal equivalence of the two functions (the adjective formal is perhaps not well chosen here but has become established in use).
garnet ::: n. --> A mineral having many varieties differing in color and in their constituents, but with the same crystallization (isometric), and conforming to the same general chemical formula. The commonest color is red, the luster is vitreous, and the hardness greater than that of quartz. The dodecahedron and trapezohedron are the common forms.
A tackle for hoisting cargo in our out.
Gay, John: (1669-1745) English schohr and clergyman, not to be confused with his contemporary, the poet and dramatist of the same name. He is important in the field of ethics for his Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality. This little work influenced David Hartley in his formulation of Associationism in Psychology and likewise sened to suggest the foundation for the later English Utilitarian School. -- L.E.D.
general formula ::: either of two lists of four terms, each formula being related to one of the first two members of the sakti catus.t.aya and consisting of attributes that are to be common (samanya) to all elements of that member of the catus.t.aya. The first general formula, tejo balaṁ pravr.ttir mahattvam, is related to virya; the second general formula, adinata ks.iprata sthairyam isvarabhavah., is related to sakti.
generalize ::: v. t. --> To bring under a genus or under genera; to view in relation to a genus or to genera.
To apply to other genera or classes; to use with a more extensive application; to extend so as to include all special cases; to make universal in application, as a formula or rule.
To derive or deduce (a general conception, or a general principle) from particulars.
Given a formula A containing a free variable, say x, the process of forming a corresponding monadic function (q.v.) -- defined by the rule that the value of the function for an argument b is that which A denotes if the variable x is taken as denoting b -- is also called abstraction, or functional abstraction. In this sense, abstraction is an operation upon a formula A yielding a function, and is relative to a particular system of interpretation for the notations appearing in the formula, and to a particular variable, as x. The requirement that A shall contain x as a free variable is not essential: when A does not contain x as a free variable, the function obtained by abstraction relative to x may be taken to be the function whose value, the same for all arguments, is denoted by A.
Given the concept of semantical truth (q.v.), we may also define a logistic system as complete if every true formula of the system is a theorem. This sense of completeness is not, in general, equivalent to the other; and may be the weaker one if formulas containing free variables occur. See Logic, formal, §§ 3, 6. -- A.C.
(g) The problem of the structure of the knowledge-situation is to determine with respect to each of the major kinds of knowledge just enumerated -- but particularly with respect to perception -- the constituents of the knowledge-situation in their relation to one another. The structural problem stated in general but rather vague terms is: What is the relation between the subjective and objective components of the knowledge-situation? In contemporary epistemology, the structural problem has assumed a position of such preeminence as frequently to eclipse other issues of epistemology. The problem has even been incorporated by some into the definition of philosophy. (See A. Lalande, Vocabulaire de la Philosophie, art. Theorie de la Connaissance. I. and G.D. Hicks, Encycl. Brit. 5th ed. art. Theory of Knowledge.) The principal cleavage in epistemology, according to this formulation of its problem, is between a subjectivism which telescopes the object of knowledge into the knowing subject (see Subjectivism; Idealism, Epistemological) and pan-objectivism which ascribes to the object all qualities perceived or otherwise cognized. See Pan-obiectivism. A compromise between the extrernes of subjectivism and objectivism is achieved by the theory of representative perception, which, distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, considers the former objective, the latter subjective. See Representative Perception, Theory of; Primary Qualities; Secondary Qualities.
habitual mind ::: the lowest form of the thinking mind (buddhi), consisting of an "undercurrent of mechanically recurrent thought" and a movement that reduces "all new experience . . . to formulas of habitual thinking".
Han character "character" (From the Han dynasty, 206 B.C.E to 25 C.E.) One of the set of {glyphs} common to Chinese (where they are called "hanzi"), Japanese (where they are called {kanji}), and Korean (where they are called {hanja}). Han characters are generally described as "ideographic", i.e., picture-writing; but see the reference below. Modern Korean, Chinese and Japanese {fonts} may represent a given Han character as somewhat different glyphs. However, in the formulation of {Unicode}, these differences were {folded}, in order to conserve the number of {code positions} necessary for all of {CJK}. This unification is referred to as "Han Unification", with the resulting character repertoire sometimes referred to as "Unihan". {Unihan reference at the Unicode Consortium (http://charts.unicode.org/unihan.html)}. [John DeFrancis, "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", University of Hawaii Press, 1984]. (1998-10-18)
Hegelianism: As expounded in the writings of Hegel, Hegelianism is both a doctrine and a method. The two are held to be logically inseparable: the method is precisely the formulation of the doctrine, and the doctrine is precisely the detailed expression of the method. This integration of the two aspects of the philosophy presents a formidable obstacle to interpretation and to summary presentation of Hegelianism as conceived by its founder.
higher-order macro "functional programming" A means of expressing certain {higher-order functions} in a {first-order language}, proposed by {Phil Wadler}. Higher-order macros cannot be {recursive} at the top level but they may contain recursive definitions. For example, the normal, definition of the {map} function, map f [] = [] map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs is higher-order because its argument, f, is a function. The alternative formulation map f l = map_f l where map_f [] = [] map_f (x:xs) = f x : m xs defines a first-order function, map_f, that is a specialisation of map in its first argument. This can be considered a {macro} because it works purely by textual substitution, requiring no knowledge about f for its validity. This is an example of {partial evaluation} - the call, map f l, has been partially evaluated to yeild an intermediate result. This may be useful in optimising compilation or execution, e.g. if the call to f can be subject to {in-lining} or when executing map_f on a long list. (2018-05-25)
Hilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der mathematik, vol. 2, Berlin, 1939. 7. ALGEBRA OF CLASSES deals with classes (q. v.) whose members are from a fixed non-empty class called the universe of discourse, and with the operations of complementation, logical sum, and logical product upon such classes. (The classes are to be thought of as determined by propositional functions having the universe of discourse as the range of the independent variable.) The universal class ∨ comprises the entire universe of discourse. The null (or empty) class ∧ has no members. The complement −a of a class a has as members all those elements of the universe of discourse which are not members of a (and those only). In particular the null class and the universal class are each the complement of the other. The logical sum a ∪ b of two classes a and b has as members all those elements which are members either of a or of b, not excluding elements which are members of both a and b (and those only). The logical product a ∩ b of two classes a and b has as members all those elements which are members of both a and b (and those only) -- in other words the logical product of two classes is their common part. The expressions of the algebra of classes are built up out of class variables a, b, c, . . . and the symbols for the universal class and the null class by means of the notations for complementation, logical sum, and logical product (with parentheses). A formula of the algebra of classes consists of two expressions with one of the symbols = or ≠ between. (a = b means that a and b are the same class, a ≠ b that a and b are not the same class.)
Hilbert has given a formalization of arithmetic which takes the shape of a logistic system having primitive symbols some of a logical and some of an arithmetical character, so that logic and arithmetic are formalized together without taking logic as prior; similarly also for analysis. This would not of itself be opposed to the Frege-Russell view, since it is to be expected that the choice as to which symbols shall be taken as primitive in the formalization can be made in more than one way. Hilbert, however, took the position that many of the theorems of the system are ideale Aussagen, mere formulas, which are without meaning in themselves but are added to the reale Aussagen or genuinely meaningful formulas in order to avoid formal difficulties otherwise arising. In this respect Hilbert differs sharply from Frege and Russell, who would give a meaning (namely as propositions of logic) to all formulas (sentences) appearing. -- Concerning Hilbert's associated program for a consistency proof see the article Proof theory.
HOL Higher Order Logic. A proof-generating system for {higher order logic} based on {LCF}. Implementations include {HOL-88} and {HOL-90}. {(ftp://ted.cs.uidaho.edu/pub/hol)}. Mailing list: info-hol@ted.cs.uidaho.edu. ["HOL: A Machine Oriented Formulation of Higher Order Logic", M.J.C. Gordon, Report 68, Comp Lab U Cambridge (1985)]. ["Introduction to HOL", M.J.C. Gordon et al, Cambridge U Press 1993 ISBN 0-521-441897].
Horse-whispering: A magical art of taming wild horses by whispering certain secret magical formulas into their ears.
Hotar: Sanskrit for caller. Priest-magicians who invoke the gods by reciting ritual formulas and improvised chants.
However, the test whether a given formula is a theorem, by the criterion that it is a theorem if a proof of it exists, is not effective -- since failure to find a proof upon search might mean lack of ingenuity rather than non-existence of a proof. The problem to give an effective test by means of which it can always be determined whether a given formula is a theorem is the decision problem, of the propositional calculus. This problem can be solved either by the process of reduction of a formula to disjunctive normal form, or by the truth-table decision procedure. We state the latter in detail.
ideal ::: Madhav: “What is not yet achieved on earth but what must be achieved because it presses for expression from above is cherished in the aspiration and thought of man as an Ideal. It is a truth from the higher regions of existence that seeks to formulate itself in this world. It clothes itself in the form of an Idea, organises itself in the human mind through a series of perceptions and leaps of thought as an Ideal to be realised and goes on exerting pressure on the evolving spirit of man to actualise it in life as a working factor. Progress is effected by these translations of the ideal into the actual.” Readings in Savitri, Vol. III.
Identity, law of: Given by traditional logicians as "A is A." Because of the various possible meanings of the copula (q.v.) and the uncertainty as to the range of the variable A, this formulation is ambiguous. The traditional law is perhaps best identified with the theorem x = x, either of the functional calculus of first order with equality, or in the theory of types (with equality defined), or in the algebra of classes, etc. It has been, or may be, also identified with either of the theorems of the propositional calculus, p ⊃ p, p ≡ p, or with the theorem of the functional calculus of first order, F(x) ⊃x F(x). Many writers understand, however, by the law of identity a semantical principle -- that a word or other symbol may (or must) have a fixed referent in its various occurrences in a given context (so, e.g., Ledger Wood in his The Analysis of Knowledge). Some, it would seem, confuse such a semantical principle with a proposition of formal logic. -- A.C.
If A, B, C are any formulas, each of the seven following formulas is a primitive formula: [A ∨ A] ⊃ A. A ⊃ [B ⊃ AB]. A ⊃ [A ∨ B]. AB ⊃ A. [A ∨ B] ⊃ [B ∨ A]. AB ⊃ B. [A ⊃ B] ⊃ [[C ∨ A] ⊃ [C ∨ B]]. If X is any individual variable, and A is any formula not containing a free occurrence of X, and B is any formula, each of the two following formulas is a primitive formula; [A ⊃x B] ⊃ [A⊃ (X)B]. [B ⊃x A] ⊃ [(EX)B ⊃ A]. If X and Y are any individual variables (the same or different), and A is any formula such that no free occurrence of X in A is in a sub-formula of the form (Y) [C], and B is the formula resulting from the substitution of Y for all the free occurrences of X in A, each of the two following formulas is a primitive formula: (X)A ⊃ B. B ⊃ (EX)A. There are two primitive rules of inference: Given A and A ⊃ B to infer B (the rule of modus ponens). Given A to infer (X)A, where X is any individual variable (the rule of generalization). In applying the rule of generalization, we say that the variable X is generalized upon. The theorems of the functional calculus of first order are the formulas which can he derived from the primitive formulas by a succession of applications of the primitive rules of inference. An inference from premisses A1, A2, . . . , An to a conclusion B is a valid inference of the functional calculus of first order if B becomes a theorem upon adding A1, A2, . . . , An to the list of primitive formulas and at the same time restricting the rule of generalization by requiring that the variable generalized upon shall not be any one of the free individual variables of A1, A2, . . . . , An. It can be proved that the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to B is a valid inference of the functional calculus of first order if (obviously), and only if (the deduction threorem), [A2 ⊃ [A2⊃ . . . [An ⊃ B] . . . ]] is a theorem of the functional calculus of first order.
If A, B, C are any formulas, each of the seven following formulas is a primitive formula:
If the Peano postulates are formulated on the basis of an interpretation according to which the domain of individuals coincides with that of the non-negative integers, the undefined term N may be dropped and the postulates reduced to the three following: (x)(y)[[S(x) = S(y)] ⊃[x = y]]. (x) ∼[S(x) = 0]. F(0)[F(x) ⊃x F(S(x))] ⊃F (x)F(y). It is possible further to drop the undefined term 0 and to replace the successor function S by a dyadic propositional function S (the contemplated interpretation being that S(x,y) is the proposition y = x+l). The Peano postulates may then be given the following form: (x)(Ey)S(x, y). (x)[S(x,y) ⊃y [S(x,z) ⊃x [y = z]]]. (x)[S(y,x) ⊃y [S(z,x) ⊃x [y = z]]]. (Ex)[[(x) ∼S(x,y)] ≡y [y = z]]. [(x) ∼S(x,z)] ⊃x [F(z)[F(x) ⊃x [S(x, y) ⊃y F(y)]] ⊃F (x)F(x)]. For this form of the Peano postulates the underlying logic may be taken to be simply the functional calculus of second order without additions. In this formulation, numerical functions can be introduced only by contextual definition as incomplete symbols.
If we deal only with formulas of the algebra of classes which are equations (i.e., which have the form A = B), the above description by reference to the functional calculus may be replaced by a simpler description using the applied propositional calculus (§ 1) whose fundamental proposittonal symbols are xε∨, xε∧, xεa, xεb, xεc, . . . . Given an equation, C of the algebra of classes, the corresponding formula C† of the propositional calculus is obtained by replacing equality ( = ) by the biconditional ( ≡ ), replacing complementation, logical sum, and logical product respectively by negation, inclusive disjunction, and conjunction, and at the same time replacing ∨, ∧, a, b, c, . . . respectively by xε∨, xε∧, xεa, xεb, xεc, . . . . An equation C is a theorem of the algbera of classes if and only if the inference from xε∨, ∼xε∧ to C† is a valid inference of the propositional calculus; analogously for valid inferences of the algebra of classes in which the formulas involved are equations.
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 many-sided 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…
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. …
II. Early Scholastics (12 cent.) St. Anselm of Canterbury (+1109) did more than anyone else in this early period to codify the spirit of Scholasticism. His motto: credo, ut tntelligam taken from St. Augustine, expressed the organic relation that existed between the supernatural and the natural during the Middle Ages and the interpretative and the directive force which faith had upon reason. In this period a new interest was taken in the problem of the universals. For the first time a clear demarcation was noted between the realistic and the nominalistic solutions to this problem. William of Champeaux (+1121) proposed the former and Roscelin (+c. 1124) the latter. A third solution, concepiualistic in character, was proposed by Abelard (+1142) who finally crystalized the Scholastic method. He was the most subtle dialectician of his age. Two schools of great importance of this period were operating at Chartres and the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor. The first, founded by Fulbert of Chartres in the late tenth century, was characterized by its leanings toward Platonism and distinguished by its humanistic tendencies coupled with a love of the natural sciences. Many of its Greek, Arabian and Jewish sources for studies in natural sciences came from the translations of Constantine the African (+c. 1087) and Adelard of Bath. Worthy to be noted as members of or sympathizers with this school are Bernard and Thierry of Chartres (+c. 1127; c. 1150); William of Conches (+1145) and Bernard Silvestris (+1167). The two most important members of the School were Gilbert de la Poiree (+1154) and John of Salisbury (+1180). The latter was a humanistic scholar of great stylistic skill and calm, balanced judgment. It is from his works, particularly the Metalogicus, that most of our knowledge of this period still derives. Juxtaposed to the dialectic, syllogistic and rationalistic tendencies of this age was a mystical movement, headed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153). This movement did not oppose itself to dialectics in the uncompromising manner of Peter Damiani, but sought rather to experience and interiorize truth through contemplation and practice. Bernard found a close follower and friend in William of St. Thierry (+1148 or 1153). An attempt to synthesize the mystic and dialectical movements is found in two outstanding members of the Victorine School: Hugh of St. Victor (+1141) who founded its spirit in his omnia disce, videbis postea nihil esse supervuum and Richard of St. Victor (+1173), his disciple, who introduced the a posteriori proof for God's existence into the Scholastic current of thought. Finally, this century gave Scholasticism its principal form of literature which was to remain dominant for some four centuries. While the method came from Abelard and the formulas and content, in great part, from the Didascalion of Hugh of St. Victor, it was Robert of Melun (+1167) and especially Peter the Lombard (+1164) who fashioned the great Summae sententiarum.
III. Golden Age (13 cent.). The sudden elevation of and interest in philosophy during this period can be attributed to the discovery and translation of Aristotelian literature from Arabian, Jewish and original sources, together with the organization of the University of Paris and the founding of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders. Names important in the introduction and early use of Aristotle are Dominic Gundisalvi, William of Auvergne (+ 1149), Alexander Neckam (+1217), Michael Scot (+c. 1234) and Robert Grosseteste (+ 1253). The last three were instrumental in interesting Scholastic thought in the natural sciences, while the last (Robert), if not the author of, was, at least, responsible for the first Summa philosophiae of Scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy has now reached the systematizing and formularizing stage and so on the introduction of Aristotle's works breaks up into two camps: Augustinianism, comprising those who favor the master theses of Augustine and look upon Aristotle with varying degrees of hostility; Aristotelianism, comprising those who favor Aristotle, without altogether abandoning the Augustinian framework.
In addition to syntactical or nominal definition we may distinguish another kind of definition, which is applicable only in connection with interpreted logistic systems, and which we shall call semantical definition. This consists in introducing a new symbol or notation by assigning a meaning to it. In an interpreted logistic system, a nominal definition carries with it implicitly a semantical definition, in that it is intended to give to the definiendum the meaning expressed by the definiens; but two different nominal definitions may correspond to the same semantical definition. Consider, for example, the two following schemata of nominal definition in the propositional calculus (Logic, formal, § 1): [A] ⊃ [B] → ∼A ∨ B. [A] ⊃ [B] → ∼[A ∼B]. As nominal definitions these are inconsistent, since they represent [A] ⊃ [B] as standing for different formulas: either one, but not both, could be used in a development of the propositional calculus. But the corresponding semantical definitions would be identical if -- as would be possible -- our interpretation of the propositional calculus were such that the two definientia had the same meaning for any particular A and B.
In a logistic system (q. v.), a primitive formula or a primitive rule of inference may be said to be independent if there are theorems of the system which would cease to be theorems upon omission of the primitive formula or primitive rule of inference. -- A.C.
In articles herein by the present writer, the notation λx[A] will be employed for the function obtained from A by abstraction relative to (or, as we may also say, with respect to) x. Russell, and Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica, employ for this purpose the formula A with a circumflex ˆ placed over each (free) occurrence of x -- but only for propositional functions. Frege (1893) uses a Greek vowel, say ε, as the variable relative to which abstraction is made, and employs the notation ε(A) to denote what is essentially the function in extension (the "Werthverlauf" in his terminology) obtained from A by abstraction relative to ε.
In formulating the pure propositional calculus the primitive formulas may (if desired) be reduced to a finite number, e.g., to the seven listed above with A, B, C taken to be the particular variables p, q, r. A second primitive rule of inference, the rule of substitution is then required, allowing the inference from a formula A to the formula obtained from A by substituting a formula B for a particular variable in A (the same formula B must be substituted for all occurrences of that variable in A). The definition of a theorem is then given in the same way as before, allowing for the additional primitive rule, the definition of a valid inference must, however, be modified.
Incantation: Any phrase or formula spoken, sung or chanted as a part of a ritual of magic.
incantation ::: n. --> The act or process of using formulas sung or spoken, with occult ceremonies, for the purpose of raising spirits, producing enchantment, or affecting other magical results; enchantment.
A formula of words used as above.
In connection with logistic systems, sentence is often used as a technical term in place of formula (see the explanation of the latter term in the article logistic system). This may be done when, under the intended interpretation of the system, sentences in this technical or formal sense become sentences in the sense of the preceding paragraph. -- A.C.
inconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action, but in a vast involved trance; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own abyss of infinity.” *The Life Divine
"All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite"s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit"s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being, — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” *The Life Divine
"Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience.” Letters on Yoga
*inconscience.
Information Management The planning, budgeting, control and exploitation of the information resources in an organisation. The term encompasses both the information itself and the related aspects such as personnel, finance, marketing, organisation and technologies and systems. Information Managers are responsible for the coordination and integration of a wide range of information handling activities within the organisation. These include the formulation of corporate information policy, design, evaluation and integration of effective information systems and services, the exploitation of IT for competitive advantage and the integration of internal and external information and data.
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 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Tr. Analytic): The procedure of the imagination by which the categories of the understanding are applied to the manifold of sensuous intuitions. Imagination, working with the pure form of time, connects sense and understanding. This is possible because the imagination contains an element of both sense and understanding, and thus is capable of formulating the rules and procedures by means of which sensuous representations may be subsumed under pure concepts. See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
In many (interpreted) logistic systems -- including such as contain, with their usual interpretations, the Zermelo set theory, or the simple theory of types with axiom of infinity, or the functional calculus of second order with addition of Peano's postulates for arithmetic -- it is impossible without contradiction to introduce the numerical name relation with its natural properties, because Grelling's paradox or similar paradoxes would result (see paradoxes, logical). The same can be said of the semantical name relation in cases where symbols for formulas are present.
Innatism: (Lat. in + natus, inborn) A theory of philosophy in which ideas, or principles, are considered to be present in the mind at birth, either fully formed or requiring some additional experience for their complete formulation. -- V.J.B.
…in Nature each of us has a principle and will of our own becoming; each soul is a force of self-consciousness that formulates an idea of the Divine in it and guides by that its action and evolution, its progressive self-finding, its constant varying self-expression, its apparently uncertain but secretly inevitable growth to fullness. That is our Swabhava.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 519
In order to complete the setting up of the propositional calculus as a logistic system (q. v.) it is necessary to state primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference. Of the many possible ways of doing this we select the following.
In particular, it is normally possible -- at least it does not obviously lead to contradiction in the case of such systems as the Zermelo set theory or the simple theory of types (functional calculus of order omega) with axiom of infinity -- to extend a system L1 into a system L2 (the semantics of L1 in the sense of Tarski), so that L2 shall contain symbols for the formulas of L1, and for the essential syntactical relations between formulas of L1, and for a relation which functions as a name relation as regards all the formulas of L1 (or, in the case of the theory of types, one such relation for each type), together with appropriate new primitive formulas. Then L2 may be similarly extended into L3, and so on through a hierarchy of systems each including the preceding one as a part.
In respect to the field of ethics in general, Soviet philosophers have lately been developing the doctrine known as socialist or proletarian humanism. As distinguished from "bourgeois humanism", this term signifies that system of social institutions and personal values designed to insure that there be no underprivileged gioup or class de facto excluded from full participation in the good life conceived in terms of the educational and cultural development of the individual and the full enjoyment of the things of this world. Such objectives, it is held, are only possible of attainment in a classless society where there is economic security for all. The view taken is that the freedoms and liberties proclaimed by "bourgeois humanism" represented a great historical advance, but one that was, in general, limited in application to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie (q.v.) from the restrictions of feudalism while retaining and making use, to greater or lesser extent, of slavery, serfdom and a system of private capitalism invoking the precarious economic existence and cultural darkness of large proletarian masses. While it is held that there is an absolute light binding upon all, vaguely expressed in such formulations as, each for all and all for each, it is asserted that in class society, the position and class interest of one class may motivate it to oppose a genuine application of this right, whereas the class interest of another class may coincide with such an application. It is held that the proletariat is in this latter position, for its class interest as well as its moral obligation is considered to be in abolishing itself as a proletariat, which is taken to mean, abolishing classes generally.
In the axiom of subset formation, A is any formula not containing t as a free varibale (in general, A will contain x as a free variable). In the axiom of replacement, A is any formula which contains neither t nor x' as a free variable (in general, A will contain x and y as free variables). These two axioms are thus represented each by an infinite list of primitive formulas -- the remaining axioms each by one primitive formula.
In the Greek, remission (of sins) meant sending away, the intent being that the disciples and the assembled believers together were able to work a change of heart in the sinner so that he would sin no more (James 5:16), not a remission of the karmic penalty due. Only much later was the power of remission taken over by the priest. Moreover, for a thousand years the formula used was “May Christ absolve thee,” superseded by “I absolve thee.” While clearly a priest may release one from the penalties imposed by his church, he cannot release anyone from the natural consequences of his acts; yet Christians have attached extreme importance to death-bed absolution by a priest. Such death-bed repentance had its origin in the fact that the last thoughts of a dying person color his afterdeath experiences, and even his next incarnation. But though well-wishers and people of high attainment can help with their counsel and example, they cannot set aside the laws of nature. Real absolution must be emancipation from error and wrongdoing, not an escape from the demands of justice or karma.
Invocation: In the terminology of magic, the act or the formula of calling for the presence of a superhuman entity.
irreducible ::: a. --> Incapable of being reduced, or brought into a different state; incapable of restoration to its proper or normal condition; as, an irreducible hernia.
Incapable of being reduced to a simpler form of expression; as, an irreducible formula.
ishwarabhava) ::: non-depression, swiftness, steadiness, mastery: the second general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya, consisting of qualities needed for the perfection of all parts of the psycho-physical system.
islam ::: n. --> The religion of the Mohammedans; Mohammedanism; Islamism. Their formula of faith is: There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.
The whole body of Mohammedans, or the countries which they occupy.
isvarabhava (ishwarabhava; iswarabhava) ::: lordship, "the temperaisvarabhava ment of the ruler and leader"; mastery, sovereignty; a term in the second general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "a sense of the Divine Power", a quality common to the four aspects of daivi prakr.ti; the personal aspect of brahman seen as the isvara.
It can be proved that if A ≡ B is a theorem, and D is the result of replacing a particular occurrence of A by B in the formula C, then the inference from C to D is a valid inference.
It can be shown that all theorems A of the pure functional calculus of first order which contain no free individual variables have the property that ∼A is not satisfiable. Hence the pure functional calculus of first order is not complete in the strong sense in which the pure propositional calculus is complete. Gödel has shown that the pure functional calculus of first order is complete in the weaker sense that if a formula A contains no free individual variables and ∼A is not satisfiable then A is a theorem.
It can be shown that the following principles of duality hold in the propositional calculus (where A* and B* denote the duals of the formulas A and B respectively): if A is a theorem, then ∼A* is a theorem; if A ⊃ B is a theorem, then B* ⊃ A* is a theorem; if A ≡ B is a theorem, then A* ≡ B* is a theorem. Special names have been given to certain particular theorems and forms of valid inference of the propositional calculus. Besides § 2 following, see: absorption; affirmation of the consequent; assertion; associative law; commutative law; composition; contradiction, law of; De Morgan's laws; denial of the antecedent; distributive law; double negation, law of; excluded middle, law of; exportation; Hauber's law; identity, law of; importation; Peirce's law; proof by cases; reductio ad absurdum; reflexivity; tautology; transitivity; transposition. Names given to particular theorems of the propositional calculus are usually thought of as applying to laws embodied in the theorems rather than to the theorems as formulas; hence, in particular, the same name is applied to theorems differing only by alphabetical changes of the variables appearing; and frequently the name used for a theorem is used also for one or more forms of valid inference associated with the theorem. Similar remarks apply to names given to particular theorems of the functional calculus of first order, etc.
It is customary to distinguish between the nature of truth and the tests for truth. There are three traditional theories as to the nature of truth, each finding virious expression in the works of different exponents. According to the correspondence theory, a proposition (or meaning) is true if there is a fact to which it corresponds. if it expresses what is the case. For example, "It is raining here now" is true if it is the case that it is raining here now; otherwise it is false. The nature of the relation of correspondence between fact and true proposition is variously described by different writers, or left largely undescribed. Russell in The Problems of Philosophy speaks of the correspondence as consisting of an identity of the constituents of the fact and of the proposition. According to the coherence theory (see H. H. Joachim: The Nature of Truth), truth is systematic coherence. This is more than logical consistency. A proposition is true insofar is it is a necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole. According to some (e.g., Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Truth), this whole must be such that every element in it necessitates, indeed entails, every other element. Strictly, on this view, truth, in its fullness, is a characteristic of only the one systematic coherent whole, which is the absolute. It attaches to propositions as we know them and to wholes as we know them only to a degree. A proposition has a degree of truth proportionate to the completeness of the systematic coherence of the system of entities to which it belongs. According to the pragmatic theory of truth, a proposition is true insofar as it works or satisfies, working or satisfying being described variously by different exponents of the view. Some writers insist that truth chiracterizes only those propositions (ideas) whose satisfactory working has actually verified them; others state that only verifiability through such consequences is necessary. In either case, writers differ as to the precise nature of the verifying experiences required. See Pragmatism. --C.A.B. Truth, semantical: Closely connected with the name relation (q.v.) is the property of a propositional formula (sentence) that it expresses a true proposition (or if it has free variables, that it expresses a true proposition for all values of these variables). As in the case of the name relation, a notation for the concept of truth in this sense often cannot be added, with its natural properties, to an (interpreted) logistic system without producing contradiction. A particular system may, however, be made the beginning of a hierarchy of systems each containing the truth concept appropriate to the preceding one.
It is not difficult to find examples of formulas A, containing no free individual variables, such that both A and ∼A are satisfiaMe. A simple example is the formula (x)F(x). More instructive is the following example, [(x)(y)(z)[[∼F{x,x)][F(x, y)F(y,z) ⊃ F(x,z)]]][(x)(Ey)F(x,y)], which is satisfiable in an infinite domain of individuals but not in any finite domain -- the negation is satisfiable in any non-empty domain.
It is the cryptic verses of the Veda that help us here; for they contain, though concealed, the gospel of the divine and immortal Supermind and through the veil some illumining flashes come to us. We can see through these utterances the conception of this Supermind as a vastness beyond the ordinary firmaments of our consciousness in which truth of being is luminously one with all that expresses it and assures inevitably truth of vision, formulation, arrangement, word, act and movement and therefore truth also of result of movement, result of action and expression, infallible ordinance or law. Vast all-comprehensiveness; luminous truth and harmony of being in that vastness and not a vague chaos or self-lost obscurity; truth of law and act and knowledge expressive of that harmonious truth of being: these seem to be the essential terms of the Vedic description.” *The Life Divine
It is the cryptic verses of the Veda that help us here; for they contain, though concealed, the gospel of the divine and immortal Supermind and through the veil some illumining flashes come to us. We can see through these utterances the conception of this Supermind as a vastness beyond the ordinary firmaments of our consciousness in which truth of being is luminously one with all that expresses it and assures inevitably truth of vision, formulation, arrangement, word, act and movement and therefore truth also of result of movement, result of action and expression, infallible ordinance or law. Vast all-comprehensiveness; luminous truth and harmony of being in that vastness and not a vague chaos or self-lost obscurity; truth of law and act and knowledge expressive of that harmonious truth of being: these seem to be the essential terms of the Vedic description.” The Life Divine
It is usually to be required that a logistic system shall provide an effective criterion for recognizing formulas, proofs, and proofs as a consequence of a set of formulas; i.e., it shall be a matter of direct observation, and of following a fixed set of directions for concrete operations with symbols, to determine whether a given finite sequence of primitive symbols is a formula, or whether a given finite sequence of formulas is a proof, or is a proof as a conseqence of a given set of formulas. If this requirement is not satisfied, it may be necessary -- e.g. -- given a particular finite sequence of formulas, to seek by some argument adapted to the special case to prove or disprove that it satisfies the conditions to be a proof (in the technical sense); i.e., the criterion for formal recognition of proofs then presupposes, in actual application, that we already know what a valid deduction is (in a sense which is stronger than that merely of the ability to follow concrete directions in a particular case). See further on this point logic, formal, § 1.
It may also be allowed to prefix the quantifiers (x) and (Ex) to a formula (sentence) A not containing x as a free variable, (x)A and (Ex)A then having each the same meaning as A.
Kant-Laplace hypothesis: Theory of the origin of the solar system, formulated first by Kant (Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755) and later by Laplace (Exposition of the System of the World, 1796). According to this theory the solar system evolved from a rotating mass of incandescent gas which by cooling and shrinking, and thus increasing its rate of spin, gradually flattened at its poles and threw off rings from its equator. These rings became the planets, which by the operation of the same laws developed their own satellites. While Laplace supposed the rotating nebula to have been the primordial stuff, Kant maintained that this was itself formed and put into rotation by gravitational action on the original atoms which through their impact with one another generated heat. -- A.C.B.
Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich: (1781-1832) Kant's younger contemporary, who attempted to formulate a speculative reconciliation of theism and pantheism, or "panentheism". Main works: Grundl. d. Naturrechts, 1803; System d. Sittenlehre, 1810; Das Urbild d. Menschheit, 1811; Vorles. u.d. Grundwahrheiten d. Wissenschaften, 1829. -- R.B.W.
ks.iprata (kshiprata) ::: swiftness; a term in the second general formula ksiprata of the sakti catus.t.aya.
Lambda Prolog "language" An extension of standard {Prolog} defined by Dale A. Miller and Gopalan Nadathur in 1986, in which terms are {strongly typed} lambda terms. {Clauses} are {higher order} {hereditary Harrop formulas}. The main novelties are {universal quantification} on {goals} and {implication}. The {Prolog/Mali} compiler compiles Lambda Prolog for the {MALI} abstract memory system. {Teyjus (http://teyjus.cs.umn.edu/)} is an implementation of Lambda Prolog. {Lambda Prolog home (http://cse.psu.edu/~dale/lProlog/)}. Mailing list: lprolog@cs.umn.edu. ["Higher-order logic programming", Miller D.A. and Nadathur G., 3rd International Conference on Logic Programming, pp 448-462, London 1986]. [Nadathur G. "A Higher-Order Logic as a Basis for Logic Programming", Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1987]. (2002-10-15)
Law: (in Kant) "Every formula which expresses the necessity of an action is called a law" (Kant). -- P. A.S.
"Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.” Essays Divine and Human ::: **law"s, laws, stone-laws, world-law, world-laws.**
“Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.” Essays Divine and Human
L. Couturat, Ilme Congres de Philosophie, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 12 (1904), see p. 1042. Logistic system: The formal construction of a logistic system requires: a list of primitive symbols (these are usually taken as marks but may also be sounds or other things --they must be capable of instances which are, recognizably, the same or different symbols, and capable of utterance in which instances of them arc put forth or arranged in an order one after another); a determination of a class of formulas, each formula being a finite sequence of primitive symbols, or, more exactly, each formula being capable of instances which are finite sequences of instances of primitive symbols (generalizations allowing two-dimensional arrays of primitive symbols and the like are non-essential); a determination of the circumstances under which a finite sequence of formulas is a proof of the last formula in the sequence, this last formula being then called a theorem (again we should more exactly speak of proofs as having instances which are finite sequences of instances of formulas); a determination of the circumstances under which a finite sequence of formulas is a proof of the last formula of the sequence as a consequence of a certain set of formulas (when there is a proof of a formula B as a consequence of the set of formulas A1, A2, . . . , An, we say that the inference from the premisses A1, A2, . . . , An to the conclusion B is a valid inference of the logistic system). It is not excluded that the class of proofs in the sense of (3) should be empty. But every proof of a formula B as a consequence of an empty set of formulas, in the sense of (4), must also be a proof of B in the sense of (3), and conversely. Moreover, if to the proof of a formula B as a consequence of A1, A2, . . . , An are prefixed in any order proofs of A1, A2, . . . , An, the entire resulting sequence of formulas must be a proof of B; more generally, if to the proof of a formula B as a consequence of A1, A2, . . . , An are prefixed in any order proofs of a subset of A1, A2, . . . , An as consequences of the remainder of A1, A2, . . . , An, the entire resulting sequence must be a proof of B as a consequence of this remainder.
like a close resemblance or even an apparently exact reproduc- tion or translation from the supraphysical to the physical formula.
liturgy ::: a. --> An established formula for public worship, or the entire ritual for public worship in a church which uses prescribed forms; a formulary for public prayer or devotion. In the Roman Catholic Church it includes all forms and services in any language, in any part of the world, for the celebration of Mass.
Logic, formal: Investigates the structure of propositions and of deductive reasoning by a method which abstracts from the content of propositions which come under consideration and deals only with their logical form. The distinction between form and content can be made definite with the aid of a particular language or symbolism in which propositions are expressed, and the formal method can then be characterized by the fact that it deals with the objective form of sentences which express propositions and provides in these concrete terms criteria of meaningfulness and validity of inference. This formulation of the matter presupposes the selection of a particular language which is to be regarded as logically exact and free from the ambiguities and irregularities of structure which appear in English (or other languages of everyday use) -- i.e., it makes the distinction between form and content relative to the choice of a language. Many logicians prefer to postulate an abstract form for propositions themselves, and to characterize the logical exactness of a language by the uniformity with which the concrete form of its sentences reproduces or parallels the form of the propositions which they express. At all events it is practically necessary to introduce a special logical language, or symbolic notation, more exact than ordinary English usage, if topics beyond the most elementary are to be dealt with (see logistic system, and semiotic).
Lolli "language" (Named after the "lollipop" operator "-o") An {interpreter} for {logic programming} based on {linear logic}, written by Josh Hodas "hodas@saul.cis.upenn.edu". Lolli can be viewed as a refinement of the {Hereditary Harrop formulas} of {Lambda-Prolog}. All the operators (though not the {higher order unification}) of Lambda-Prolog are supported, but with the addition of linear variations. Thus a Lolli program distinguishes between clauses which can be used as many, or as few, times as desired, and those that must be used exactly once. Lolli is implemented in {SML/NJ}. {(ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/Lolli/Lolli-0.7.tar.Z)}. [Josh Hodas et al, "Logic Programming in a Fragment of Intuitionistic Linear Logic", Information and Computation, to appear]. (1992-11-18)
Lotus Notes Formula Language "language" A {macro} language for {Lotus Notes} that uses commands starting with @, e.g. @If, @Left, @Right, @Username. Many Notes applications are built with just this language. (2003-10-06)
Löwenheim's theorem: The theorem, first proved by Löwenheim, that if a formula of the pure functional calculus of first order (see Logic, formal § 3), containing no free individual variables, is satisfiable (see ibid.) at all, it is satisfiable in a domain of individuals which is at most enumerable. Other, simpler, proofs of the theorem were afterwards given by Skolem, who also obtained the generalization that, if an enumerable set of such formulas are simultaneously satisfiable, they are simultaneously satisfiable in a domain of individuals at most enumerable.
MADCAP Math and set problems, for the Maniac II and CDC 6600. "MADCAP - A Scientific Compiler for a Displayed Formula Texbook Language", M.B. Wells, CACM 4(1):31-36 (Jan 1961). Sammet 1969, pp.271-281. Versions: Madcap 5 (1964), Madcap 6. "The Unified Data Structure Capability in Madcap 6", M.B. Wells et al, Intl J Comp Info Sci 1(3) (sep 1972).
Madhav: “Seven are the planes of existence that are embodied, in principle, in each grade of this creation. The stabs are the wounds inflicted by the Darkness and Falsehood of the Adversary on these seven formulations. The seven sorrows are the result of these seven stabs.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: The Name is a Power. It stands for a particular formulation of Consciousness and Force and when uttered—audibly or otherwise—acts like a spring summoning all that it represents into action.” Readings in Savitri, Vol. I.
Madhav: “This creation is an ordered manifestation of the Divine. There is a central Will, expressing the originating Truth-vision, impelling the whole movement. But also there are special emanations from the Divine charged with specific tasks in the organisation and maintenance of the emerging creation. These are the gods and goddesses, deities, Powers and Personalities that are in charge of their respective domains, on different levels of existence. Each world has its own guardians entrusted by the Supreme Creative Spirit with the work of building and furthering the manifestation of the particular Truth-principle that pushes for expression in that world-formula.” Readings in Savitri Vol. I.
magistral ::: a. --> Pertaining to a master; magisterial; authoritative; dogmatic.
Commanded or prescribed by a magister, esp. by a doctor; hence, effectual; sovereign; as, a magistral sirup.
Formulated extemporaneously, or for a special case; -- opposed to officinal, and said of prescriptions and medicines. ::: n.
mahattva (mahattwa; mahattwam) ::: greatness, largeness, vastness; a term in the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "a greatness of sustaining force", an element of dehasakti; sometimes equivalent to mahima. mahattvabodho, balaslagha, laghuta, dharan.asamarthyam iti dehasaktih. (mahattwabodho, balaslagha, laghuta, dharanasamarthyam iti
Main works: Problem d. Geschichtsphilosophie, 1892; Philosophie des Geldes, 1900; Soziologie, 1908; Goethe, 1913; Lebensanschauung, 1918. Simple Enumeration: (Bacon) The name given by F. Bacon to the Aristotelian and the Scholastic process of induction which advances to the knowledge of laws from the knowledge of facts established by observation and experiment and clearly arranged. This type of induction treats instances by noting the number of observed coincident happenings of the antecedent and the consequent under investigation, and then formulating a causal connection between them. Bacon considers that Simple Enumeration lacks the methodological characteristics which he conceived (rather than determined and applied) for the process of induction. It may be added that the ancient and medieval logicians were fully aware of this type of induction. -- T.G.
"Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation.” Essays on the Gita
“Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation.” Essays on the Gita
mantra ::: a mystic formula, "a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental", which can not only "reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess", but in some cases "produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects . . . on the physical plane".
Mantra: A Sanskrit term meaning an incantation consisting of a sacred formula, usually a quotation from the Vedas. The word has come, especially in occult usage, to mean a spell or charm. In Shaktism and elsewhere, the holy syllables to which, as manifestations of the eternal word or sound, great mystic significance and power is ascribed.
mantra ::: n. --> A prayer; an invocation; a religious formula; a charm.
mantra ::: sacred syllable, name or mystic formula; the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance; any of the verses of the Veda, revealed verses of power not of an ordinary but of a divine inspiration and source.
mantra&
mathematises ::: to reduce to or as if to mathematical formulas.
Maxim, ethical: In general any rule of conduct which an individual may adopt, or which he may be advised to follow as a good guide for action, e.g., Descartes' maxim to try always to conquer himself rather than fortune. The formulation of such rules is often recommended as a help in deciding what to do in particular cases, especially if time is short, in resisting temptation, etc. Kant held (1) that each voluntary act proceeds according to a maxim or "subjective principle of action," e.g., in breaking a promise one has as one's maxim, "When it is to my advantage, I will make a promise and not keep it," (2) that one can tell whether an act is right or not by asking whether one can will its maxim to be a universal law. -- W.K.F.
Mead, George Herbert: (1863-1931) Professor of Philosophy at Chicago University. One of the leading figures in the Deweyan tradition. He contributed an important article to the volume, Creative Intelligence. He emphasized the relationship between the individual and his formulation and testing of hypotheses, on the one hand, as against the organic relationship of the individual with the society which is responsible for him. -- L.E.D.
Melvin Conway "person" An early {proto-hacker} who wrote an {assembler} for the {Burroughs 220} called {SAVE} and (probably) formulated {Conway's Law}. [{Jargon File}] (2015-12-30)
Method: (Gr. methodos, method) Any procedure employed to attain a certain end. Any knowing techniques employed in the process of acquiring knowledge of a given subject-matter. The science which formulates the rules of any procedure.
Mill's methods: Inductive methods formulated by John Stuart Mill for the discovery of causal relations between phenomena. Method of Agreement: If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon. Method of Difference: If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon. Joint Method of Agreement and Difference: If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that circumstances the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon. Method of Concomitant Variations: Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation. Method of Residues: Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous inductions to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedents. See Mill's System of Logic, bk. Ill, ch. VIII. -- A.C.B.
mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ‘Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind" and ‘mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer.” The Life Divine
"Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” The Life Divine
"The mind proper is divided into three parts — thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind — the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).” Letters on Yoga
"The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first, sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its own constructions.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"He [man] has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that necessitate the movements and forms of a creation. . . .” *The Life Divine
"The human mind is an instrument not of truth but of ignorance and error.” Letters on Yoga
"For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations, — as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
The Mother: "The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations — whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul — and simply formulating the plan of action — in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations — it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.*
mnemonics ::: n. Devices, such as formulas or rhymes, used as aids in remembering. adj. mnemonic. Relating to, assisting, or intended to assist the memory.
Modality: (Kant. Ger. Modalität) Concerning the mode -- actuality, possibility or necessity -- in which anything exists. Kant treated these as a priori categories or necessary conditions of experience, though in his formulation they are little more than definitions. See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
model checking "theory, algorithm, testing" To algorithmically check whether a program (the model) satisfies a specification. The model is usually expressed as a {directed graph} consisting of {nodes} (or {vertices}) and {edges}. A set of {atomic propositions} is associated with each node. The nodes represents states of a program, the edges represent possible executions which alters the state, while the atomic propositions represent the basic properties that hold at a point of execution. A specification language, usually some kind of {temporal logic}, is used to express properties. The problem can be expressed mathematically as: given a temporal logic formula p and a model M with initial state s, decide if M,s \models p. ["Automatic verification of finite state concurrent systems using temporal logic", E.M. Clarke, E.A. Emerson, and A.P. Sisla, ACM Trans. on Programming Languages and Systems 8(2), pp. 244--263, 1986]. (1997-06-26)
Moral Law: (in Kant's ethics) That formula which expresses the necessity of an action done from duty in terms of one's own reflection. -- P.A.S.
(Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 05, 08-01-1964)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 one-sided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 82
Nama-rupa: (Skr.) "Name and form", a stereotyped formula for the phenomenal world, or its conceptual and material aspects; also: "word and beauty", as forms of manifestation. See Rupa. -- K.F.L.
Name relation or meaning relation: The relation between a symbol (formula, word, phrase) and that which it denotes or of which it is the name.
Name relation: The relation between a symbol (formula, word, phrase) and that which it denotes or of which it is the name.
Nature ::: An active force of conscious-being which realises itself in its powers of self-experience, its powers of knowledge, will, self-delight, self-formulation with all their marvellous variations, inversions, conservations and conversions of energy, even perversions, is what we call Prakriti or Nature, in ourselves as in the cosmos.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 437-38
Nature ::: “An active force of conscious-being which realises itself in its powers of self-experience, its powers of knowledge, will, self-delight, self-formulation with all their marvellous variations, inversions, conservations and conversions of energy, even perversions, is what we call Prakriti or Nature, in ourselves as in the cosmos.” The Synthesis of Yoga
nature ::: Sri Aurobindo: "An active force of conscious-being which realises itself in its powers of self-experience, its powers of knowledge, will, self-delight, self-formulation with all their marvellous variations, inversions, conservations and conversions of energy, even perversions, is what we call Prakriti or Nature, in ourselves as in the cosmos.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Newton's Method: The method of procedure in natural philosophy as formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, especially in his Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III). These rules are as follows: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general induction from phaenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phaenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions. To this passage should be appended another statement from the closing pages of the same work. "I do not make hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." -- A.C.S.
Next, as a consequence, it follows that only a limited part of the action of the vital or other higher plane is concerned with the earth-existence. But even this creates a mass of possibilities which is far greater than the earth can at one time mainfest or contain in its own less plastic formulas. All these possibilities do not realise themselves ; some fail altogether and leave at the most an idea that comes to nothing ; some try seriously and are repelled and defeated and, even if in action for a time, come to nothing. Others effectuate a half manifestation, and this is the most usual result, the more so as these vital or other supraphysical forces come Into conflict and have not only to overcome the resistance of the physical consciousness and of matter, but their own internecine resistance to each other. A certain number succeed in precipitating their results in a more complete and successful creation, so that if you compare this creation with its original in the higher plane, there is something
normal distribution "statistics" (Or "Gaussian distribution") The {frequency distribution} of many natural phenomena such as the height or intelligence of people of a certain age and sex. The formula looks something like: P(x) = e^(((x-m)/s)^2) where P(x) is the probability of a measurement x, m is the mean value of x and s is the {standard deviation}. Also known as a "bell curve" because of its shape. (2003-10-25)
Normative: (Lat. normatus, pp. of normo, square) Constituting a standard; regulative. Having to do with an established ideal. In scientific method: concerning those sciences which have subject-matters containing values, and which set up norms or rules of conduct, such as ethics, aesthetics, politics. The ideal formulation of any science. Opposite of empirical. -- J.K.F.
Nota notae est nota rei ipsius: (Lat) That which falls within the comprehension of a "note", i.e. a known component of a thing, also falls within the comprehension of the thing, an attempted formulation of the supreme principle of syllogistic reasoning on the basis of comprehension rather than extension; Kant is said to have offered this principle in place of the famous extensivist rule, the dictum de omni et nullo (q.v.). -- V.J.B.
not formulated in written codes or documents; not reduced to writing; oral.
"Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the Vedanta, — the original Vedanta, not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the discoveries of modern Science, — for instance, that Vedantic expression which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the universal Energy in multitudinous forms.(1) Significant, especially, is the drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings.” The Life Divine
“Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the Vedanta,—the original Vedanta, not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the discoveries of modern Science,—for instance, that Vedantic expression which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the universal Energy in multitudinous forms.(1) Significant, especially, is the drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings.” The Life Divine
Now it is readily verified that all the primitive formulas are tautologies, and that for the rule of modus ponens (and the rule of substitution) the property holds that if the premisses of the inference are tautologies the conclusion must be a tautology. It follows that every theorem of the propositional calculus is a tautology. By a more difficult argument it can be shown also that every tautology is a theorem. Hence the test whether a formula is a tautology provides a solution of the decision problem of the propositional calculus.
Object language: A language or logistic system L is called object language relatively to another language (metasystem) L' containing notations for formulas of L and for syntactical properties of and relations between formulas of L (possibly also semantical properties and relations). The language L' is called a syntax language of L.
Of quite a different kind are so-called real definitions, which are not conventions for introducing new symbols or notations -- as syntactical and semantical definitions are -- but are propositions of equivalence (material, formal, etc.) between two abstract entities (propositions, concepts, etc.) of which one is called the definiendum and the other the definiens. Not all such propositions of equivalence, however, are real definitions, but only those in which the definiens embodies the "essential nature" (essentia, ουσια) of the definiendum. The notion of a real definition thus has all the vagueness of the quoted phrase, but the following may be given as an example. If all the notations appearing, including ⊃x, have their usual meanings (regarded as given in advance), the proposition expressed by (F)(G)[[F(x) ⊃x G(x)] ≡ (x)[∼F(x) ∨ G(x)]] is a real definition of formal implication -- to be contrasted with the nominal definition of the ¦notation for formal implication which is given in the article Logic, formal, § 3. This formula, expressing a real definition of formal implication, might appear, e.g., as a primitive formula in a logistic system.
Om bhur bhuvah svah ::: [a formula, see the terms separately].
.OM ::: in the Vedic tradition, the sacred "initiating syllable", regarded as "the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech" and "the foundation of all the potent creative sounds of the revealed word"; the "Word of Manifestation", the mantra or "expressive sound-symbol of the Brahman Consciousness in its four domains" (see AUM).
OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthetises and releases all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds, out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed to be the developed evolutions.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 273
OM ::: “OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds, out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed to be the developed evolutions.” Essays on the Gita
OM ::: Sri Aurobindo: "OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds, out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed to be the developed evolutions.” *Essays on the Gita
OM ::: Sri Aurobindo: “OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds, out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed to be the developed evolutions.” Essays on the Gita
Operationalism: Scientific propositions are, roughly speaking, predictions and a prediction is an if-then proposition: "If certain operations are performed, then certain phenomena having determinate properties will be observed. Its hypothetical character shows that it is not final or complete but intermediate and instrumental" (Logic, p. 456). P. W. Bridgman's very influential formulation of operationalism is comparable: "In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations, the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations". (The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 5.) If the operation is (or can be), carried out the proposition has meaning, if the consequences which it forecasts occur, it is true, has "warranted assertibility" or probability.
Or, if L1 contains symbols for positive integers, we may extend L1 into L2 by merely adding a symbol for a relation which functions as a numerical name relation as regards all numbers of formulas of L1 (or one such relation for each type) together with appropriate new primitive formulas; and so on through a hierarchy of systems L1, L2, L3, . . . .
Or the word negation may be used in a syntactical sense, so that the negation of a sentence (formula) A is the sentence ∼A. -- A. C.
Other primitive formulas (possibly involving new primitive notations) which may be added correspond to the axiom of choice (q. v.) or are designed to introduce classes (q. v.) or descriptions (q. v.). Functional abstraction (q. v.) may also be Introduced by means of additional primitive formulas or primitive rules of inference, or it may be defined with the aid of descriptions. Whitehead and Russell employ the axiom of infinity and the axiom of choice but avoid the necessity of special primitive formulas in connection with classes and descriptions by introducing classes and descriptions as incomplete symbols.
“Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,—but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,—as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge.” The Life Divine
"Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops within us.” The Life Divine
“Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops within us.” The Life Divine
paralogism ::: n. --> A reasoning which is false in point of form, that is, which is contrary to logical rules or formulae; a formal fallacy, or pseudo-syllogism, in which the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Peano's first publication on mathematicil logic was the introduction to his Calcolo Geometrico, 1888. His postulates for arithmetic (see arithmetic, foundations of) appeared in his Arith¦metices Principia (1889) and in revised form in Sul concetto di numero (Rivista di Matematica, vol. 1 (1891)), and were repeated in successive volumes (more properly, editions) of his Formulaire de Mathematiques (1894-1908). The last-named work, written with the aid of collaborators, was intended to provide a reduction of all mathematics to symbolic notation, and often the encyclopedic aspect was stressed as much as, or more than, that of logical analysis.
pharmaceutical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the knowledge or art of pharmacy, or to the art of preparing medicines according to the rules or formulas of pharmacy; as, pharmaceutical preparations.
Philosophers have in the past been concerned with two questions covered by our definition, though attempts to organize the subject as an autonomous department of philosophy are of recent date. Enquiries into the origin of language (e.g. in Plato's Kratylos) once a favorite subject for speculation, are now out of fashion, both with philosophers and linguists. Enquiries as to the nature of language (as in Descartes, Leibniz, and many others) are, however, still central to all philosophical interest in language. Such questions as "What are the most general characters of symbolism?", "How is 'Language' to be defined?", "What is the essence of language?", "How is communication possible?", "What would be the nature of a perfect language?", are indicative of the varying modulations which this theme receives in the works of contemporaries. Current studies in the philosophy of language can be classified under five hends: Questions of method, relation to other disciplines, etc. Much discussion turns here upon the proposal to establish a science and art of symbolism, variously styled semiotic, semantics or logical syntax, The analysis of meaning. Problems arising here involve attention to those under the next heading. The formulation of general descriptive schemata. Topics of importance here include the identification and analysis of different ways in which language is used, and the definition of men crucial notions as "symbol'', "grammar", "form", "convention", "metaphor", etc. The study of fully formalized language systems or "calculi". An increasingly important and highly technical division which seeks to extend and adapt to all languages the methods first developed in "metamathematics" for the study of mathematical symbolism. Applications to problems in general philosophy. Notably the attempt made to show that necessary propositions are really verbal; or again, the study of the nature of the religious symbol. Advance here awaits more generally acceptable doctrine in the other divisions. References:
::: ". . . philosophy is only a way of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essential significance the psychological and physical facts of existence and their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist,. . . .” Essays on the Gita
“… philosophy is only a way of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essential significance the psychological and physical facts of existence and their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist,….” Essays on the Gita
Philosophy is only a way of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essential significance the psychological and physical facts of existence and their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 253
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.
Planck's constant: In quantum mechanics (q.v.), a fundamental physical constant, usually denoted by the letter h, which appears in many physical formulas. It may be defined by the law that the quantum (q.v.) of radiant energy of any frequency is equal to the frequency multiplied by h. see further Uncertainty principle. -- A.C.
PLANES. ::: If we regard the gmdatton of worlds or planes as a whole, we see them as a great connected complex move- ment ; the higher precipitate their influences on the lower, the lotver react to the higher and develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action. The material world has evolved life in obedience to a pressure from the vital plane, mind in obedience to a pressure from the mental plane. It is now trying to evolve supermind in obedica^ to a pressure from the supra- mental plane. In more detail, particular forces, movements, powers, beings of a higher world can throw themselves on the lower to establish appropriate and corresponding forms which will connect them with the material domain and, as it were, reproduce or project their action here. And each thing created here has, supporting it, subtler envelopes or forms of itself which make it subsist and connect it with forces acting from above. Man, for instance, has, besides his gross physical body, subtler sheaths or bodies by which he lives behind the s’eil in direct connection with suprapbysical planes of consciousness and can be influenced by their powers, movements and beings. What takes place in life has always behind it pie-existeni movements and forms in the occult vital planes ; what takes place in mind presupposes prc-cxistcnt movements and forms in the occult mental planes. That is an aspect of things which becomes more and more evident, insistent and important, the more we progress in a dynamic yoga.
plan ::: n. 1. A systematic arrangement of elements or important parts; a configuration or outline. 2. A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective. plans, heart-plan, life-plan, time-plan, world-plan, vision-plans, world-plan. *v. 3. To formulate a scheme or program for the accomplishment, enactment, or attainment of. *plans, planned, planning.
Plotinism offers a well-developed theory of sensation. The objects of sensation are of a lower order of being than the perceiving organism. The inferior cannot act upon the superior. Hence sensation is an activity of the sensory agent upon its objects. Sensation provides a direct, realistic perception of material things, but, since they are ever-changing, such knowledge is not valuable. In internal seme perception, the imagimtion also functions actively, memory is attributed to the imaginative power and it serves not only in the recall of sensory images but also in the retention of the verbal formulae in which intellectual concepts are expressed. The human soul can look either upward or downward; up to the sphere of purer spirit, or down to the evil regions of matter. Rational knowledge is a cognition of intelligible realities, or Ideas in the realm of Mind which is often referred to as Divine. The climax of knowledge consists in an intuitive and mystical union with the One; this is experienced by few.
pointed domain "theory" In most formulations of {domain theory}, a {domain} is defined to have a {bottom} element and {algebraic} {CPOs} without bottoms are called "{predomains}". David Schmidt's domains do not have this requirement and he calls a domain with a bottom "pointed". (1999-07-07)
Poisson distribution "mathematics" A {probability distribution} used to describe the occurrence of unlikely events in a large number of independent trials. Poisson distributions are often used in building simulated user loads. [Formula?] (2003-03-18)
pontifical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a pontiff, or high priest; as, pontifical authority; hence, belonging to the pope; papal.
Of or pertaining to the building of bridges. ::: n. --> A book containing the offices, or formulas, used by a pontiff.
Positivism: First associated with the doctrine of Auguste Comte that the highest form of knowledge is simple description presumably of sensory phenomena. The doctrine was based on an evolutionary "law of three stages", believed by Comte to have been discovered by him in 1822 but anticipated by Turgot in 1750. The three stages were the theological, in which anthropomorphic wills were resorted to to explain natural events, the metaphysical, in which these wills were depersonalized and became forces and essences, and finally the positive. It should be noted that positivistic description was supposed to result in mathematical formulas, not in introspective psychology. See Scientific Empiricism I. -- G.B.
Pragmatism: (Gr. pragma, things done) Owes its inception as a movement of philosophy to C. S. Peirce and William James, but approximations to it can be found in many earlier thinkers, including (according to Peirce and James) Socrates and Aristotle, Berkeley and Hume. Concerning a closer precursor, Shadworth Hodgson, James says that he "keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known as' ". Kant actually uses the word "pragmatic" to characterize "counsels of prudence" as distinct from "rules of skill" and "commands of morality" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 40). His principle of the primacy of practical reason is also an anticipation of pragmatism. It was reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which originally led Peirce to formulate the view that the muddles of metaphysics can be cleared up if one attends to the practical consequences of ideas. The pragmatic maxim was first stated by Peirce in 1878 (Popular Science Monthly) "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". A clearer formulation by the same author reads: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". This is often expressed briefly, viz.: The meaning of a proposition is its logical (or physical) consequences. The principle is not merely logical. It is also admonitory in Baconian style "Pragmatism is the principle that everv theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose onlv meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the impentive mood". (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 5.18.) Although Peirce's maxim has been an inspiration not only to later pragmatists, but to operationalists as well, Peirce felt that it might easily be misapplied, so as to eliminate important doctrines of science -- doctrines, presumably, which hive no ascertainable practical consequences.
pravr.tti (pravritti) ::: literally "moving out and forward"; activity, pravrtti "movement and impulsion and kinesis"; the will to act, a term in the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "the Divine Impulse which acts through us", the pure desireless impulsion (suddha pravr.tti) into which rajas is transformed in the liberation (mukti) of the nature from the trigun.a of the lower prakr.ti; "the ancient sempiternal urge to action . . . which for ever proceeds without beginning or end from the original Soul of all existence", one side of "the double movement of the Soul and Nature" whose other side is nivr.tti.
Predicables: (Lat. praedicabilia) In Aristotle's logic the five types of predicates that may be affirmed or denied of a subject in a logical proposition, viz. definition, genus, differentia, property, and accident. The list of predicables as formulated by Porphyry and later logicians omits definition and includes species. See Definition: Genus; Species; Differentia; Property; Accident. -- G.R.M.
Principle of non-sufficient reason: According to this law, the probabilities of two propositions may be said to be equal, if there is no adequate ground for declaring them unequal. When applied without qualification, this principle may lead to unwarranted results. Such a difficulty may be avoided by an adequate formulation of the Principle of Indifference. -- T.G.
proof 1. "logic" A {finite} sequence of {well-formed formulas}, F1, F2, ... Fn, where each Fi either is an {axiom}, or follows by some rule of inference from some of the previous F's, and Fn is the statement being proved. See also {proof theory}. 2. A left-associative {natural language} {parser} by Craig R. Latta "latta@xcf.berkeley.edu". Ported to {Decstation 3100}, {Sun-4}. {(ftp://scam.berkeley.edu/pub/src/local/proof/)}. E-mail: "proof@xcf.berkeley.edu". Mailing list: proof-requestf@xcf.berkeley.edu (Subject: add me). (1994-11-29)
Proof theory: The formalization of mathematical proof by means of a logistic system (q. v.) makes possible an objective theory of proofs and provability, in which proofs are treated as concrete manipulations of formulas (and no use is made of meanings of formulas). This is Hilbert's proof theory, or metamathematics. p A central problem of proof theory, according to Hilbert, is the proof of consistency of logistic systems adequate to mathematics or substantial parts of mathematics. -- A logistic system is said to be consistent, relatively to a particular notation in the system called negation, if there is no formula A such that both A and the negation of A are provable (i.e., are theorems). The systems with which Hilbert deals, and the notations in them which he wishes to call negation, are such that, if a formula A and its negation were once proved, every propositional formula could be proved; hence he is able to formulate the consistency by snying that a particular formula (e.g., ∼[0 = 0]) is not provable.
Propositional calculus: See Logic, formal, § 1. Propositional calculus, many-valued: The truth-table method for the classical (two-valued) propositional calculus is explained in the article logic, formal, § 1. It depends on assigning truth-tables to the fundamental connectives, with the result that every formula -- of the pure propositional calculus, to which we here restrict ourselves for the sake of simplicity -- has one of the two truth-values for each possible assignment of truth-values to the variables appearing. A formula is called a tautology if it has the truth-value truth for every possible assignment of truth-values to the variables; and the calculus is so constructed that a formula is a theorem if and only if it is a tautology.
proposition "logic" A statement in {propositional logic} which may be either true or false. Each proposition is typically represented by a letter in a {formula} such as "p =" q", meaning proposition p implies proposition q. (2006-03-14)
Proprioceptor: See Receptor. Prosyllogism: See Episyllogism. Protagoras of Abdera: (about 480-410 B.C.) A leading Sophist, renowned for his philosophical wisdom; author of many treatises on grammar, logic, ethics and politics; visited Athens on numerous occasions and was finally forced to flee after having been convicted of impiety. His famous formula that man is the measure of all things is indicative of his relativism which ultimately rests upon his theory of perception according to which we know only what we perceive but not the thing perceived. -- M.F.
Protective magic: The use of magic formulae, incantations, rituals, etc., for averting or overcoming evil influences.
Pythagoreanism: The doctrines (philosophical, mathematical, moral, and religious) of Pythagoras (c. 572-497) and of his school which flourished until about the end of the 4th century B.C. The Pythagorean philosophy was a dualism which sharply distinguished thought and the senses, the soul and the body, the mathematical forms of things and their perceptible appearances. The Pythagoreans supposed that the substances of all things were numbers and that all phenomena were sensuous expressions of mathematical ratios. For them the whole universe was harmony. They made important contributions to mathematics, astronomv, and physics (acoustics) and were the first to formulate the elementary principles and methods of arithmetic and geometry as taught in the first books of Euclid. But the Pythagorean sect was not only a philosophical and mathematical school (cf. K. von Fritz, Pythagorean Politics in Southern Italy, 1941), but also a religious brotherhood and a fellowship for moral reformation. They believed in the immortality and transmigration (see Metempsychosis) of the soul which they defined as the harmony of the body. To restore harmony which was confused by the senses was the goal of their Ethics and Politics. The religious ideas were closely related to those of the Greek mysteries which sought by various rites and abstinences to purify and redeem the soul. The attempt to combine this mysticism with their mathematical philosophy, led the Pythagoreans to the development of an intricate and somewhat fantastic symbolism which collected correspondences between numbers and things and for example identified the antithesis of odd and even with that of form and matter, the number 1 with reason, 2 with the soul, etc. Through their ideas the Pythagoreans had considerable effect on the development of Plato's thought and on the theories of the later Neo-platonists.
quantifier "logic" An operator in {predicate logic} specifying for which values of a variable a formula is true. Universally quantified means "for all values" (written with an inverted A, {LaTeX} \forall) and existentially quantified means "there exists some value" (written with a reversed E, {LaTeX} \exists). To be unambiguous, the set to which the values of the variable belong should be specified, though this is often omitted when it is clear from the context (the "universe of discourse"). E.g. Forall x . P(x) "=" not (Exists x . not P(x)) meaning that any x (in some unspecified set) has property P which is equivalent to saying that there does not exist any x which does not have the property. If a variable is not quantified then it is a {free variable}. In {logic programming} this usually means that it is actually universally quantified. See also {first order logic}. (2002-05-21)
Quantifier: Universal quantifier is the name given to the notation (x) prefixed to a logical formula A (containing the free varible x) to express that A holds for all values of x -- usually, for all values of x within a certain range or domain of values, which either is implicit in the context, or is indicated by the notation through some convention. The same name is also given to variant or alternative notations employed for the same purpose. And of course the same name is given when the particular variable appearing is some other letter than x.
Quotation marks, usually single quotes, are employed as a means of distinguishing the name of a symbol or formula from the symbol or formula itself (see syntax, logical). A symbol or formula between quotation marks is employed as a name of that particular symbol or formula. E.g., 'p' is a name of the sixteenth letter of the English alphabet in small italic type.
raga ::: 1. liking, attraction. ::: 2. [in Indian classical music, a particular mode or order of sound or formula].
rational ::: a. --> Relating to the reason; not physical; mental.
Having reason, or the faculty of reasoning; endowed with reason or understanding; reasoning.
Agreeable to reason; not absurd, preposterous, extravagant, foolish, fanciful, or the like; wise; judicious; as, rational conduct; a rational man.
Expressing the type, structure, relations, and reactions of a compound; graphic; -- said of formulae. See under Formula.
receipt ::: n. --> The act of receiving; reception.
Reception, as an act of hospitality.
Capability of receiving; capacity.
Place of receiving.
Hence, a recess; a retired place.
A formulary according to the directions of which things are to be taken or combined; a recipe; as, a receipt for making sponge cake.
recipe ::: n. --> A formulary or prescription for making some combination, mixture, or preparation of materials; a receipt; especially, a prescription for medicine.
Reducibility, axiom of: An axiom which (or some substitute) is necessary in connection with the ramified theory of types (q.v.) if that theory is to be adequate for classical mathematics, but the admissibility of which has been much disputed (see Paradoxes, logical). An exact statement of the axiom can be made only in the context of a detailed formulation of the ramified theory of types -- which will not here be undertaken. As an indication or rough description of the axiom of reducibility, it may be said that it cancels a large part of ihe restrictive consequences of the prohibition against impredicative definition (q.v.) and, in approximate effect, reduces the ramified theory of types to the simple theory of types (for the latter see Logic, formal, § 6). -- A.C.
rent regard for the other members of the great series. Thus, if we regard the vital or the subtle physical plane, we see great ranges of it, (most of it), existing in themselves, without any relation with the material world and with no movement to affect or influence it, still less to precipitate a corresponding manifes- tation in the physical formula. At most we can say that the existence of anything in the vital, subtle physical or any other plane creates a possibility for a corresponding movement of manifestation in the physical world. But something more is needed to turn that static or latent possibility into a dynamic potentiality or an actual urge towards a material creation. That something may be a call from the material plane, e.g., some force or some one on the physical existence entering into touch with a supraphysical power or world or part of it and moved to bring it down into the earth-life. Or it may be an impulse in the vital or other plane itself, e.g., a vital being moved to extend his action towards the earth and establish there a kingdom for himself or the play of the forces for which he stands in his own domain.
residual ::: a. --> Pertaining to a residue; remaining after a part is taken. ::: n. --> The difference of the results obtained by observation, and by computation from a formula.
The difference between the mean of several observations and any one of them.
roga ::: illness, disease; bodily disorder, considered to be due to various causes including impurities or imbalances in the pañcabhūta and pañcapran.a, functional defects, materialisation of "false illness, formulated in symptom and not in root in the sukshma body and thence pressed upon the sthula", or simply "the habit of disease"; same as rogasakti.
Rule of Faith: In general, an authoritative statement of belief. In historic Christianity such statements appeared out of existing formulae (e.g., the early baptismal confessions) or were formulated to meet existing heresies. In Catholic Christianity the Rule of Faith (Regula Fidei) includes the whole of apostolic teaching and its further elaborations. -- V.F.
Russell's Paradox "mathematics" A {paradox} (logical contradiction) in {set theory} discovered by {Bertrand Russell}. If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself? If it does then it doesn't and vice versa. The paradox stems from the acceptance of the following {axiom}: If P(x) is a property then {x : P} is a set. This is the {Axiom of Comprehension} (actually an {axiom schema}). By applying it in the case where P is the property "x is not an element of x", we generate the paradox, i.e. something clearly false. Thus any theory built on this axiom must be inconsistent. In {lambda-calculus} Russell's Paradox can be formulated by representing each set by its {characteristic function} - the property which is true for members and false for non-members. The set R becomes a function r which is the negation of its argument applied to itself: r = \ x . not (x x) If we now apply r to itself, r r = (\ x . not (x x)) (\ x . not (x x)) = not ((\ x . not (x x))(\ x . not (x x))) = not (r r) So if (r r) is true then it is false and vice versa. An alternative formulation is: "if the barber of Seville is a man who shaves all men in Seville who don't shave themselves, and only those men, who shaves the barber?" This can be taken simply as a proof that no such barber can exist whereas seemingly obvious axioms of {set theory} suggest the existence of the paradoxical set R. {Zermelo Fränkel set theory} is one "solution" to this paradox. Another, {type theory}, restricts sets to contain only elements of a single type, (e.g. {integers} or sets of integers) and no type is allowed to refer to itself so no set can contain itself. A message from Russell induced {Frege} to put a note in his life's work, just before it went to press, to the effect that he now knew it was inconsistent but he hoped it would be useful anyway. (2000-11-01)
samhita. ::: "compilation of knowledge"; a collection of vedic mantras or hymns mainly concerned with nature and deities; the Samhitas form the first part of each of the four Vedas; one of the two primary sections of each of the Vedas, containing hymns and sacred formulae, the other section being the Brahmanas
sanity check "programming" 1. Checking {code} (or anything else, e.g. a {Usenet} posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g. if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a "sanity check", before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the {algorithm} itself. Compare {reality check}. 2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state). [{Jargon File}] (1998-08-29)
sarvaṁ (brahma) ::: brahman as Bliss, as Knowledge, as the Infinite, as the All; the formula of the brahma catus.t.aya with its terms in reverse order. ananda purus ananda purusa
scalability How well a solution to some problem will work when the size of the problem increases. For example, a central {server} of some kind with ten {clients} may perform adequately but with a thousand clients it might fail to meet response time requirements. In this case, the average response time probably scales linearly with the number of clients, we say it has a {complexity} of O(N) ("order N") but there are problems with other complexities. E.g. if we want N nodes in a network to be able to communicate with each other, we could connect each one to a central exchange, requiring O(N) wires or we could provide a direct connection between each pair, requiring O(N^2) wires (the exact number or formula is not usually so important as the highest power of N involved). (1995-03-29)
Schachter's Hypothesis "web" The observation that "Given two unrelated technical terms, an {Internet} {search engine} will retrieve only résumés". This was first formulated by {Joshua Eli Schachter (http://burri.to/~joshua/)} in about 1998, while poring over the uniformly irrelevant pages that resulted from a search he'd run on "+{Perl} +{MAPI}" in {Altavista}. (2002-02-04)
Schlick, Moritz: (1882-1936) Taught at Rostock, Kiel, Vienna, also visit, prof.; Stanford, Berkeley. Founder of the Vienna Circle (see Scientific empiricism.) Called his own view "Consistent Empiricism." Main contributions: A logically revised correspondence view of the nature of truth. A systematic epistemology based on the distinction of (immediate) experience and (relational) knowledge. Clarified the analytic -- a priori character of logic and mathematics (by disclosing the "implicit definitions" in postulate systems). Repudiation of Kantian and phenomenological (synthetic) apriorism. Physicalistic, epistemological solution of the psycho-physical problem in terms of a double language theory. Earlier critical-realistic views were later modified and formulated as Empirical Realism. Greatly influenced in this final phase by Carnap and especially Wittgenstein, he considered the logical clarification of meanings the only legitimate task of a philosophy destined to terminate the strife of systems. Important special applications of this general outlook to logic and methodology of science (space, time, substance, causality, probability, organic life) and to problems of ethics (meaning of value judgments, hedonism, free-will, moral motivation). An optimistic, poetic view of the meaning of life is expressed in only partly published writings on a "Philosophy of Youth."
science ::: n. --> Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws; knowledge classified and made available in work, life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or philosophical knowledge.
Especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical
SCL "language" 1. {System Control Language}. 2. Symbolic Communication Language. Designed primarily for the manipulation of symbolic formulas. Featured pattern matching (which was partly the inspiration for SNOBOL), string operations in buffers, and automatic storage management. "A Language for Symbolic Communication", C.Y. Lee et al, Tech Mem 62-3344-4, Bell Labs, Sept 1962.
Similarly, a relation in extension may be formed by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to two particular variables taken in a given order. -- A.C.
Similarly, existential quantifier is the name given to the notation (Ex) prefixed to a logical formula A (containing the free variable x) to express that A holds for some (i.e., at least one) value of x -- usually, for some value of x within a certain range or domain. The E which forms part of the notation is often inverted, and various alternative notitions also occur.
Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …
Since this definition of consistency is relative to the choice if a particular notation as representing negation, the following definition is sometimes used instead: (2) A logistic system is consistent if not every formula (not every sentence) is a theorem. In the case of many familiar systems, under the usual choice as to which notation represents negation, the equivalence of this sense of consistency to the previous one is immediate.
skolemisation A means of removing {quantifiers} from {first order logic} formulas. [Details?]
Software in the Public Interest, Inc. "company" (SPI) A non-profit corporation which helps organisations develop and distribute {open hardware} and {open software}. SPI's goals are: * to create, form and establish an organization to formulate and provide software systems for use by the general public without charge; * to teach and train individuals regarding the use and application of such systems; * to hold classes, seminars and workshops concerning the proper use and application of computers and computer systems; * to endeavor to monitor and improve the quality of currently existing publicly available software; * to support, encourage and promote the creation and development of software available to the general public; * to provide information and education regarding the proper use of the Internet; * to organize, hold and conduct meetings, discussions and forums on contemporary issues concerning the use of computers and computer software; * to foster, promote and increase access to software systems available to the general public; * to solicit, collect and otherwise raise money and to expend such funds in furtherance of the goals and activities of the corporation; * to aid, assist, cooperate, co-sponsor and otherwise engage in concerted action with private, educational and governmental organisations and associations on all issues and matters concerning the use of computers and computer software and; * generally to endeavor to promote, foster and advance interest in computers and computer software by all available means and methods. SPI currently supports {Berlin}, {Debian}, {GNOME}, {LSB}, {Open Source}. {SPI Home (http://spi-inc.org/)}. (2002-04-14)
software "programming" (Or "computer program", "program", "code") The instructions executed by a computer, as opposed to the physical device on which they run (the "{hardware}"). The term was coined by the eminent statistician, {John Tukey}. Programs stored on {non-volatile storage} built from {integrated circuits} (e.g. {ROM} or {PROM}) are usually called {firmware}. Software can be split into two main types - {system software} and application software or {application programs}. System software is any software required to support the production or execution of application programs but which is not specific to any particular application. Examples of system software would include the {operating system}, {compilers}, editors and sorting programs. Examples of application programs would include an accounts package or a {CAD} program. Other broad classes of application software include {real-time} software, {business software}, scientific and engineering software, {embedded software}, personal computer software and {artificial intelligence} software. Software includes both {source code} written by humans and executable {machine code} produced by {assemblers} or {compilers}. It does not usually include the data processed by programs unless this is in a format such as {multimedia} which depends on the use of computers for its presentation. This distinction becomes unclear in cases such as {spread sheets} which can contain both instructions (formulae and {macros}) and data. There are also various intermediate compiled or {semi-compiled}, forms of software such as {library} files and {byte-code}. Some claim that {documentation} (both paper and electronic) is also software. Others go further and define software to be programs plus documentation though this does not correspond with common usage. The noun "program" describes a single, complete and more-or-less self-contained list of instructions, often stored in a single {file}, whereas "code" and "software" are uncountable nouns describing some number of instructions which may constitute one or more programs or part thereof. Most programs, however, rely heavily on various kinds of {operating system} software for their execution. The nounds "code" and "software" both refer to the same thing but "code" tends to suggest an interest in the implementation details whereas "software" is more of a user's term. (2002-07-21)
spell ::: 1. A word or formula believed to have magic power. 2. Fig. An influence that can control the mind or character; fascination. 3. A state or period of enchantment.
Spencer, Herbert: (1820-1903) was the great English philosopher who devoted a life time to the formulation and execution of a plan to follow the idea of development as a first principle through all the avenues of human thought. A precursor of Darwin with his famous notion of all organic evolution as a change "from homogeneity to heterogenity," from the simple to the complex, he nevertheless was greatly influenced by the Darwinian hypothesis and employed its arguments in his monumental works in biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. He aimed to interpret life, mind and society in terms of matter, motion and force. In politics, he evidenced from his earliest writings a strong bias for individualism. See Evolutionism, Charles Darwin. -- L.E.D.
Spirituality ::: Spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,— the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 889-90
SPIRITUAL LIFE. ::: The spiritual life is not a thing that can be formulated in a rigid definition or bound by a fixed mental rule ; it is a vast field of evolution, an immense kingdom poten- tially larger than the other kuigdoms below it, with a hundred
spreadsheet "application, tool" (Or rarely "worksheet") A type of {application program} which manipulates numerical and string data in rows and columns of cells. The value in a cell can be calculated from a formula which can involve other cells. A value is recalculated automatically whenever a value on which it depends changes. Different cells may be displayed with different formats. Some spreadsheet support three-dimensional matrices and cyclic references which lead to iterative calculation. An essential feature of a spreadsheet is the copy function (often using {drag-and-drop}). A rectangular area may be copied to another which is a multiple of its size. References between cells may be either absolute or relative in either their horizontal or vertical index. All copies of an absolute reference will refer to the same row, column or cell whereas a relative reference refers to a cell with a given offset from the current cell. Many spreadsheets have a "What-if" feature. The user gives desired end conditions and assigns several input cells to be automatically varied. An area of the spreadsheet is assigned to show the result of various combinations of input values. Spreadsheets usually incorporate a {macro language}, which enables third-party writing of worksheet applications for commercial purposes. In the 1970s, a {screen editor} based calculation program called {Visi-Calc} was introduced. It was probably the first commercial spreadsheet program. Soon {Lotus Development Corporation} released the more sophisticated {Lotus 1-2-3}. Clones appeared, (for example {VP-Planner} from {Paperback Software} with {CGA} graphics, {Quattro} from {Borland}) but Lotus maintained its position with world-wide marketing and support - and lawyers! For example, Borland was forced to abandon its Lotus-like {pop-up menu}. While still developing 1-2-3, Lotus introduced {Symphony}, which had simultaneously active windows for the spreadsheet, graphs and a {word processor}. {Microsoft} produced {MultiPlan} for the {Macintosh}, which was followed by {Excel} for Macintosh, long before {Microsoft Windows} was developed. When {Microsoft Windows} arrived Lotus was still producing the {text-based} 1-2-3 and Symphony. Meanwhile, {Microsoft} launched its {Excel} spreadsheet with interactive graphics, graphic charcters, mouse support and {cut-and-paste} to and from other Windows applications. To compete with Windows spreadsheets, Lotus launched its {Allways} add-on for 1-2-3 - a post-processor that produced Windows-quality graphic characters on screen and printer. The release of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows was late, slow and buggy. Today, Microsoft, Lotus, Borland and many other companies offer Windows-based spreadsheet programs. The main end-users of spreadsheets are business and science. Spreadsheets are an example of a non-algorithmic programming language. [Dates?] (1995-03-28)
sraddha (shaktyam bhagawati cha, iti sraddha) ::: sraddha means faith in God and in his sakti (the formula of the last member of the sakti catus.t.aya).
Sri Aurobindo: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4.* Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life"s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: “There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life’s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
**Sri Aurobindo: "The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made.” *The Life Divine
standard deviation "statistics" (SD) A measure of the range of values in a set of numbers. Standard deviation is a statistic used as a measure of the dispersion or variation in a distribution, equal to the square root of the {arithmetic mean} of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean. The standard deviation of a random variable or list of numbers (the lowercase greek sigma) is the square of the {variance}. The standard deviation of the list x1, x2, x3...xn is given by the formula: sigma = sqrt(((x1-(avg(x)))^2 + (x1-(avg(x)))^2 + ... + (xn(avg(x)))^2)/n) The formula is used when all of the values in the population are known. If the values x1...xn are a random sample chosen from the population, then the sample Standard Deviation is calculated with same formula, except that (n-1) is used as the {denominator}. [{dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com/)}]. ["Barrons Dictionary of Mathematical Terms, second edition"]. (2003-05-06)
stereo-chemical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or illustrating, the hypothetical space relations of atoms in the molecule; as, a stereo-chemic formula.
stereotype ::: to make or fix conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, form or image of.
sthairya (sthairya; sthairyam) ::: steadiness; constancy; "the capacity of fixity in jnana", an attribute of the brahman.a; a term in the second general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya.
Strict implication: As early as 1912, C. I. Lewis projected a kind of implication between propositions, to be called strict implication, which should more nearly accord with the usual meaning of "implies" than does material implication (see logic, formal, § 1). should make "p implies q" synonymous with "q is deducible from p," and should avoid such so-called paradoxes of material implication as the theorem [p ⊃ q] ∨ [q ⊃ p]. The first satisfactory formulition of a calculus of propositions with strict implication appeared in 1920, and this system, and later modified forms of it. have since been extensively investigated. An essential feature is the introduction of modalities through the notation (say) M[p], to mean "p is possible" (Lewis uses a diamond instead of M). The strict implication of q by p is then identified with ∼M[p ∼q], whereas the material implication p ⊃ q is given by ∼[p ∼q]. In 1932 Lewis, along with other modifications, added a primitive formula (involving the binding of propositional variables by existential quantifiers) which renders definitively impossible an interpretation of the system which would make Mp the same as p and strict implication the same as material implication. Consistency of the system, including this additional primitive formula, may be established by means of an appropriate four-valued propositional calculus, the theorems of the system being some among the tautologies of the four-valued propositional calculus. -- A.C.
String Oriented Symbolic Language "language" (SNOBOL) A {string processing language} for {text} and {formula} manipulation, developed by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky at {Bell Labs} in 1962. SNOBOL had only simple {control structures} but provided a rich string-matching formalism of power comparable to {regular expressions} but implemented differently. People used it for simple {natural language processing} analysis tasks well into the 1980s. Since then, {Perl} has come into favour for such tasks. SNOBOL was originally called "SEXI" - String EXpression Interpreter. In spite of the suggestive name, SNOBOL is not related to {COBOL}. Farber said the name SNOBOL was largely contrived at the time the original JACM article was published when one of the implementors said something like, "This program doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ...". The expansion to "String Oriented Symbolic Language" was contrived later. Implementations include (in no particular order): {SNOBOL2}, {SNOBOL3}, {SNOBOL4}, {FASBOL}, {SITBOL}, {MAINBOL}, {SPITBOL} and {vanilla}. See also {EZ}, {Poplar}, {SIL} and {Icon}. {SNOBOL 4 (http://snobol4.org/)}. {David Farber (http://cis.upenn.edu/%7Efarber/)}. {Ralph Griswold (http://cs.arizona.edu/people/ralph/)}. ["SNOBOL, A String Manipulating Language", R. Griswold et al, J ACM 11(1):21, Jan 1964]. (2004-04-29)
St. Thomas was a teacher and a writer for some twenty years (1254-1273). Among his works are: Scriptum in IV Libros Sententiarum (1254-1256), Summa Contra Gentiles (c. 1260), Summa Theologica (1265-1272); commentaries on Boethius. (De Trinitate, c. 1257-1258), on Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (De Divinis Nominibus, c. 1261), on the anonymous and important Liber de Causis (1268), and especially on Aristotle's works (1261-1272), Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, On the Soul, Posterior Analytics, On Interpretation, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption; Quaestiones Disputatae, which includes questions on such large subjects as De Veritate (1256-1259); De Potentia (1259-1263); De Malo (1263-1268); De Spiritualibus Creaturis, De Anima (1269-1270); small treatises or Opuscula, among which especially noteworthy are the De Ente et Essentia (1256); De Aeternitate Mundi (1270), De Unitate Intellecus (1270), De Substantiis Separatis (1272). While it is extremely difficult to grasp in its entirety the personality behind this complex theological and philosophical activity, some points are quite clear and beyond dispute. During the first five years of his activity as a thinker and a teacher, St. Thomas seems to have formulated his most fundamental ideas in their definite form, to have clarified his historical conceptions of Greek and Arabian philosophers, and to have made more precise and even corrected his doctrinal positions, (cf., e.g., the change on the question of creation between In II Sent., d.l, q.l, a.3, and the later De Potentia, q. III, a.4). This is natural enough, though we cannot pretend to explain why he should have come to think as he did. The more he grew, and that very rapidly, towards maturity, the more his thought became inextricably involved in the defense of Aristotle (beginning with c. 1260), his texts and his ideas, against the Averroists, who were then beginning to become prominent in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris; against the traditional Augustinianism of a man like St. Bonaventure; as well as against that more subtle Augustinianism which could breathe some of the spirit of Augustine, speak the language of Aristotle, but expound, with increasing faithfulness and therefore more imminent disaster, Christian ideas through the Neoplatonic techniques of Avicenna. This last group includes such different thinkers as St. Albert the Great, Henry of Ghent, the many disciples of St. Bonaventure, including, some think, Duns Scotus himself, and Meister Eckhart of Hochheim.
Such systems may, however, contain partial name relations which function as name relations in the case of some but not all of the formulas of the system (or of their associated Gödel numbers).
SYMBAL SYMbolic ALgebra. A {symbolic mathematics} language with {ALGOL}-like syntax by Max Engeli, late 60's. Implemented for {CDC 6600}. ["User's Manual for the Formula Manipulation Language SYMBAL", M. Engeli, TRM-8.00, Comp Ctr UT Austin, June 1968].
symbol ::: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4. Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
Symbolic Link "file format" (SYLK) A {Microsoft} file format for {spreadsheets}, (not to be confused with {symbolic link}). SYLK format existed in one form or another in as early as 1987, and was part of {Excel} v1.0. It is is an outgrowth of {VisiCalc} {DIF} file format. SYLK format is ascii text and represents information about both formula, value, and some formatting information, which makes it something like an {RTF} for spreadsheets. It is used as a general tabular data exchange format. {(http://netghost.narod.ru/gff/graphics/summary/micsylk.htm)}. [Reference?] (2004-04-08)
symbolic mathematics "mathematics, application" (Or "symbolic math") The use of computers to manipulate mathematical equations and expressions in symbolic form, as opposed to manipulating the numerical quantities represented by those symbols. Such a system might be used for symbolic integration or differentiation, substitution of one expression into another, simplification of an expression, change of subject etc. One of the best known symbolic mathematics software packages is {Mathematica}. Others include {ALAM}, {ALGY}, {AMP}, {Ashmedai}, {AXIOM*}, {CAMAL}, {CAYLEY}, {CCalc}, {CLAM}, {CoCoA}(?), {ESP}, {FLAP}, {FORM}, {FORMAL}, {Formula ALGOL}, {GAP}, {JACAL}, {LiE}, {Macaulay}, {MACSYMA}, {Magic Paper}, {MAO}, {Maple}, {Mathcad}, {MATHLAB}, {MuMath}, {Nother}, {ORTHOCARTAN}, {Pari}, {REDUCE}, {SAC-1}, {SAC2}, {SAINT}, {Schoonschip}, {Scratchpad I}, {SHEEP}, {STENSOR}, {SYMBAL}, {SymbMath}, {Symbolic Mathematical Laboratory}, {TRIGMAN}, {UBASIC}. {Usenet} newsgropup: {news:sci.math.symbolic}. (1995-04-12)
Tantra(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word literally meaning a "loom" or the warp or threads in a loom, and, by extension ofmeaning, signifying a rule or ritual for ceremonial rites. The Hindu Tantras are numerous works orreligious treatises teaching mystical and magical formulae or formularies for the attainment of magical orquasi-magical powers, and for the worship of the gods. They are mostly composed in the form of dialogsbetween Siva and his divine consort Durga, these two divinities being the peculiar objects of theadoration of the Tantrins.In many parts of India the authority of the Tantras seems almost to have superseded the clean andpoetical hymns of the Vedas.Most tantric works are supposed to contain five different subjects: (1) the manifestation or evolution ofthe universe; (2) its destruction; (3) the worship or adoration of the divinities; (4) the achievement orattainment of desired objects and especially of six superhuman faculties; (5) modes or methods of union,usually enumerated as four, with the supreme divinity of the kosmos by means of contemplativemeditation.Unfortunately, while there is much of interest in the tantric works, their tendency for long ages has beendistinctly towards what in occultism is known as sorcery or black magic. Some of the rites or ceremoniespracticed have to do with revolting details connected with sex.Durga, the consort of Siva, his sakti or energy, is worshiped by the Tantrins as a distinct personifiedfemale power.The origin of the Tantras unquestionably goes back to a very remote antiquity, and there seems to belittle doubt that these works, or their originals, were heirlooms handed down from originally debased ordegenerate Atlantean racial offshoots. There is, of course, a certain amount of profoundly philosophicaland mystical thought running through the more important tantric works, but the tantric worship in manycases is highly licentious and immoral.
. t.aya (brahma chatusthaya; brahmachatusthaya; brahmachatushtaya) ::: the sixth catus.t.aya, the quaternary of the divine Reality (brahman), consisting of sarvaṁ brahma, anantaṁ brahma, jñanaṁ brahma and anandaṁ brahma (combined in sarvam anantaṁ jñanam anandaṁ brahma, the formula of the fourfold brahman). brahmadarsana
tejas ::: fiery brilliance; mental light and energy; the energy of temperament that manifests itself in each element of the fourfold personality (brahmatejas, etc.); a term in the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "a strong and ardent force and intensity", an element of cittasakti; one of the seven kinds of akashic material; rūpa or lipi . composed of this material; fire, the principle of light and heat, one of "the five elements of ancient philosophy or rather elementary conditions of Nature, pañca bhūta, which constitute objects by their various combination", also called agni1; the virile energy carried to the head by udana.
tejo balam pravrittir mahattvam) ::: in all of these (elements of virya there must be) energy, strength, dynamism and greatness (the four terms of the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya). sarves.vetes.u ks.iprata, sthairyam, adinata cesvarabhavah. (sarveshvesarvesvetesu
tejo balaṁ pravr.ttir mahattvam (tejo balam pravrittir mahattwam) ::: energy (tejas), strength (bala1), dynamism (pravr.tti), greatness (mahattva): the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya, consisting of qualities needed for the perfection of all four elements of virya.
temporal logic "logic" An extension of {predicate calculus} which includes notation for arguing about *when* statements are true. Time is discrete and extends indefinitely into the future. Three {prefix} operators, represented by a circle, square and diamond mean "is true at the next time instant", "is true from now on" and "is eventually true". x U y means x is true until y is true. x P y means x precedes y. There are two types of formula: "state formulae" about things true at one point in time, and "path formulae" about things true for a sequence of steps. An example of a path formula is "x U y", and example of a state formula is "next x" or a simple atomic formula such at "waiting". "true until" in this context means that a state formula holds at every point in time up to a point when another formula holds. "x U y" is the "strong until" and implies that there is a time when y is true. "x W y" is the "weak until" in which it is not necessary that y holds eventually. There are two types of temporal logic used: branching time and linear time. The basic propositional temporal logic cannot differentiate between the two, though. Linear time considers only one possible future, in branching time you have several alternative futures. In branching temporal logic you have the extra operators "A" (for "all futures") and "E" (for "some future"). For example, "A(work U go_home)" means "I will work until I go home" and "E(work U go_home)" means "I may work until I go home". (1997-01-21)
teshu kshiprata, sthairyam, adinata cheshwarabhava) ::: in all of these (elements of sakti there must be) swiftness, steadiness, non-depression and mastery (the four terms of the second general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya).
The addition to the functional calculus of first order of individual constants (denoting particular individuals) is not often made -- unless symbols for functions from individuals to individuals (so-called "mathematical" or "descriptive" functions) are to be added at the same time. Such an addition is, however, employed in the two following sections as a means of representing certain forms of inference of traditional logic. The addition is really non-essential, and requires only minor changes in the definition of a formula and the list of primitive formulas (allowing the alternative of individual constants at certain places where the above given formulation calls for free individual variables).
The assertion sign was adopted by Russell, and by Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica, in approximately Frege's sense of 1879, and it is from this source that it has come into general use. Some recent writers omit the assertion sign, either as understood, or on the ground that the Frege-Russell distinction between asserted and unasserted propositions is illusory. Others use the assertion sign in a syntactical sense, to express that a formula is a theorem of a logistic system (q.v.); this usage differs from that of Frege and Russell in that the latter requires the assertion sign to be followed by a formula denoting a proposition, or a truth value, while the former requires it to be followed by the syntactical name of such a formula.
“the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM,—OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name—it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self—existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13—Page 315
"the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM, - OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name – it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self- existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13 – Page 315*
The formulas and the c-rules of the language in question may include some which are extralogical in character -- corresponding, e.g., to physical laws or to matters of empirical fact. Carnap makes an attempt (which, however, has been questioned) to define in purely syntactical terms when a relation of consequence is one of logical consequence. If the notion of consequence is restricted to that of logical consequence, the terms corresponding to valid and contra-valid are analytic and contradictory respectively. If the c-rules are purely logical in character, the class of analytic sentences coincides with that of valid sentences, and the class of contradictory sentences with that of contravalid sentences.
The formulation which we have given provides a means of proving theorems of the propositional calculus, the proof consisting of an explicit finite sequence of formulas, the last of which is the theorem proved, and each of which is either a primitive formula or inferable from preceding formulas by a single application of the rule of inference (or one of the rules of inference, if the alternative formulation of the pure propositional calculus employing the rule of substitution is adopted). The test whether a given finite sequence of formulas is a proof of the last formula of the sequence is effective -- we have the means of always determining of a given formula whether it is a primitive formula, and the means of always determining of a given formula whether it is inferable from a given finite list of formulas by a single application of modus ponens (or substitution). Indeed our formulation would not be satisfactory otherwise. For in the contrary case a proof would not necessarily carry conviction, the proposer of a proof could fairly be asked to give a proof that it was a proof -- in short the formal analysis of what constitutes a proof (in the sense of a cogent demonstration) would be incomplete.
The capital roman letters here denote arbitrary formulas of the propositional calculus (in the technical sense defined below) and the arrow is to be read "stands for" or "is an abbreviation for." Suppose that we have given some specific list of propositional symbols, which may be infinite in number, and to which we shall refer as the fundamental propositional symbols. These are not necessarily single letters or characters, but may be expressions taken from any language or system of notation; they may denote particular propositions, or they may contain variables and denote ambiguously any proposition of a certain form or class. Certain restrictions are also necessary upon the way in which the fundamental propositional symbols can contain square brackets [ ]; for the present purpose it will suffice to suppose that they do not contain square brackets at all, although they may contain parentheses or other kinds of brackets. We call formulas of the propositional calculus (relative to the given list of fundamental propositional symbols) all the expressions determined by the four following rules: all the fundamental propositional symbols are formulas if A is a formula, ∼[A] is a formula; if A and B are formulas [A][B] is a formula; if A and B are formulas [A] ∨ [B] is a formula. The formulas of the propositional calculus as thus defined will in general contain more brackets than are necessary for clarity or freedom from ambiguity; in practice we omit superfluous brackets and regard the shortened expressions as abbreviations for the full formulas. It will be noted also that, if A and B are formulas, we regard [A] | [B], [A] ⊃ [B], [A] ≡ [B], and [A] + [B], not as formulas, but as abbreviations for certain formulas in accordance with the above given definitions.
“The Chhandogya,… is to be a work in the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolised in the OM, the sacred syllable of the Veda, not therefore, the pure state of existence only, but that existence in all its parts… OM is the symbol and the thing symbolised.”the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM,—OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name—it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self—existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13—Page 315
(The complete list of primitive formulas is thus infinite, but there are just seven possible forms of primitive formulas as above.) There is one primitive rule of inference, as follows: Given A and A ⊃ B to infer B. This is the inference known as modus ponens (see below, §2).
“The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos—it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.” Letters on Yoga
The decision problem, of the pure functional calculus of first order has two forms the so-called proof-theoretic decision problem, to find an effective test (decision procedure) by means of which it can always be determined whether a given formula is a theorem; the so-called set-theoretic decision problem, to find an effective test by means of which it can always be determined whether a given formula containing no free individual variables is satisfiable. It follows from Gödel's completeness theorem that these two forms of the decision problem are equivalent: a solution of either would lead immediately to a solution of the other.
The determination of the circumstances under which a sequence of formulas is a proof, or a proof as a consequence of a set of formulas, is usually made by means of: a list of primitive formulas; and a list of primitive rules of inference each of which prescribes that under certain circumstances a formula B shall be an immediate consequence of a set of formulas A1, A2, . . . , An. The list of primitive formulas may be empty -- this is not excluded. Or the primitive formulas may be included under the head of primitive rules of inference by allowing the case n=0 in (6). A proof is then defined as a finite sequence of formulas each of which is either a primitive formula or an immediate consequence of preceding formulas by one of the primitive rules of inference. A proof as a consequence of a set of formulas A1, A2, . . . , An is in some cases defined as a finite sequence of formulas each of which is either a primitive formula, or one of A1, A2, . . . , An, or an immediate consequence of preceding formulas by one of the primitive rules of inference; in other cases it may be desirable to impose certain restrictions upon the application of the primitive rules of inference (e.g., in the case of the functional calculus of first order -- logic, formal, § 3 -- that no free variable of A1, A2, . . . , An shall be generalized upon).
The dual of a formula is obtained by interchanging conjunction and (inclusive) disjunction throughout and at the same time interchanging universal quantification and existential quantification throughout. (In doing this the different symbols, e.g., functional constants, although they may consist of several characters in succession rather than a single character, shall be treated as units, and no change shall be made inside a symbol. A similar remark, applies at all places where we speak of occurrences of a particular symbol or sequence of symbols in a formula, and the like.) It can be shown that the following principles of duality hold (where A* and B* denote the duals of. the formulas A and B respectively): if A is a theorem, then ∼A* is a theorem; if A ⊃ B is a theorem, then B* ⊃ A* is a theorem; if A ≡ B is a theorem, then A* ≡ B* is a theorem. A formula is said to be in prenex normal form if all the quantifiers which it contains stand together at the beginning, unseparated by negations (or other sentential connectives), and the scope of each quantifier (i.e., the extent of the bracket [ ] following the quantifier) is to the end of the entire formula. In the case of a formula in prenex normal form, the succession of quantifiers at the beginning is called the prefix; the remaining portion contains no quantifiers and is the matrix of the formula. It can be proved that for every formula A there is a formula B in prenex normal form such that A ≡ B is a theorem; and B is then called a prenex normal form of A.
The dual of a formula or an expression of the algebra of classes is obtained by interchanging logical sum and logical product, and at the same time interchanging ∨ and ∧. The principle of duality holds, that the dual of every theorem is also a theorem.
The first paper of Tarski cited below is devoted to the problem of finding a definition of semantical truth for a logistic system L, not in L itself but in another system (metasystem) containing notations for the formulas of L and for syntactical relations between them. This is attractive as an alternative to the method of introducing the concept of truth by arbitrarily adding a notation for it, with appropriate new primitive formulas, to the metasystem, but in many important cases it is possible only if the metasystcm is in some essential respect logically stronger than L.
The formalization as a logistic system of the functional calculus of order omega with axiom of infinity leads, by a method which cannot be given here, to a (definite but quite complicated) proposition of arithmetic which is equivalent to -- in a certain sense, expresses -- the consistency of the system. This proposition of arithmetic can be represented within the system by a formula A containing no free variables, and the following second form of gödel's incompleteness theorem can then be proved: If the system is consistent, then the formula A, although its meaning is a true proposition of arithmetic, is not a theorem of the system. We might, of course, add A to the system as a new primitive formula -- we would then have a new system, whose consistency would correspond to a new proposition of arithmetic, represented by a new formula B (containing no free variables), and we would still have in the new system, if consistent, that B was not a theorem.
The kind of an interpretation, or assignment of meaning, which is normally intended for a logistic system is indicated by the technical terminology employed. This is namely such an interpretation that the formulas, some or all of them, mean or express propositions; the theorems express true propositions; and the proofs and valid inferences represent proofs and valid inferences in the ordinary sense. (Formulas which do not mean propositions may be interpreted as names of things other than propositions, or may be interpreted as containing free variables and having only an ambiguous denotation -- see variable.) A logistic system may thus be regarded as a device for obtaining -- or, rather stating -- an objective, external criterion for the validity of proofs and inferences (which are expressible in a given notation).
The Mother: “The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations—whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul—and simply formulating the plan of action—in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations—it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.
The notion of truth should be kept distinct from that of a theorem, the true formulas being in general only some among the theorems (in view of Gödel's result, Logic, formal § 6).
theorem ::: 1. A rule or law esp. one expressed by an equation or formula. 2. An idea that has been demonstrated as true or is assumed to be so demonstrable.
theorem ::: n. --> That which is considered and established as a principle; hence, sometimes, a rule.
A statement of a principle to be demonstrated. ::: v. t. --> To formulate into a theorem.
Theosophy ::: A compound Greek word: theos, a "divine being," a "god"; sophia, "wisdom"; hence divine wisdom.Theosophy is the majestic wisdom-religion of the archaic ages and is as old as thinking man. It wasdelivered to the first human protoplasts, the first thinking human beings on this earth, by highlyintelligent spiritual entities from superior spheres. This ancient doctrine, this esoteric system, has beenpassed down from guardians to guardians to guardians through innumerable generations until our owntime. Furthermore, portions of this original and majestic system have been given out at various periods oftime to various races in various parts of the world by those guardians when humanity stood in need ofsuch extension and elaboration of spiritual and intellectual thought.Theosophy is not a syncretistic philosophy-religion-science, a system of thought or belief which has beenput together piecemeal and consisting of parts or portions taken by some great mind from other variousreligions or philosophies. This idea is false. On the contrary, theosophy is that single system orsystematic formulation of the facts of visible and invisible nature which, as expressed through theilluminated human mind, takes the apparently separate forms of science and of philosophy and ofreligion. We may likewise describe theosophy to be the formulation in human language of the nature,structure, origin, destiny, and operations of the kosmical universe and of the multitudes of beings whichinfill it.It might be added that theosophy, in the language of H. P. Blavatsky (Theosophical Glossary, p. 328), is"the sub-stratum and basis of all the world-religions and philosophies, taught and practiced by a few electever since man became a thinking being. In its practical bearing, Theosophy is purely divine ethics; thedefinitions in dictionaries are pure nonsense, based on religious prejudice and ignorance." (See alsoUniversal Brotherhood)
The position taken is that investigation reveals basic, recurrent patterns of change, expressible as laws of materialist dialectics, which are seen as relevant to every level of existence, and, because validated by past evidence, as indispensable hypotheses in guiding further investigation. These are Law of interpenetration, unity and strife of opposites. (All existences, being complexes of opposing elements and forces, have the character of a changing unity. The unity is considered temporary, relative, while the process of change, expressed by interpenetration and strife, is continuous, absolute.) Law of transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. (The changes which take place in nature are not merely quantitative; their accumulation eventually precipitates new qualities in a transition which appears as a sudden leap in comparison to the gradualness of the quantitative changes up to that point. The new quality is considered as real as the original quality. It is not mechanically reducible to it it is not merely a larger amount of the former quality, but something into which that has developed.) Law of negation of negation. (The series of quantitative changes and emerging qualities is unending. Each state or phase of development is considered a synthesis which resolves the contradictions contained in the preceding synthesis and which generates its own contradictions on a different qualitative level.) These laws, connecting ontology with logic, are contrasted to the formalistic laws of identity, difference and excluded middle of which they are considered qualitatively enriched reconstructions. Against the ontology of the separateness and self-identity of each thing, the dialectical laws emphasize the interconnectedness of all things and self-development of each thing. An A all parts of which are always becoming non-A may thus be called non-A as well as A. The formula, A is A and cannot be non-A, becomes, A is A and also non-A, that is, at or during the same instant: there is no instant, it is held, during which nothing happens. The view taken is that these considerations apply as much to thought and concepts, as to things, that thought is a process, that ideas gain their logical content through interconnectedness with other ideas, out of and into which they develop.
The precipitates of the propaedeutical effort are to be found, for Spinoza, in the definitions, axioms, postulates, and within the structural plan expressed in the geometrical ordering. It is highly probable that Spinoza would have admitted the tentative character of at least some of the definitions, axioms, and postulates formulated by him. He doubtless saw the possibility that the process of inquiry, revising, augmenting, and re-coordinating the fund of knowledge, might demand alteration in the structural bases of systematic expression as well as in the knowledge to be ordered. Such changes, however, would occur within limits set by the propaedeutical disclosures and the general framework. Advance might require the abandonment of an older metaphysical element, and the substitution of a new one. But with equal likelihood, the advance of knowledge would make possible a richer and deeper apprehension of the content of fixed principles. To illustrate: The first definition of the Ethica, that of Causa sui, might well be for Spinoza a principle that awakened reason must accept, a truth whose priority and validity could not be undermined. He might regard it as a minimal definition of reality, of the nature of the ultimate object of inquiry. On the other hand, Spinoza, it may be conjectured, would not claim for every element of his system a similar finality. Just as he recognizes the role of hypothesis in science, in a similar way, he would recognize the tentative character of some metaphysical and theological elements.
The question of whether the operations must be specified or merely conceivable for the proposition to have meaning (which is analogous to the constructibility problem in mathematical discussions) has occasioned considerable criticism, for there appeared to be a danger that important scientific propositions might be excluded as meaningless. To this and other problems of operationalism the logical positivists (or empiricists) have contributed formulary modifications and refinements. See Logical Empiricism. In spite of their frequent difference with regard to the empirical foundation of logic and mathematics, pragmatism has received some support from the strict logicians and mathematical philosophers. One of the most important instances historically was C. I. Lewis' paper "The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge" (University of California Publications in Philosophy, 1926). Here he stated 'that the truth of experience must always be relative to our chosen conceptual systems", and that our choice between conceptual systems "will be determined consciously or not, on pragmatic grounds".
The reader should distinguish between theorems about the propositional calculus -- the deduction theorem, the principles of duality (below), etc. -- and theorems of the propositional calculus in the sense just defined. It is convenient to use such words as theorem, premiss, conclusion both for propositions (in whatever language expressed) and for formulas representing propositions in some fixed system or calculus.
". . . there are a series of subtler and subtler formulations of substance which escape from and go beyond the formula of the material universe. Without going deeply into matters which are too occult and difficult for our present inquiry, we may say, adhering to the system on which we have based ourselves, that these gradations of substance, in one important aspect of their formulation in series, can be seen to correspond to the ascending series of Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind and that other higher divine triplicity of Sachchidananda. In other words, we find that substance in its ascension bases itself upon each of these principles and makes itself successively a characteristic vehicle for the dominating cosmic self-expression of each in their ascending series.” The Life Divine
“… there are a series of subtler and subtler formulations of substance which escape from and go beyond the formula of the material universe. Without going deeply into matters which are too occult and difficult for our present inquiry, we may say, adhering to the system on which we have based ourselves, that these gradations of substance, in one important aspect of their formulation in series, can be seen to correspond to the ascending series of Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind and that other higher divine triplicity of Sachchidananda. In other words, we find that substance in its ascension bases itself upon each of these principles and makes itself successively a characteristic vehicle for the dominating cosmic self-expression of each in their ascending series.” The Life Divine
There is also an analogous process of functional abstraction relative to two or more variables (taken in a given order), which yields a polyadic function when applied to a formula A.
The requirement of effectiveness does not compel the lists of primitive symbols, primitive formulas, and primitive rules of inference to be finite. It is sufficient if there are effective criteria for recognizing formulas, for recognizing primitive formulas, for recognizing applications of primitive rules of inference, and (if separately needed) for recognizing such restricted applications of the primitive rules of inference as are admitted in proofs as a consequence of a given set of formulas.
The requirement of effectiveness plays an important role in connection with logistic systems, but the necessity of the requirement depends on the purpose in hand and it may for some purposes be abandoned. Various writers have proposed non-effective, or non-constructive, logistic systems; in some of these the requirement of finiteness of length of formulas is also abandoned and certain infinite sequences of primitive symbols are admitted as formulas.
The restriction which is imposed in order to avoid paradox can be seen in connection with the axiom of subset formation. Instead of this axiom, an uncritical formulation of axioms for set theory might well have included (Et)[xεt ≡x A], asserting the existence of a set t whose members are the sets x satisfying an arbitrary condition A expressible in the notation of the system. This, however, would lead at once to the Russell paradox by taking A to be ∼ xεx and then going through a process of inference which can be described briefly by saying that x is put equal to t. As actually proposed, however, the axiom of subset formation allows the use of the condition A only to obtain a set t whose members are the sets x which are members of a previously given set z and satisfy A. This is not known to lead to paradox.
The structural problem stated in terms of the antithesis between subjective and objective is rather too vague for the purposes of epistemology and a more precise analysis of the knowledge-situation and statement of the issues involved is required. The perceptual situation -- and this analysis may presumably be extended with appropriate modifications to memory, imagination and other modes of cognition -- consists of a subject (the self, or pure act of perceiving), the content (sense data) and the object (the physical thing perceived). In terms of this analysis, two issues may be formulated Are content and object identical (epistemological monism), or are they numerically distinct (epistemological dualism)? and Does the object exist independently of the knowing subject (epistemological idealism) or is it dependent upon the subject (epistemological realism)? (h) The problem of truth is perhaps the culmination of epistemological enquiry -- in any case it is the problem which brings the enquiry to the threshold of metaphysics. The traditional theories of the nature of truth are: the correspondence theory which conceives truth as a relation between an "idea" or a proposition and its object --the relation has commonly been regarded as one of resemblance but it need not be so considered (see Correspondence theory of truth); the Coherence theory which adopts as the criterion of truth, the logical consistency of a proposition with a wider system of propositions (see Coherence theory of truth), and the intrinsic theory which views truth as an intrinsic property of the true proposition. See Intrinsic theory of truth. --L-W. Bibliography:
The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other main parts of the Nature. But there are different parts or planes of the subconscient. All upon earth is based on the Inconscient as it is called, though it is not really inconscient at all, but rather a complete "sub"-conscience, a suppressed or involved consciousness, in which there is everything but nothing is formulated or expressed. The subconscient lies between this Inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body. It contains the potentiality of all the primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the dull and inert strands of Matter and form by a constant development a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness; it contains them not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions but as the fluid substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as "complexes" exploding into action and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed, the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of for ever. All seeds are there and all Sanskaras of the mind, vital and body,—it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All too that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.
Ref: SABCL Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 354
“the Supreme Chief of all those Mahatmans. This pontificate could be exercised only by a Brahman who had reached a certain age, and he it was who was the sole guardian of the mystic formula, and he was the Hierophant who created great Adepts. He alone could explain the meaning of the sacred word, AUM, and of all the religious symbols and rites. . . .
The theorems of the propositional calculus are the formulas which can be derived from the primitive formulas by a succession of applications of the primitive rule of inference. In other words, the primitive formulas are theorems, and if A and A ⊃ B are theorems then B is a theorem. An inference from premisses A1, A2, . . . , An to a conclusion B is a valid inference of the propositional calculus if B becomes a theorem upon adding A1, A2, . . . , An to the list of primitive formulas. In other words, the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to B is a valid inference if B is either a primitive formula or one of the formulas A1, A2, . . . , An, and if the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to C and the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to C ⊃ B are both valid inferences then the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to B is a valid inference. It can be proved that the inference from A1, A2, . . . , An to B is a valid inference of the propositional calculus if (obviously), and only if (the deduction theorem), [A1 ⊃ [A2 ⊃ . . . [An ⊃ B] . . . ]] is a theorem of the propositional calculus.
The theory of the relation between the formulas of an interpreted logistic system (semantical system in Carnap's terminology) and their meanings. See Name relation; Semiotic 2; and Truth, semantical. -- A.C.
The three primitive connectives (and consequently all connectives definable from them) denote truth-functions -- i.e., the truth-value (truth or falsehood) of each of the propositions &min;p, pq, and p ∨ q is uniquely determined by the truth-values of p and q. In fact, &min;p is true if p is false and false if p is true; pq is true if p and q are both true, false otherwise; p ∨ q is false if p and q are both false, true otherwise. Thus, given a formula of the (pure) propositional calculus and an assignment of a truth-value to each of the variables appearing, we can reckon out by a mechanical process the truth-value to be assigned to the entire formula. If, for all possible assignments of truth-values to the variables appearing, the calculated truth-value corresponding to the entire formula is truth, the formula is said to be a tautology.The test whether a formula is a tautology is effective, since in any particular case the total number of different assignments of truth-values to the variables is finite, and the calculation of the truth-value corresponding to the entire formula can be carried out separately for each possible assignment of truth-values to the variables.
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 201
The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 35
The use of the mantra, sacred syllable, name or mystic formula which is of so much importance in the Indian systems of Yoga and common to them all.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 538
"The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems.” The Secret of the Veda
“The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems.” The Secret of the Veda
The Zermelo set theory has an adequacy to the logical development of mathematics comparable to that of the functional calculus of order omega (§ 6). Indeed, as here actually formulated, its adequacy for mathematics apparently exceeds that of the functional calculus; however, this should not be taken as an essential difference, since both systems are incomplete, in accordance with Gödel'a theorem (§ 6), but are capable of extension.
The Zermelo set theory may be formulated as a simple applied functional calculus of first order (in the sense of § 3), for which the domain of individuals is composed of classes, and the only functional constant is ε, primitive formulas (additional to those given in § 3) being added as follows:
This may be generalized by arbitrarily taking n different truth-values, t1, t2, . . . , tm, f1, f2, . . . , fn-m, of which the first m are called designated values -- and then setting up truth tables (in terms of these n truth-values) for a set of connectives, which usually includes connectives notationally the game as the fundamental connectives of the classical calculus, and may also include others. A formula constructed out of these connectives and variables is then called a tautology if it has a designated value for each possible assignment of truth-values to the variables, and the theorems of the n-valued propositional calculus are to coincide with the tautologies.
This representation does not reproduce faithfully all particulars of the traditional account. The fact is that the traditional doctrine, having grown up from various sources and under an inadequate formal analysis, is not altogether what seems to be the best representation, and simply note the four following points of divergence: We have defined the connectives ⊃x and ∧x in terms of universal and existential quantification, whereas the traditional account might be thought to be more closely reproduced if they were taken as primitive notations. (It would, however, not be difficult to reformulate the functional calculus of first order so that these connectives would be primitive and the usual quantifiers defined in terms of them.) The traditional account associates the negation in E and O with the copula (q. v.), whereas the negation symbol is here prefixed to the sub-formula P(x). (Notice that this sub-formula represents ambiguously a proposition and that, in fact, the notation of the functional calculus of first order provides for applying negation only to propositions.) The traditional account includes under A and E respectively, also (propositions denoted by) P(A) and ∼P(A), where A is an individual constant. These singular propositions are ignored in our account of opposition and immediate inference, but will appear in § 5 as giving variant forms of certain syllogisms. Some aspects of the traditional account require that A and E be represented as we have here, others that they be represented by [(Ex)S(x)][S(x) ⊃x P(x)] and [(Ex)S(x)][S(x) ⊃x ∼P(x)] respectively. The question concerning the choice between these two interpretations is known as the problem of existential import of propositions. We prefer to introduce (Ex)S(x) as a separate premiss at those places where it is required. Given a fixed subject S and a fixed predicate P, we have, according to the square of opposition, that A and O are contradictory, E and I are contradictory, A and E are contrary, I and O are subcontrary, A and I are subaltern, E and O are subaltern. The two propositions in a contradictory pair cannot be both true and cannot be both false (one is the exact negation of the other). The two propositions in a subaltern pair are so related that the first one, together with the premiss (Ex)S(x), implies the second (subalternation). Under the premiss (Ex)S(x), the contrary pair, A, E, cannot be both true, and the subcontrary pair, I, O, cannot be both false.
This use of nominal definition (including contextual definition -- see the article Incomplete symbol) in connection with a logistic system is extraneous to the system in the sense that it may theoretically be dispensed with, and all formulas written in full. Practically, however, it may be necessary for the sake of brevity or perspicuity, or for facility in formal work.
thought-Mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, — but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin, — as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. " *The Life Divine
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
To the mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunyam), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind"s approach to it, not That but impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not e true essence or nature (Swarupa) of the Eternal and Infinite. Even the words Eternal and Infinite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.” The Hour of God
To the mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunyam), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind’s approach to it, not That but impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not e true essence or nature (Swarupa) of the Eternal and Infinite. Even the words Eternal and Infinite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.” The Hour of God
Transitivity: A dyadic relation R is transitive if, whenever xRy and yRz both hold, xRz also holds. Important examples of transitive relations are the relation of identity or equality; the relation less than among whole numbers, or among rational numbers, or among real numbers, the relation precedes among instants of time (as usually taken); the relation of class inclusion, ⊂ (see logic, formal, §7); the relations of material implication and material equivalence among propositions, the relations of formal implication and formal equivalence among monadic propositional functions. In the propositional calculus, the laws of transitivity of material implication and material equivalence (the conditional and biconditional) are: [p ⊃ q][q ⊃ r] ⊃ [p ⊃ r] [p ≡ q][q ≡ r] ⊃ [p ≡ r] Similar laws of transitivity may be formulated for equality (e.g., in the functional calculus of first order with equality), class inclusion (e.g., in the Zermelo set theory), formal implication (e.g., in the pure functional calculus of first order), etc. -- A.C.
Trinity ::: Madhav: “The Trinity is Sat-Chit-Ananda, the triple formulation of the Reality as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.” The Book of the Divine Mother
T'ung: Mere identity, or sameness, especially in social institutions and standards, which is inferior to harmony (ho) in which social distinctions and differences are in complete concord. (Confucianism). Agreement, as in "agreement with the superiors" (shang t'ung). The method of agreement, which includes identity, generic relationship, co-existence, and partial resemblance. "Identity means two substances having one name. Generic relationship means inclusion in the same whole. Both being in the same room is a case of co-existence. Partial resemblance means having some points of resemblance." See Mo chi. (Neo-Mohism). --W.T.C. T'ung i: The joint method of similarities and differences, by which what is present and what is absent can be distinguished. See Mo chi. --W.T.C. Tung Chung-shu: (177-104 B.C.) was the leading Confucian of his time, premier to two feudal princes, and consultant to the Han emperor in framing national policies. Firmly believing in retribution, he strongly advocated the "science of catastrophic and anomalies," and became the founder and leader of medieval Confucianism which was extensively confused with the Yin Yang philosophy. Extremely antagonistic towards rival schools, he established Confucianism as basis of state religion and education. His best known work, Ch-un-ch'iu Fan-lu, awaits English translation. --W.T.C. Turro y Darder, Ramon: Spanish Biologist and Philosopher. Born in Malgrat, Dec. 8 1854. Died in Barcelona, June 5, 1926. As a Biologist, his conclusions about the circulation of the blood, more than half a century ago, were accepted and verified by later researchers and theorists. Among other things, he showed the insufficiency and unsatisfactoriness of the mechanistic and neomechanistic explanations of the circulatory process. He was also the first to busy himself with endocrinology and bacteriological immunity. As a philosopher Turro combated the subjectivistic and metaphysical type of psychology, and circumscribed scientific investigation to the determination of the conditions that precede the occurrence of phenomena, considering useless all attempt to reach final essences. Turro does not admit, however, that the psychical series or conscious states may be causally linked to the organic series. His formula was: Physiology and Consciousness are phenomena that occur, not in connection, but in conjunction. His most important work is Filosofia Critica, in which he has put side by side two antagonistic conceptions of the universe, the objective and the subjectne conceptions. In it he holds that, at the present crisis of science and philosophy, the business of intelligence is to realize that science works on philosophical presuppositions, but that philosophy is no better off with its chaos of endless contradictions and countless systems of thought. The task to be realized is one of coming together, to undo what has been done and get as far as the original primordial concepts with which philosophical inquiry began. --J.A.F. Tychism: A term derived from the Greek, tyche, fortune, chance, and employed by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) to express any theory which regards chance as an objective reality, operative in the cosmos. Also the hypothesis that evolution occurs owing to fortuitous variations. --J.J.R. Types, theory of: See Logic, formal, § 6; Paradoxes, logical; Ramified theory of types. Type-token ambiguity: The words token and type are used to distinguish between two senses of the word word. Individual marks, more or less resembling each other (as "cat" resembles "cat" and "CAT") may (1) be said to be "the same word" or (2) so many "different words". The apparent contradiction therby involved is removed by speaking of the individual marks as tokens, in contrast with the one type of which they are instances. And word may then be said to be subject to type-token ambiguity. The terminology can easily be extended to apply to any kind of symbol, e.g. as in speaking of token- and type-sentences. Reference: C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 4.517. --M.B. Tz'u: (a) Parental love, kindness, or affection, the ideal Confucian virtue of parents. (b) Love, kindness in general. --W.T.C. Tzu hua: Self-transformation or spontaneous transformation without depending on any divine guidance or eternal agency, but following the thing's own principle of being, which is Tao. (Taoism). --W.T.C. Tzu jan: The natural, the natural state, the state of Tao, spontaneity as against artificiality. (Lao Tzu; Huai-nan Tzu, d. 122 B.C.). --W.T.C. U
tweening "graphics" An {interpolation} technique where an {animation} program generates extra frames between the key frames that the user has created. This gives smoother animation without the user having to draw every frame. A scene is described by a mathematical model - a set of two- or three-dimensional objects whose positions in are given by sets of coordinates. Tweening uses mathematical formulae to generate these coordinates at a sequence of discrete times. The simplest system would move each point at a constant rate in a straight line between its initial and final positions, though other kinds of path are possible. The coordinates at each time step are used to generate (or "render") a two-dimensional image of the scene which forms one "frame" of the animation. Tweening is similar to {morphing} except that morphing is usually performed by interpolating between corresponding points marked by the user on two images, rather than between two configurations of a model. (1995-04-04)
ubiquity ::: n. --> Existence everywhere, or in places, at the same time; omnipresence; as, the ubiquity of God is not disputed by those who admit his existence.
The doctrine, as formulated by Luther, that Christ&
Unitarianism: The mme for the theological view which emphasises the oneness of God in opposition to the Triitarian formula (q.v.). Although the term is modern, the idea underlying Unitarianism is old. In Christian theology any expression of the status of Jesus as being less than a metaphysical part of Deity is of the spirit of Unitarianism (e.g., Dynamistic Monarchianists, Adoptionists, Socinians, and many others). Unitarians hold only the highest regard for Jesus but refuse to bind that regard to a Trinitarian metaphysics. In general, their views of the religious life have been prophetic of liberal thought. Today there are numbers of liberal Christian ministers who are Unitarian in thought but not in name. The British and Foreign Unitarian Association dates formally to 1825. Manchester College, Oxford, was claimed Unitarian. Leading theologians were Joseph Priestly (1733-1804), James Martineau (1805-1900), James Drummond and J. E. Carpenter. American Unitarianism wis given expression in King's Chapel, Boston (1785), in a number of associations, in Meaddville Theological School (1844) and Harvard Divinity School (the chief seat of the movement prior to 1878). Channing (1780-1842) and Theodore Parker (1810-1860) directed the movement into wider liberal channels. -- V.F.
unknowable ::: “The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made.” The Life Divine
Unmanifest ::: Whatever the manifestation spiritual or material or other may be, it has behind it something that is beyond itself, and even if we reached the highest possible heights of manifested existence there would be still beyond that even an Unmanifested from which it came. The Unmanifested Supreme is beyond all de®nition and description by mind or speech; no de®nition the mind can make, af®rmative or negative, can be at all expressive of it or adequate. To the Mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunya), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of Silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind's approach to it, not That itself; impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not the true essence or nature (swarupa) of the Eternal and In®nite. Even the words Eternal and In®nite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 189-90
Valid: In the terminology of Carnap, a sentence (or class of sentences) is valid if it is a consequence of the null class of sentences, contra-valid if every sentence is a consequence of it. The notion of consequence here refers to a full set of primitive formulas and rules of inference for the language or logistic system (q.v.) in question, known as c-rules, and including (in general) non-effective rules. If the notion of consequence is restricted to depend only on the d-rules -- i.e., the subclass of the c-rules which are effective -- it is then called d-consequence or derivability, and the terms corresponding to valid and contravalid are demonstrable and refutable respectively.
Variable: A letter occurring in a mathematical or logistic formula and serving, not as a name of a particular, but as an ambiguous name of ¦any one of a class of things -- this class being known as the range of the variable, and the members of the class as values of the variable.
Vedanta: The best known and most popular formulation of Hindu mystic philosophy, which teaches that the phenomenal world is mere illusion and has only seeming reality, as have also the apparent individual selves of the world, and there is but one self, Brahman-Atman; he who knows “that, soul art thou,” attains moksha and is released from the wheel of existence.
Veda, plural Vedas: (Skr. knowledge) Collectively the ancient voluminous, sacred literature of India (in bulk prior to 1000 B.C.), composed of Rigveda (hymns to gods), Samaveda (priests' chants), Yajurveda (sacrificial formulae), and Atharvaveda (magical chants), which among theosophic speculations contain the first philosophic insights. Generally recognized as an authority even in philosophy, extended and supplemented later by sutras (q.v.) and various accessory textbooks on grammar, astronomy, medicine, etc., called Vedangas ("members of the Veda") and the philosophical treatises, such as the Upanishads (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Vedas, dating from between 1400-1000 BC, consisting of formulas &
Veda: The generic name for the most ancient sacred literature of the Hindus, consisting of the four collections called (1) Rig Veda, hymns to gods, (2) Sama Veda, priests’ chants, (3) Yajur Veda, sacrificial formulae in prose, and (4) Atharva Veda, magical chants; each Veda is divided into two broad divisions, viz. (1) Mantra, hymns, and (2) Brahmana, precepts, which include (a) Aranyakas, theology, and (b) Upanishads, philosophy; the Vedas are classified as revealed literature; they contain the first philosophical insights and are regarded as the final authority; tradition makes Vyasa the compiler and arranger of the Vedas in their present form; the Vedic period is conservatively estimated to have begun about 1500 to 1000 B.C.
Vidhi: Sanskrit for rule, formula, sacred precept or scripture.
VisiCalc "application, tool, business, history" /vi'zi-calk/ The first {spreadsheet} program, conceived in 1978 by {Dan Bricklin}, while he was an MBA student at Harvard Business School. Inspired by a demonstration given by {Douglas Engelbart} of a {point-and-click} {user interface}, Bricklin set out to design an {application} that would combine the intuitiveness of pencil and paper calculations with the power of a {programmable pocket calculator}. Bricklin's design was based on the (paper) financial spreadsheet, a kind of document already used in business planning. (Some of Bricklin's notes for VisiCalc were scribbled on the back of a spreadsheet pad.) VisiCalc was probably not the first application to use a spreadsheet model, but it did have a number of original features, all of which continue to be fundamental to spreadsheet software. These include {point-and-type} editing, {range} {replication} and formulas that update automatically with changes to other {cells}. VisiCalc is widely credited with creating the sudden demand for desktop computers that helped fuel the {microcomputer} boom of the early 1980s. Thousands of business people with little or no technical expertise found that they could use VisiCalc to create sophisticated financial programs. This makes VisiCalc one of the first {killer apps}. {Dan Bricklin's Site (http://bricklin.com/visicalc.htm)}. (2003-07-05)
Watson, John Broadus: (1878-1958) American psychologist and leading exponent of Behaviorism (see Behaviorism), studied and served as Instructor at the University of Chicago, and was appointed Professor of Experimental Psychology at Johns Hopkins University 1908 where he served until 1920. Since then he engaged in the advertising business in New York City. The program for a behavioristic psychology employed the objective methods of the biological sciences and excluded the introspective method of earlier psychology; it is formulated by Watson in "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," Psychological Review XX (1913), and Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1914. -- L.W.
Weber-Fechner Law: Basic law of psychophysics which expresses in quantitative terms the relation between the intensity of a stimulus and the intensity of the resultant sensation. E. H. Weber applying the method of "just noticeable difference" in experiments involving weight discrimination found that the ability to discriminate two stimuli depends not on the absolute difference between the two stimuli but on their relative intensities and suggested the hypothesis that for each sense there is a constant expressing the relative intensities of stimuli producing a just noticeable difference of sensation. Fechner, also employing the method of just perceptible difference, arrived at the formula that the sensation varies with the logarithm of the stimulus: S = C log R where S represents the intensity of the sensation, R that of the stimulus and C a constant which varies for the different senses and from individual to individual and even for the same individual at different times. -- L.W.
Whatever verbal or ideative logic one may bring to support it, this way of seeing the universe explains nothing ; it only erects a mental formula of the inexplicable. It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chlt-Sbakri, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. The other side was developed by the Shakta Tantrics. The two together, the Vedantlc and the
Where a formula contains a variable, say x, as a free variable, the meaning of the formula is thought of as depending on the meaning of x. If the formula contains no other free variables than x, then it acquires a particular meaning when x is given a value -- i.e., when a name of some one value of x is substituted for all free occurrences of x in the formula -- or, what comes to the same thing for this purpose, when the free occurrences of x are taken as denoting some one value.
Where a particular (Interpreted) system does not contain symbols for formulas, it may be desirable to employ Gödel's device for associating (positive integral) numbers with formulas, and to consider the relation between a number and that which the associated formula denotes. This we shall call the numerical name relation and distinguish it from the relation between a formula and that which it denotes by calling the latter the semantical name relation.
While the algebra of classes can be set up as an independent logistic system, we shall here describe it instead by reference to the functional calculus of first order (§ 3), using two monadic functional constants, ∨ and ∧ and an infinite list of monadic functional variables F1, G1, H1, . . . corresponding in order to the class variables a, b, c, . . . respectively. Given any expression A of the algebra of classes, the corresponding formula A‡ of the functional calculus is obtained by replacing complementation, logical sum, and logical product respectively by negation, inclusive disjunction, and conjunction, and at the same time replacing ∨, ∧, a, b, c, . . . respectively by ∨(x), ∧(x), F1(x), G1(x), H1(x), . . . . Given any formula A = B of the algebra of classes the corresponding formula of the functional calculus is A‡ ≡x B‡. Given any formula A ≠ B of the algebra of classes, the corresponding formula of the functional calculus is ∼[A‡ ≡x B‡]. A formula C is a theorem of the algebra of classes if and only if the inference from (x)∨(x) and (x)∼∧(x) to C‡ (where C‡ corresponds to C) is a valid inference of the functional calculus. The inference from premisses D1, D2, . . ., Dn to a conclusion C is a valid inference of the algebra of classes if and only if the inference from (x)∨(x), (x)∼∧(x), D1‡, D2‡, . . . , Dn‡ to C‡ is a valid inference of the functional calculus.
With the aid of Gödel's device of representing sequences of primitive symbols and sequences of formulas by means of numbers, it is possible to give a more exact definition of the notion of effectiveness by making it correspond to that of recursiveness (q. v.) of numerical functions. E.g., a criterion for recognizing primitive formulas is effective if it determines a general recursive monadic function of natural numbers whose value is 0 when the argument is the number of a primitive formula, 1 for any other natural number as argument. The adequacy of this technical definition to represent the intuitive notion of effectiveness as described above is not immediately clear, but is placed beyond any real doubt by developments for details of which the reader is referred to Hilbert-Bernays and Turing (see references below).
W. V. Quine, Mathematical Logic, New York, 1940. Logic, symbolic, or mathematical logic, or logistic, is the name given to the treatment of formal logic by means of a formalized logical language or calculus whose purpose is to avoid the ambiguities and logical inadequacy of ordinary language. It is best characterized, not as a separate subject, but as a new and powerful method in formal logic. Foreshadowed by ideas of Leibniz, J. H. Lambert, and others, it had its substantial historical beginning in the Nineteenth Century algebra of logic (q. v.), and received its contemporary form at the hands of Frege, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, and others. Advantages of the symbolic method are greater exactness of formulation, and power to deal with formally more complex material. See also logistic system. -- A. C.
Zaotar: Ancient Persian for caller. Priest-magician who invokes the gods by reciting ritual formulas and improvised chants.
Zermelo Fränkel set theory "mathematics" A {set theory} with the {axioms} of {Zermelo set theory} (Extensionality, Union, Pair-set, Foundation, Restriction, Infinity, Power-set) plus the Replacement {axiom schema}: If F(x,y) is a {formula} such that for any x, there is a unique y making F true, and X is a set, then {F x : x in X} is a set. In other words, if you do something to each element of a set, the result is a set. An important but controversial {axiom} which is NOT part of ZF theory is the {Axiom of Choice}. (1995-04-10)
Zermelo set theory "mathematics" A {set theory} with the following set of {axioms}: Extensionality: two sets are equal if and only if they have the same elements. Union: If U is a set, so is the union of all its elements. Pair-set: If a and b are sets, so is {a, b}. Foundation: Every set contains a set disjoint from itself. Comprehension (or Restriction): If P is a {formula} with one {free variable} and X a set then {x: x is in X and P(x)}. is a set. Infinity: There exists an {infinite set}. Power-set: If X is a set, so is its {power set}. Zermelo set theory avoids {Russell's paradox} by excluding sets of elements with arbitrary properties - the Comprehension axiom only allows a property to be used to select elements of an existing set. {Zermelo Fränkel set theory} adds the Replacement axiom. [Other axioms?] (1995-03-30)
z-test ::: The statistical formula to determine the z-score of a particular raw score.
KEYS (10k)
14 Sri Aurobindo
3 The Mother
2 Sri Ramakrishna
1 T S Eliot
1 Thomas Wolfe
1 Robert Anton Wilson
1 Ludwig Boltzmann
1 Leonard Susskind
1 John Steinbeck
1 H P Lovecraft
1 Howard Gardner
1 Fyodor Dostoevsky
1 Friedrich Schiller
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Formula of devotion of Mahayanist Buddhism
1 Flannery O'Connor
1 Eknath Easwaran
1 Charles S Peirce
1 Aleister Crowley?
1 Jorge Luis Borges
1 Aleister Crowley
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
31 Anonymous
16 Martin Sorrell
12 Sri Aurobindo
10 Albert Einstein
8 Friedrich Nietzsche
7 William James
7 Carl Jung
6 Stephen King
6 Lewis Hamilton
5 Peter Thiel
5 Norman Vincent Peale
5 Michelle Obama
5 Israelmore Ayivor
5 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5 Cheryl Strayed
5 Bernie Ecclestone
5 Anton Chekhov
5 Alain de Botton
4 Warren Buffett
4 Richard Simmons
1:The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky,#KEYS
2:Honour to the high and sublime excellence of wisdom! ~ Formula of devotion of Mahayanist Buddhism, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
3:The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, -- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
4:The human Guru whispers the sacred formula into the ear. The Divine Guru breathes the spirit into the soul. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
5:A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Divine Body, #KEYS
6:Divine incarnations and those that are the Lord's own -- their love is not made up of scriptural formula, it springs from within. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
7:Mechanical Nature is only a lower truth; it is the formula of an inferior phenomenal action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of Secrets, #KEYS
8:A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,
Compressing Nature into a formula. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#KEYS
9:Material existence and earthly activities are not the whole scope of our personal becoming or the whole formula of the cosmos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Works, Devotion and Knowledge, #KEYS
10:S = k log W
The formula for entropy of a system. Boltzmann committed suicide after failing to convince contemporary scientists of the validity of the formula. Grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.
~ Ludwig Boltzmann, Epitaph,#KEYS
11:The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula. ~ Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, #KEYS
12:The Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer and all-embracing Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
13:The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
14:The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked ~ T S Eliot, #KEYS
15:It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. (402) ~ Charles S Peirce, #KEYS
16:In the Confucian tradition is a simple formula that appeals to me deeply: 'If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.' I urge everyone to reflect deeply on these words, as simple as they are profound. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #KEYS
17:'Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman' is the triple formula of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of self-manifestation in three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its self-view as the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the cosmos.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 01: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe, The Supreme Truth-Consciousness [149] [T1],#KEYS
18:The formula of the Cup is not so well suited for Evocations, and the magical Hierarchy is not involved in the same way; for the Cup being passive rather than active, it is not fitting for the magician to use it in respect of anything but the Highest. In practical working it consequently means little but prayer, and that prayer the 'prayer of silence.'
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formuale of the Elemental Weapons [148],#KEYS
19:If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story. ~ John Steinbeck, #KEYS
20:Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, #KEYS
21:Light came and went and came again, the great plume of the fountain pulsed and winds of April sheeted it across the Square in a rainbow gossamer of spray. The fire department horses drummed on the floors with wooden stomp, most casually, and with dry whiskings of their clean, coarse tails. The street cars ground into the Square from every portion of the compass and halted briefly like wound toys in their familiar quarter-hourly formula. A dray, hauled by a boneyard nag, rattled across the cobbles on the other side before his father's shop. The courthouse bell boomed out its solemn warning of immediate three, and everything was just the same as it had always been. ~ Thomas Wolfe, The Lost Boy, #KEYS
22:The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their downfall: in the labyrinth, in hardness towards oneself and others, in experiment; their delight lies in self-mastery: asceticism is with them nature, need, instinct. The difficult task they consider a privilege; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation... Knowledge - a form of asceticism. - They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not exclude their being the cheerfullest, the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second. - The second type: they are the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security; they are the noble warriors, with the king above all as the highest formula of warrior, judge, and upholder of the law. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, #KEYS
23:And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world~where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again~each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, 'Know thyself,' is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every 'thou' on earth is the center of this world, in the sense of that formula quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as 'an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.' ~ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology, #KEYS
24:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #KEYS
25:Abrahadabra is a word that first publicly appeared in The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema . Its author, Aleister Crowley, described it as the Word of the Aeon, which signifieth The Great Work accomplished. This is in reference to his belief that the writing of Liber Legis (another name for The Book of the Law) heralded a new Aeon for mankind that was ruled by the godRa-Hoor-Khuit (a form of Horus). Abrahadabra is, therefore, the magical formula of this new age. It is not to be confused with the Word of the Law of the Aeon, which is Thelema, meaning Will. ... Abrahadabra is also referred to as the Word of Double Power. More specifically, it represents the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm
represented by the pentagram and the hexagram, the rose and the cross, the circle and the square, the 5 and the 6 (etc.), as also called the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of ones Holy Guardian Angel. In Commentaries (1996), Crowley says that the word is a symbol of the establishment of the pillar or phallus of the Macrocosm...in the void of the Microcosm.
~ Wikipedia,#KEYS
26:But before entering into the details of I. A. O. as a magical formula it should be remarked that it is essentially the formula of Yoga or meditation; in fact, of elementary mysticism in all its branches. In beginning a meditation practice, there is always a quiet pleasure, a gentle natural growth; one takes a lively interest in the work; it seems easy; one is quite pleased to have started. This stage represents Isis. Sooner or later it is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work. The simplest and easiest acts become almost impossible to perform. Such impotence fills the mind with apprehension and despair. The intensity of this loathing can hardly be understood by any person who has not experienced it. This is the period of Apophis.
It is followed by the arising not of Isis, but of Osiris. The ancient condition is not restored, but a new and superior condition is created, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death. The Alchemists themselves taught this same truth. The first matter of the work was base and primitive, though 'natural.' After passing through various stages the 'black dragon' appeared; but from this arose the pure and perfect gold
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formula of I. A. O. [158-159],#KEYS
27:Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help; we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation, fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty, or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not. The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
28:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?
Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?
Poets, when they write poems...
Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!
What does "inspired" mean?
It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.
Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.
Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.
Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#KEYS
29:The general characteristics and attributions of these Grades are indicated by their correspondences on the Tree of Life, as may be studied in detail in the Book 777.
Student. -- His business is to acquire a general intellectual knowledge of all systems of attainment, as declared in the prescribed books. (See curriculum in Appendix I.) {231}
Probationer. -- His principal business is to begin such practices as he my prefer, and to write a careful record of the same for one year.
Neophyte. -- Has to acquire perfect control of the Astral Plane.
Zelator. -- His main work is to achieve complete success in Asana and Pranayama. He also begins to study the formula of the Rosy Cross.
Practicus. -- Is expected to complete his intellectual training, and in particular to study the Qabalah.
Philosophus. -- Is expected to complete his moral training. He is tested in Devotion to the Order.
Dominus Liminis. -- Is expected to show mastery of Pratyahara and Dharana.
Adeptus (without). -- is expected to perform the Great Work and to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
Adeptus (within). -- Is admitted to the practice of the formula of the Rosy Cross on entering the College of the Holy Ghost.
Adeptus (Major). -- Obtains a general mastery of practical Magick, though without comprehension.
Adeptus (Exemptus). -- Completes in perfection all these matters. He then either ("a") becomes a Brother of the Left Hand Path or, ("b") is stripped of all his attainments and of himself as well, even of his Holy Guardian Angel, and becomes a babe of the Abyss, who, having transcended the Reason, does nothing but grow in the womb of its mother. It then finds itself a
Magister Templi. -- (Master of the Temple): whose functions are fully described in Liber 418, as is this whole initiation from Adeptus Exemptus. See also "Aha!". His principal business is to tend his "garden" of disciples, and to obtain a perfect understanding of the Universe. He is a Master of Samadhi. {232}
Magus. -- Attains to wisdom, declares his law (See Liber I, vel Magi) and is a Master of all Magick in its greatest and highest sense.
Ipsissimus. -- Is beyond all this and beyond all comprehension of those of lower degrees. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
30:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.
And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga,#KEYS
31:the process of unification, the perfecting our one's instrumental being, the help one needs to reach the goal :::
If we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavor.
As you pursue this labor of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. ... It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us [the psychic being], to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perfection and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realize. This discovery and realization should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
~ The Mother, On Education, [T1],#KEYS
32:There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge. This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#KEYS
33: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
34:In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, 'Forth now and push forward also in other fields.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
35:CHAPTER XIII
OF THE BANISHINGS: AND OF THE PURIFICATIONS.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The wand is not a wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.
That is a mere logical commonplace: in magick one must go much farther than this. One finds one's analogy in electricity. If insulation is imperfect, the whole current goes back to earth. It is useless to plead that in all those miles of wire there is only one-hundredth of an inch unprotected. It is no good building a ship if the water can enter, through however small a hole.
That first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.
If one littlest thought intrude upon the mind of the Mystic, his concentration is absolutely destroyed; and his consciousness remains on exactly the same level as the Stockbroker's. Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother. If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it.> {101}
The Magician must therefore take the utmost care in the matter of purification, "firstly", of himself, "secondly", of his instruments, "thirdly", of the place of working. Ancient Magicians recommended a preliminary purification of from three days to many months. During this period of training they took the utmost pains with diet. They avoided animal food, lest the elemental spirit of the animal should get into their atmosphere. They practised sexual abstinence, lest they should be influenced in any way by the spirit of the wife. Even in regard to the excrements of the body they were equally careful; in trimming the hair and nails, they ceremonially destroyed> the severed portion. They fasted, so that the body itself might destroy anything extraneous to the bare necessity of its existence. They purified the mind by special prayers and conservations. They avoided the contamination of social intercourse, especially the conjugal kind; and their servitors were disciples specially chosen and consecrated for the work.
In modern times our superior understanding of the essentials of this process enables us to dispense to some extent with its external rigours; but the internal purification must be even more carefully performed. We may eat meat, provided that in doing so we affirm that we eat it in order to strengthen us for the special purpose of our proposed invocation.> {102}
By thus avoiding those actions which might excite the comment of our neighbours we avoid the graver dangers of falling into spiritual pride.
We have understood the saying: "To the pure all things are pure", and we have learnt how to act up to it. We can analyse the mind far more acutely than could the ancients, and we can therefore distinguish the real and right feeling from its imitations. A man may eat meat from self-indulgence, or in order to avoid the dangers of asceticism. We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose.
It is ceremonially desirable to seal and affirm this mental purity by Ritual, and accordingly the first operation in any actual ceremony is bathing and robing, with appropriate words. The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous to antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the fame of mind suitable to that one thought.
A similar operation takes place in the preparation of every instrument, as has been seen in the Chapter devoted to that subject. In the preparation of theplace of working, the same considerations apply. We first remove from that place all objects; and we then put into it those objects, and only those {103} objects, which are necessary. During many days we occupy ourselves in this process of cleansing and consecration; and this again is confirmed in the actual ceremony.
The cleansed and consecrated Magician takes his cleansed and consecrated instruments into that cleansed and consecrated place, and there proceeds to repeat that double ceremony in the ceremony itself, which has these same two main parts. The first part of every ceremony is the banishing; the second, the invoking. The same formula is repeated even in the ceremony of banishing itself, for in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper.
In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that force ... ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
36:[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
37: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:Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 2:Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 3:Formula for success: Underpromise and overachieve. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove 4:Formula for success: under promise and over deliver. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove 5:We've got a wonderful economic formula in this country. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 6:There is no perfect mathematical formula for pricing a business. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 7:Being your true self is the most effective formula for success there is. ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 8:To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 9:The formula & 10:There is one guaranteed formula for failure, and that is to try to please everyone. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 11:There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 12:People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 13:A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 14:Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 15:The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 16:The question is not whether the formula for success will work, but rather whether the person will work the formula. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 17:Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings ~ arthur-rubinstein, @wisdomtrove 18:The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove 19:Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 20:If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 21:The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 22:[A formula for answering controversial letters - without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 23:The formula of life is simple. It is the formula of giving - giving courage, attention, peace, love and comfort to yourself and the society. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 24:Then, as horizons step, Or noons report away,Without the formula of sound, It passes, and we stay:A quality of loss Affecting our content. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 25:Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form. ~ john-wheeler, @wisdomtrove 26:The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove 27:I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 28:Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 29:To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 30:We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 31:No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That's what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can't understand moats. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 32:It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bull-fighters. It's not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 33:By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 34:There is no path to truth. Truth must be discovered, but there is no formula for its discovery. What is formulated is not true. You must set out on the uncharted sea, and the uncharted sea is yourself. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 35:Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 36:In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove 37:In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,... [t]he rich man is usually & 38:My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself – because it was. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 39:Joy is the wild card of life; it supersedes every other formula for success. If you can find a way to create joy, you can rise beyond all external factors. If you can play at whatever you are doing, you are the master of your life. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 40:... no formula for success [exists] except, perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings." "I accept life unconditionally. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition. ~ arthur-rubinstein, @wisdomtrove 41:Women do not win formula one races, because they simply are not strong enough to resist the G-forces. In the boardroom, it is different. I believe women are better able to marshal their thoughts than men and because they are less egotistical they make fewer assumptions. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 42:To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running, and if you have a good team around you and more than a fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can't guarantee it just by following someone else's formula. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 43:Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 44:There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts. It is this: Have as your objective the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage. There is a magic formula for avoiding conflicts. It is this: Be concerned that you do not offend, not that you are not offended. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 45:Jesus Christ is the greatest man in the history of the world. And to me, he's the greatest person in the history of mankind and the universe. We can't prove it, I can't put it in a test tube or in an astronomical formula, but by faith I believe it because the Bible teaches it. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 46:When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say & 47:In my relationship with God, I've learned that if I follow a & 48:If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 49:The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 50:An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 51:Vipassana arises as you pay awareness to the inner and outer experience unfolding at the present moment. Vipassana is not associated with any rigid formula or methods. Whenever you are aware of your mental or physical feelings like tension in the muscles, movement of limbs, stiffness, heat or cold, you have begun to develop special understanding of realities. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 52:We love Formula One and think Formula One's great. But we think Formula E is different. We would be making a big mistake if we tried to compete with Formula One and be similar to Formula One, we have to be radically different to Formula One to have a chance of survival. I don't mean survival by beating Formula One but co-existing complimentary to Formula One. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 53:If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 54:Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 55:It is for these reasons that I believe we must expand day-care centers and provide other assistance which I have recommended to the Congress. At present, the total facilities of all the licensed day-care centers in the Nation can take care of only 185,000 children. Nearly 500,000 children under 12 must take care of themselves while their mothers work. This, it seems to me, is a formula for disaster. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 56:The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 57:The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 58:The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 59:For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 60:There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 61:If you set your bar at & 62:Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:I try not to do anything by formula. ~ Sean Lennon, #NFDB
2:Under each formula lies a corpse. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
3:The best formula for revenge is success. ~ Kid Rock, #NFDB
4:There is no formula to relationships. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
5:From the Formula, Form the Familiar. ~ Justin Sirois, #NFDB
6:Your life comes down to this formula: ~ Darren Hardy, #NFDB
7:Make it a simple formula for your life. ~ Emilie Barnes, #NFDB
8:Follow your passion. Magic has no formula. ~ Tina Sharkey, #NFDB
9:Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
10:Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. ~ Ernst Haas, #NFDB
11:Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
12:He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
13:Formula for success: Underpromise and overachieve. ~ Tom Peters, #NFDB
14:Formula 1 would be a paradise without the media. ~ Kimi Raikkonen, #NFDB
15:Formula for success: under promise and over deliver. ~ Tom Peters, #NFDB
16:Formula One has been the backdrop of my life. ~ Tamara Ecclestone, #NFDB
17:In Spain there were no TV rights for Formula One. ~ Fernando Alonso, #NFDB
18:I truly don't have any formula for the choices I make. ~ Javier Bardem, #NFDB
19:It would be quite good to be a Formula 1 racecar driver. ~ Rupert Grint, #NFDB
20:Now it's not D.T.F., It's now, diapers, tantrums and formula. ~ Pauly D, #NFDB
21:The danger is, you have a formula and you just repeat it. ~ Martin Parr, #NFDB
22:my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There ~ Lin Yutang, #NFDB
23:We've got a wonderful economic formula in this country. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
24:Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
25:I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. ~ Thelonious Monk, #NFDB
26:I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
27:All the memory methods work with my formula: LTM + STM = MTM. ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
28:The basic formula of all sin is: frustrated or neglected love. ~ Franz Werfel, #NFDB
29:I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
30:That was the set formula. Meet. Eat. Fuck. Those days are gone. ~ Fabian Black, #NFDB
31:I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working. ~ Chris Daughtry, #NFDB
32:I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
33:Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula Cream - you can use it everywhere. ~ Minnie Driver, #NFDB
34:As far as advice to potential teenage idols, there is no formula. ~ Bobby Sherman, #NFDB
35:There is no perfect mathematical formula for pricing a business. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
36:Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty ~ Alison Wong, #NFDB
37:What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
38:Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math. ~ Daniel Pinkwater, #NFDB
39:I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life. ~ Debbie Harry, #NFDB
40:By using formula in filmmaking we are admitting that film is not art. ~ Signe Baumane, #NFDB
41:My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
42:Virtual Reality for Formula One could be fantastic - driving the car! ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
43:Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions. ~ William James, #NFDB
44:The formula has been wiped completely from servers, backups, everywhere. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
45:The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
46:There is not a formula for the way that God heals. There's not a timetable. ~ Amy Grant, #NFDB
47:If there was any magic formula, it was getting to pitch every fourth day. ~ Sandy Koufax, #NFDB
48:Patience in the mind and dynamism in action is the right formula. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
49:The formula ‘two and two make five’ is not without its attractions. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
50:The Lord has never restricted Himself to move by any predetermined formula ~ Rick Joyner, #NFDB
51:The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke. The ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
52:Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God. ~ Maria Mitchell, #NFDB
53:I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips. ~ Bill Griffith, #NFDB
54:I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
55:The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky,#NFDB
56:A Divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
57:Formula for success: Rise early, work hard, strike oil. —J. Paul Getty H ~ Gregory Zuckerman, #NFDB
58:It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
59:To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
60:[Red Sox and Blue Jays] formula's been they have such durability in the bullpen. ~ Joe Maddon, #NFDB
61:the combined wonderful-company-at-a-fair-price strategy the Magic Formula. ~ Tobias E Carlisle, #NFDB
62:War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by fixed formula ~ George S Patton, #NFDB
63:Worrying about things beyond your control is a pretty good formula for illness. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
64:I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience. ~ Greg Lake, #NFDB
65:I think 'Hero' is not a real martial arts movie; it is not about violence, or formula. ~ Jet Li, #NFDB
66:Ive just got to do a good job and stay on in Formula One for as long as I can. ~ Kimi Raikkonen, #NFDB
67:Master a formula and then learn a new one: the power of learning quickly In ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
68:Anger is a big part of that formula, for passion is anger and love combined. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
69:Every NASCAR driver watches Formula One in the morning; they are well informed. ~ Mario Andretti, #NFDB
70:Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula. ~ William Bernbach, #NFDB
71:The formula for success is Cosmic Ordering, the formula for failure is worry. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
72:True. I’ve no formula I can work out for certain… emotions I feel around you. ~ Kerri Maniscalco, #NFDB
73:A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot, #NFDB
74:Honour to the high and sublime excellence of wisdom! ~ Formula of devotion of Mahayanist Buddhism, #NFDB
75:That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them. ~ Ben Horowitz, #NFDB
76:We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
77:Prayerize, visualize, actualize—that is the formula for successful imaging. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
78:Speeding around his own private racetrack in his own Formula One racing car. Some ~ David Walliams, #NFDB
79:The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
80:There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
81:There is no formula for happiness. Yet none of the formula of happiness are wrong. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
82:A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God. ~ Donald Knuth, #NFDB
83:If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
84:Those words are not a magical formula. They're not going to open my heart to you. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
85:If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that's good. ~ Joel Greenblatt, #NFDB
86:It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens. ~ Kurt Busiek, #NFDB
87:I was carrying Jackie Stewart's bag! Formula One was pretty much the same back then. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
88:In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
89:People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
90:Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
91:formula one drivers generally maintain a heart rate of around 175 bpm for hours on end. ~ Dave Grossman, #NFDB
92:I did 'Formula 51' because I got to run around Liverpool in a kilt, with golf clubs. ~ Samuel L Jackson, #NFDB
93:In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
94:We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
95:A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
96:Everything in Formula 1 has been sterilised now, the whole thing is controlled too much. ~ Nigel Mansell, #NFDB
97:There is no formula that I'm aware of for being a successful or fulfilled woman today. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
98:There was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
99:The formula for a top-heavy aristocrat with a seventies man-perm could also describe a Poodle. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
100:A great life is not the result of a formula perfectly followed. Rather of a God wholly trusted. ~ Eric Ludy, #NFDB
101:The world is changing. And a lot of people in Formula One are starting to understand this. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
102:It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one. ~ Alan Rudolph, #NFDB
103:[Maurizio Arrivabene is quite a character] but only for himself and not for Formula One. ~ Bernie Ecclestone, #NFDB
104:We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion. ~ Benjamin Cardozo, #NFDB
105:Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
106:Evolution .. Just the right formula of science and comedy may get moviegoers through the door. ~ Ivan Reitman, #NFDB
107:It's such a simple formula: More Faith, Less Fear. Believe again and you will begin again. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
108:We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering. ~ Tullian Tchividjian, #NFDB
109:Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
110:Take more chances than you dare. You'll make more sales than you expect. That's the formula. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
111:As in any proper fairy tale, there's a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines. ~ Andrew Davidson, #NFDB
112:Everybody who knows Formula 1 knows McLaren and knows that it is the greatest team in Formula 1. ~ Sergio Perez, #NFDB
113:Prayer is no mere exercise of words or of the ears, it is no mere repetition of empty formula. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
114:Thus the blasphemy of the homosexual formula, for it denies Babalon and breeds devils in chaos. ~ Kenneth Grant, #NFDB
115:Baby formula contains three salts: magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride. ~ Mark Kurlansky, #NFDB
116:I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
117:nose-eyes-ears” is the formula I always teach my clients to employ when communicating with all dogs, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
118:Country music is not a formula it's a music with its own soul and I'm all about saving that soul! ~ Sammy Kershaw, #NFDB
119:I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements. ~ Piers Anthony, #NFDB
120:O mundo real é o terreno em que todo e qualquer grupo formula ou revoga leis como num grande jogo. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
121:There is no formula to making it to the NFL other than good fortune and and playing well in college. ~ Dante Hall, #NFDB
122:What the Sermon describes in a graphic manner, the Bhagavadgita reduces to a scientific formula. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
123:You may have heard of the six "P" formula. It says, "Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
124:Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
125:The formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. ~ Nancy Etcoff, #NFDB
126:Hard work and training. There's no secret formula. I lift heavy, work hard and aim to be the best. ~ Ronnie Coleman, #NFDB
127:Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
128:Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom. ~ Jimmy Greaves, #NFDB
129:No other formula gives your baby a better start in life except that stuff that comes out of you for free. ~ Tina Fey, #NFDB
130:The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
131:There is no formula. There are only confirmations to formulas which one has already discovered oneself. ~ Ernst Haas, #NFDB
132:TO be racing in Formula One with Mclaren has been the ultimate goal for me. It's a dream come true. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
133:Believe that all the resources you need are in your mind. That is a formula that really works. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
134:My formula for greatness is Amor fati: . . . not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
135:This is the idea that language is a disembodied object, along the lines of a mathematical formula. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
136:In to je moja formula: osnova so najboljše, sveže in naravne sestavine, in vedno kuhati z ljubeznijo. ~ James F Twyman, #NFDB
137:The greatest formula that can liberate, cleanse and elevate the mind is Rama-Name, the Name of Rama. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
138:Even if you know a character really well, there's no formula for what jokes will work and what won't. ~ Seth MacFarlane, #NFDB
139:I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through—then follow through.” —Sir Walter Scott ~ Pat Flynn, #NFDB
140:Quando uma empresa formula uma ideia, o processo é caótico. Não há um momento do tipo ‘ahá’”, disse Bezos. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
141:We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt. ~ Leon M Lederman, #NFDB
142:When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. ~ Leonard Bernstein, #NFDB
143:When you find the talent, it's always raw, and when you put the talent in the formula, you get the Knocks. ~ Wyclef Jean, #NFDB
144:As the cancellation of the German Grand Prix indicates, Germany is a terrible market for Formula One. ~ Bernie Ecclestone, #NFDB
145:Formula One is not just multinationals. It's also about national players wanting to get global coverage. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
146:Passion is an unmatched fuel. Add being happy to that and you have a wonderful formula for good health. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk, #NFDB
147:There is a Japanese proverb that describes my formula for success: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” You ~ Nick Vujicic, #NFDB
148:The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
149:There is no doubt that Formula 1 has the best risk management of any sport and any industry in the world. ~ Jackie Stewart, #NFDB
150:Following my muse has worked out pretty well so far. I can't see any reason to change the formula now. ~ Chris Van Allsburg, #NFDB
151:The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
152:the most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
153:The formula is simple: In any given situation, detach and ask, “What do I need to do to take care of myself? ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
154:The question is not whether the formula for success will work, but rather whether the person will work the formula. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
155:There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn’t some magical thing that just started happening. ~ Chad Kroeger, #NFDB
156:Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
157:To race Formula three is very high risk and I am not going to take a chance. Thank god I am not doing it! ~ Emerson Fittipaldi, #NFDB
158:If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
159:The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, -- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#NFDB
160:There's no right time to have kids and no perfect formula. The good news is there isn't a wrong way, either. ~ Natalie Massenet, #NFDB
161:Formula One was a very dangerous sport. It still is dangerous. But the danger factor is also the exciting part. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
162:I can't really attribute my success onscreen to any formula and suggest you "do this or that" to make it as an actor. ~ Ice Cube, #NFDB
163:On a piece of paper, write down the formula for our human reaction: S-P-R This stands for Stimulus—Pause—Response. ~ Tom Hopkins, #NFDB
164:Success does not come from a formula. It comes from persistent effort and a number of small steps you perform daily. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
165:There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: Beat it to death if it succeeds. ~ Ernie Kovacs, #NFDB
166:There's no way to learn how to write a hit song. There's no formula for it. You just have to have it inside of you. ~ Al Jardine, #NFDB
167:When you start explaining why something's funny or finding a formula for it I think it loses some of its funniness. ~ Betty White, #NFDB
168:Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation. ~ Clive James, #NFDB
169:I should probably confess that I get bored easily, which explains my reluctance to work with formula, tropes, whatever. ~ Kit Reed, #NFDB
170:Shopping for formula and smashed peas while wearing tactical gear was quite possibly his latest favorite pastime. ~ Cristin Harber, #NFDB
171:All the big artists I talk to say that they are trapped in a formula and they are looking for the music of tomorrow. ~ David Guetta, #NFDB
172:Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
173:don’t expect a magic formula that’ll make books fall out of your head and automatically give you a wide readership. ~ David Morrell, #NFDB
174:It is amazing how many drivers, even at the Formula One Level, think that the brakes are for slowing the car down. ~ Mario Andretti, #NFDB
175:True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
176:Long ago her father taught her an old formula, one that converts cricket chirps per minute into degrees Fahrenheit. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
177:Once you think you have the formula for good design, you’re dead. You cease to be a good designer at that point. ~ Michael Vanderbyl, #NFDB
178:That formula—Bible reading and prayer—will result in the same increase in faith for anyone willing to trust God. How ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
179:And, so yeah, I'll always want to work in independent films because you're not forced into a category or a formula. ~ Terrence Howard, #NFDB
180:A lot of people criticize Formula 1 as an unnecessary risk. But what would life be like if we only did what is necessary? ~ Niki Lauda, #NFDB
181:Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
182:The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people. ~ Tom Peters, #NFDB
183:When a script focuses on being a film instead of a formula, it can transcend the ghetto of its genre.
-Mike Schmidt ~ Graham Elwood,#NFDB
184:Prayer is not a magic formula, but verbal communication with the sovereign God of creation. Examine your own prayer habits. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
185:Here is a good revolution in conscious and a good salvation formula for mankind: Get rid of religion, keep the God! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
186:Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
187:There's a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it's half as long as the time you've been together. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
188:"An intellectual formula never has been and never will be discovered which could embrace the abundant possibilities of life." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
189:As a Formula One driver, you dream about winning your first race all your life. I am desperate to know what it feels like. ~ Sergio Perez, #NFDB
190:Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
191:If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
192:The man who came to his friend to ask for bread did not recite some formula request; he pleaded for what he needed. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
193:There is no perfect ending to a relationship. No magic formula. Just a silent scream as they rip your fucking heart out. ~ Michael Faudet, #NFDB
194:[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
195:The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
196:When we place more value on what other people think of us than on what we think of ourselves, it’s a formula for misery. ~ Suzanne Selfors, #NFDB
197:I genuinely loved school, where the formula for success was straightforward. Study and you get good grades. Simple, safe. ~ Rachel Friedman, #NFDB
198:A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Divine Body, #NFDB
199:The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental. ~ Norman Davies, #NFDB
200:Everybody is completely different. I think there is no formula for filmmaking. Everybody finds their own way of doing things. ~ Mia Wasikowska, #NFDB
201:I don't like to stick to one formula. That gets boring. I get bored, so I want to try different ways of getting inside something. ~ Thomas Jane, #NFDB
202:¿No podríamos seguir siendo amigos?... -Seguro que muere un hada cada vez que en algún lugar del mundo se formula esta pregunta. ~ Kerstin Gier, #NFDB
203:The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
204:Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do. As ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
205:My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. ~ Cary Grant, #NFDB
206:There is no one-size-fits-all formula. You are unique. Your situation and your aspirations are unique.” #TheImageOfLeadership ~ Sylvie Di Giusto, #NFDB
207:this is a great formula for moving in the direction of any calling: find what you love and what the world needs, then combine them. ~ Jeff Goins, #NFDB
208:Everything you should be an expression of your purpose. If an activity doesn't fit that formula, you wouldn't work on it. Period. ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
209:for the irreducible case with all three roots real, there is just one positive root; that is, the root given by the Cardan formula ~ Paul J Nahin, #NFDB
210:I've found a formula for avoiding these exaggerated fears of age; you take care of every day - let the calendar take care of the years. ~ Ed Wynn, #NFDB
211:There can be no formula in arts. Formulas are for factory mass productions. There are no discoveries in already discovered formulas. ~ Signe Baumane, #NFDB
212:the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, #NFDB
213:God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
214:There is no necessity for a technique or formula for meditation. Inner feeling, or inner knowing, is the silent voice of inspiration. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
215:Number one, like yourself. Number two, you have to eat healthy. And number three, you've got to squeeze your buns. That's my formula. ~ Richard Simmons, #NFDB
216:The formula of life is simple. It is the formula of giving - giving courage, attention, peace, love and comfort to yourself and the society. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
217:The World Cup was a huge frustration because I had prepared really hard for it. But in the World Cup there is no formula, no recipe for success. ~ Kaka, #NFDB
218:Virality isn't luck. It's not magic. And it's not random. There's a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. ~ Jonah Berger, #NFDB
219:When I clicked into this idea of doing a band and examining a band as a dysfunctional family, I wanted to reverse that Rescue Me formula. ~ Denis Leary, #NFDB
220:Admiration from my readers inspire me, and the only 'formula' I believe in towards making a good writer is: 'to thine own self be true!' ~ Ashwin Sanghi, #NFDB
221:A formula for crafting a falsifiable hypothesis is: Falsifiable Hypothesis = [Specific Repeatable Action] will [Expected Measurable Outcome] ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
222:A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,
Compressing Nature into a formula. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#NFDB
223:Mechanical Nature is only a lower truth; it is the formula of an inferior phenomenal action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of Secrets, #NFDB
224:to have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
225:And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer. ~ E L Doctorow, #NFDB
226:Hearts are made of something much tougher. It's unbreakable, and you can reshape it anytime you like. Hearts are made to a secret formula. ~ Kerstin Gier, #NFDB
227:Hearts are made of something much tougher. It’s unbreakable, and you can reshape it anytime you like. Hearts are made to a secret formula. ~ Kerstin Gier, #NFDB
228:There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
229:Every time someone gives you a formula for what you should be and what you should do, you should know they’re giving you a pair of handcuffs. ~ Junot D az, #NFDB
230:The formula is simple - do more of what is working, do less of what isn't, and try on new behaviors to see if they produce better results. ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
231:A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that. ~ Chet Atkins, #NFDB
232:Here's a two step formula for handling stress. Step number one: Don't sweat the small stuff. Step number two: Remember it's all small stuff. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
233:High-end boutiques aren't putting small staple stores out of business. What's putting small staple stores out of business is formula retail. ~ Chicken John, #NFDB
234:How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
235:I'm delighted to be coming back to Formula 1 after a two-year break, and I'm grateful to Lotus Renault GP for offering me this opportunity. ~ Kimi Raikkonen, #NFDB
236:Then, as horizons step, Or noons report away,Without the formula of sound, It passes, and we stay:A quality of loss Affecting our content. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
237:A vital part of the happiness formula is self-discipline. Whoever conquers himself knows deep happiness that fills the heart with joy. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
238:Someone once told her there's a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it's half as long as the time you've been together. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
239:The Six Core Competencies do not define or offer a formula. Rather, they define structure driven by criteria for the elements that comprise it. ~ Larry Brooks, #NFDB
240:My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. —Cary Grant ~ Aleatha Romig, #NFDB
241:She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
242:We believe that the elements in the chemical formula of our creative work, problem, invention, and art, correspond to the challenges of our age. ~ El Lissitzky, #NFDB
243:And an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
244:The common belief that everyone can do anything if they just try hard enough is a formula for inefficiency at best and for complete failure at worst. ~ W J King, #NFDB
245:The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
246:What is full of redundancy or formula is predictably boring. What is free of all structure or discipline is randomly boring. In between lies art. ~ Wendy Carlos, #NFDB
247:The American success formula is first to get a home of your own, then to get a car of your own so you don't have to stay in that home of your own. ~ Sam Levenson, #NFDB
248:Then they ask, "Do you want Jesus to come into your heart?" Does it bother anyone that this formula or language is not found in the New Testament? ~ Paul Washer, #NFDB
249:If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me? ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
250:The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course. ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
251:Yesterday's success formula is often today's obsolete dogma ... We must continually challenge the past so that we can renew ourselves each day. ~ Sumantra Ghoshal, #NFDB
252:You know that the formula is askew when even if the formula is working, it's not; when even if everything's going right, something is wrong. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
253:Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
254:Do you have any ambitions outside racing? My main ambition at the moment, whether inside or outside racing, is to become Formula 1 World Champion. ~ Kimi Raikkonen, #NFDB
255:A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
256:Keeping the mind open to new ideas, not being too anxious about success, putting 100% effort and meditation is the formula for entrepreneurs. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
257:On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
258:El ocaso de los Dioses, Nietzsche formula tres tareas por las que se requieren educadores: hay que aprender a mirar, a pensar y a hablar y escribir. ~ Byung Chul Han, #NFDB
259:So, if we must give a general formula applicable to all kinds of soul, we must describe it as the first actuality [entelechy] of anatural organized body. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
260:The values, the programs, the formula, the determination, and the patriotism responsible for America's past success are still here to be tapped. ~ Michael Mandelbaum, #NFDB
261:Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. —JONAH BERGER ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
262:Formula 1 is a huge international phenomenon even if an otherwise car racing obsessed American public has always found Formula 1 to be a little weird. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
263:I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
264:I think everyone has a certain kind of formula in their life. When you deviate from that formula, you're going to fail big or you're gonna win big. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB
265:Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
266:The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
267:I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” –Herbert Bayard Swope ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
268:I failed to fulfill what should have been an interesting role. I couldn't take their formula and bring what I had, my humor, my ideas, and make it my own. ~ Dianne Wiest, #NFDB
269:Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists. ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
270:A formula for comedy is comedy equals tragedy plus time. A difficult or uncomfortable situation takes place, and then you laugh about it later down the road. ~ Brian Regan, #NFDB
271:With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive. ~ Rosa Luxemburg, #NFDB
272:I go to see grand prix every year, and I watch every race on TV for sure. I probably go to three or four CART races and three or four Formula One races. ~ Emerson Fittipaldi, #NFDB
273:The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don't have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child. ~ Larry Elder, #NFDB
274:a submarine skipper’s formula for success: temper aggression with reason and patience, and act decisively and tenaciously when the best move presented itself. ~ Craig DiLouie, #NFDB
275:For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
276:It is utterly implausible that a mathematical formula should make the future known to us, and those who think it can would once have believed in witchcraft. ~ Jacob Bernoulli, #NFDB
277:Making a television show is not like making Coca-Cola or Bacardi rum. The human element in our business prevents us from finding a successful formula every time. ~ Desi Arnaz, #NFDB
278:No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard. ~ Joaquin Sorolla, #NFDB
279:That's ally our life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
280:The First Prescription’s formula for success: Do whatever makes your inner light brighter. In other words, try to treat yourself and everyone else with love. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
281:To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
282:differential equations that can be solved in “closed form,” that is, by means of a formula for the unknown function f, are the exception rather than the rule, ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
283:Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism. ~ Henry Steele Commager, #NFDB
284:I think love is one of the most elusive things in the world. I don't know that there's a perfect formula for it and that's what makes the stories interesting. ~ Ashton Kutcher, #NFDB
285:Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB
286:Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
287:The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ~ William James, #NFDB
288:Art has a will of its own. It has nothing to do with the taste of the moment or what's expected of you. That's a formula for dead art, or fashionable art. ~ Helen Frankenthaler, #NFDB
289:How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
290:If we switched to Markov networks, we could use any logical formula as a template for Markov network features, and that would unify logic and graphical models. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
291:Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:
A quality of loss
Affecting our content. ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
292:What people tend to forget is the journey that I had getting to Formula One. There were plenty of years where I had to learn about losing and having bad races. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
293:In that - and that is my personal view - Singapore delivers the most value, as they think about Formula One as a complete entertainment event, on and off track. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
294:Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine. ~ Lance Secretan, #NFDB
295:The American Academy of Pediatrics officially supports breastfeeding, but receives about half a million dollars from Ross, manufacturers of Similac infant formula. ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
296:the Sermon on the Mount is God’s formula for revival. The Beatitudes are His recipe for His kingdom to come and His will to be done on the earth as it is in heaven. ~ Heidi Baker, #NFDB
297:The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section. ~ Barbara Bush, #NFDB
298:Why can’t music be magic? Aren’t spells just words you repeat? And what are songs? Lyrics that play over and over again. The words are like a formula.” All ~ Silvia Moreno Garcia, #NFDB
299:A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
300:The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
301:There are people who have figured out the exact, you know, Kanye West formula, the mix between "Graduation" and "808s," and were able to become more successful at it. ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
302:America cannot commit to go to war on behalf of 50 countries around the world because that is the formula that is one day going to break down and break out into war. ~ Pat Buchanan, #NFDB
303:I seem to like playing with form, and the superhero genre has an awful lot of formula to it. It has a lot of formula to it that I don't think it should be limited to. ~ Kurt Busiek, #NFDB
304:Lewis [Hamilton] is a hero in the UK. The British love Formula One. Sebastian (Vettel) is also not doing much for F1. People hardly recognize him on the street. ~ Bernie Ecclestone, #NFDB
305:There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later. ~ Jeff Dunham, #NFDB
306:We changed the names of our technical schools to colleges, we expanded the eligibility for HOPE scholarships for technical training, and we added some formula funding. ~ Roy Barnes, #NFDB
307:My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
308:The media has a formula, they have a blueprint for destroying Republican political officials they don't like. It's not gonna work on Trump. He doesn't fit that mold. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
309:Everyone asks me how I get my subjects to open up to me. There’s no formula to it. It’s just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people - of being yourself. ~ Mary Ellen Mark, #NFDB
310:The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
311:Tengo has an innate knack for precision in all realms, including correct punctuation and discovering the simplest possible formula necessary to solve a math problem. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
312:When I find a fashion formula I love, I tend to stick to it. There's nothing wrong with wearing a look over and over again, if it suits you and makes you feel great. ~ Adrienne Maloof, #NFDB
313:I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
314:Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
315:my whole career is based on the idea that the formula doesn't matter, the thing that counts is what you do with the formula; that is to say, it is a matter of style. ~ Raymond Chandler, #NFDB
316:I don't have a ready-made formula to apply when I embark on a new book, but my guiding principles are discipline, compassion and a sincere eagerness to understand myself. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
317:Labels don't mean anything to me. I'm trying to play as passionately as I'm able to. If they want to call that cool, that's fine. Just spell the name right, is the formula. ~ Lee Konitz, #NFDB
318:The chorus of disapproval is like one of those formula songs that seem to hit number one all the time. You know the tune in a moment and it begins to bore you in two. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
319:The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura. ~ Carl Schmitt, #NFDB
320:A feeling rose inside him, making him queasy, as though an elaborate formula he’d thought was perfect was now giving false results because of an unpredictable variable. ~ Keigo Higashino, #NFDB
321:Ideas can never be traced to any one source. They are tossed back and forth between people until the decision makers step in and choose what they think is a success formula. ~ Jack Kirby, #NFDB
322:Louis Kelso's formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too. ~ James J Kilpatrick, #NFDB
323:Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
324:Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
325:The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
326:Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. – Jim Shepley ~ David Pietrusza, #NFDB
327:For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan. ~ Chris Daughtry, #NFDB
328:I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear. ~ Margot Kidder, #NFDB
329:there is no formula to discovering went to say which one [yes or no]. There is only Jesus, doing as he sees his Father do, asking us to do as he does. Love God. Love people. ~ Emily P Freeman, #NFDB
330:The thing is, you can use for eight hours, and then as long as you take sixty-four hours off, you can go another eight hours without being addicted. It’s like a scientific formula. ~ Ann Hood, #NFDB
331:A big part of the Motown formula was, they took music and turned it into this sort of automotive assembly line. They were cranking out 10 songs a day in that studio, or more. ~ Mayer Hawthorne, #NFDB
332:Every song that has been a hit for me has been honest and truthful. I have to believe that same formula will work on this (television) show. It has to be believable and honest. ~ Reba McEntire, #NFDB
333:It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory. ~ David Stockman, #NFDB
334:La elocuencia de una exposición es directamente proporcional a la inteligencia de quien la formula, del mismo modo que credibilidad lo es a la estupidez de quien la recibe. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
335:My own tastes happen to be in tune with what the public wants. I think that's the reason my batting average is so high, not because I've discovered some brilliant formula. ~ Cameron Mackintosh, #NFDB
336:The true value of any dogma or belief lies in its ability to point beyond itself to a deeper reality which can not be readily articulated in a simple formula or expression. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
337:Life is a linear equation in which you can't cross multiply! If you think you can do it, you can do it. If you think you can't do it, you can't do it. It's a simple formula! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
338:The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
339:The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
340:Usually action films have a formula: good guy gets in trouble, his wife dies, friends have problems, so he goes to the mountain, learns martial arts, comes back, and kills the bad guy. ~ Jet Li, #NFDB
341:Gilbert White discovered the formula for complete happiness, but he died before making the announcement, leaving it for me to do so. It is to be very busy with the unimportant. ~ A Edward Newton, #NFDB
342:I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
343:In the rest of the world though, particularly in Europe, the most popular form of racing is not stock cars. It`s not NASCAR. It doesn`t look anything like NASCAR. It`s Formula 1. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
344:Material existence and earthly activities are not the whole scope of our personal becoming or the whole formula of the cosmos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Works, Devotion and Knowledge, #NFDB
345:The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
346:While there may be various tips, pointers, ingredients, and strategies to success, there is no one formula that always guarantees it other than to keep learning from failure itself. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
347:[Formula One] is entertainment and it competes with other entertainments - and not with other racing formats. It competes with people's time on a weekend. So you have to deliver. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
348:Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music. ~ Claude Debussy, #NFDB
349:The formula for success is every guy can make a difference for the entire team in whatever his role is. And to do it right, to get it right, is a critical factor in being successful. ~ Nick Saban, #NFDB
350:When we are born, we are studied, and deviations, if noxious to the species, are suppressed; good deviations are preserved. And furthermore, we bear our formula on our arm band! ~ Christina Stead, #NFDB
351:[Formula One racing looking after Jackie Stewart in 1968] was not so intense and, yes, it was much more dangerous - what was definitely different back then was the level of safety. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
352:It is not possible to have a one-size-fit-all formula for happiness. What works for one person may not work for another. Everyone has to choose his own methods to achieve happiness. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
353:«La elocuencia de una exposición es directamente proporcional a la inteligencia de quien la formula, del mismo modo que su credibilidad lo es a la estupidez de quien la recibe», ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
354:The kind of child our society resembles just now is one whose intelligence far exceeds his maturity. Every teacher and every parent knows what a formula for disaster that can be. ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
355:For 40 years, my formula has been to love yourself, move your body and to watch portion size. But the No. 1 thing is to love and value yourself, no matter what you've been through. ~ Richard Simmons, #NFDB
356:I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
357:If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy. ~ Michael Pare, #NFDB
358:On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable. ~ Tim Berners Lee, #NFDB
359:Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt. ~ Leon M Lederman, #NFDB
360:If you look at the sponsorship yields, Formula One - because it happens every year - generates more sponsorship money for a four-year cycle than anybody else. So it is very powerful. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
361:Romantic behavior was basically monotonous and predictable, and that therefore one could write a fairly straightforward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people. ~ John Green, #NFDB
362:The formula for a successful film is simple: good script, good direction, a dedicated cast and a fantastic crew. If you have all of these elements then the rest will fall into place. ~ Hrithik Roshan, #NFDB
363:the words are only part of the poetic
formula: the rest is ritual, and the
reason in THEM must contend with the
mechanics of magic-making in IT -- and
must not win. ~ Laura Riding Jackson,#NFDB
364:When I hear the same formula being used over and over, I get bored. Just as huge pop artists have taken inspiration from things that are happening at the moment, I do the same with my music. ~ Katy B, #NFDB
365:You simply need to know where to look for the questions. An easy mathematical formula applied to Homo sapiens. And behold! Science reigns over nature once more. No emotions needed. ~ Kerri Maniscalco, #NFDB
366:For many years, my formula has been to love yourself, move your body and to watch portion size. But the No. 1 thing is to love and value yourself, no matter what you've been through. ~ Richard Simmons, #NFDB
367:When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
368:As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. ~ Hunter S Thompson, #NFDB
369:The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
370:The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck ~ Darren Hardy, #NFDB
371:This was the beginning of real income for McDonald’s. Harry devised a formula for the monthly payments being made by our operators that paid our own mortgage and other expenses plus a profit. ~ Ray Kroc, #NFDB
372:I express the principle of one's freedom as a human being in this formula: No one can compel me (in accordance with his beliefs about the welfare of others) to be happy after his fashion. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
373:My knowledge of the universe is that if I write stupid jokes, the universe gives me a really nice house and great meals. I do not believe mankind will ever develop a formula to explain this. ~ Joel Klein, #NFDB
374:There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
375:We are such cold creatures, all of us. Power robs us of our humanity. It’s an ancient formula, hard-wired into our brain cells, and any attempt to circumvent it is an exercise in futility. ~ C S Friedman, #NFDB
376:The rigidity of those pledges is something I don’t like. The circumstances change and you can’t be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist. It’s—who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway? ~ George H W Bush, #NFDB
377:When you make something that everyone likes, it's very easy to say, "Well, I'll just repeat that." Because that was easy. I have a formula. But creatively, it's not very interesting. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn, #NFDB
378:Happiness is there, waiting for you. All you need to do is follow the formula that creates it. Unhappiness is also there, waiting for you. Your response determines which one you will experience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
379:Living is having and following a purpose. That's all. That's the formula of life-have and follow a purpose. That's it. If you do it, you're living and if you don't do it, you're not living. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
380:Non-Western expressions of Christianity, therefore, can be portrayed as inferior to the successful formula for ministry put forth by many white evangelicals in mainstream Christian culture. ~ Soong Chan Rah, #NFDB
381:I definitely think the formula to making my character seem sweet is to let him act like a jerk, give him a redeeming moment, and have a sweet song playing over the background when it happens. ~ Jim Jefferies, #NFDB
382:I express the principle of one's freedom as a human being in this formula: No one can compel me (in accordance with his beliefs about the welfare of others) to be happy after his own fashion. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
383:The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness. ~ Stanislav Grof, #NFDB
384:Within days of Lenin’s death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin’s sacred “behest. ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
385:You look like Euler's equation,' he murmured as he looked me up and down. Nerd translation: Euler's equation is said to be the most perfect formula ever written. Simple but elegant. Beautiful. ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
386:Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
387:I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula! ~ Auguste Laurent, #NFDB
388:Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they're successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn't work. ~ Shawn Achor, #NFDB
389:"Our quaternity formula confirms the rightness of their claims; for the Holy Ghost, as the synthesis of the original One which then became split, issues from a source that is both light and dark." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
390:Taking your first title is much more complicated and more difficult; it takes years of work - from go-kart to Formula One. The second comes more easily, because you've already got the experience. ~ Niki Lauda, #NFDB
391:It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see?... And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It's a useful formula. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
392:I understand the formula that producers hire directors and directors are hired to direct and actors are hired to act. I don't have any conflict with any directors because I know they're the boss. ~ Danny Trejo, #NFDB
393:Even though it was the 70s, we found old stocks of clothes that had never been worn from the 50s and took them apart. I started to teach myself how to make clothes from that kind of formula. ~ Vivienne Westwood, #NFDB
394:Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
395:The breakthrough for came not from quadratic equations, but rather from cubics which clearly had real solutions but for which the Cardan formula produced formal answers with imaginary components. ~ Paul J Nahin, #NFDB
396:I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen. ~ Corazon Aquino, #NFDB
397:[Olympics] obviously, is not the easiest thing to do, and nobody makes any money out of. Yet, for the small amount of money they could [invest] in a Formula One race, they don't want to do it. ~ Bernie Ecclestone, #NFDB
398:In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
399:There is no consensus in Israel regarding the two-state formula. We will not, under any circumstances, allow the establishment of a neighboring state that will be a genuine threat on our existence. ~ Reuven Rivlin, #NFDB
400:Fogg Behavior Model is represented in a formula, B = MAT, which represents that a given behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
401:He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made. ~ Robert Graves,#NFDB
402:His leadership example of doing your job, treating others with respect, expecting people to do their jobs, and holding them accountable is a formula for success that will work in any good organization. ~ Bill Walsh, #NFDB
403:One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
404:The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
405:To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
406:We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
407:You look like Euler's equation," he murmured as he looked me up and down.
Nerd translation: Euler's equation is said to be the most perfect formula ever written. Simple but elegant. Beautiful. ~ Cynthia Hand,#NFDB
408:One reason [of Andy Griffith Show popularity] is because of the formula. It had comedy, but it also had tender moments. The other reason is because it was therapeutic. It helped people relax and unwind. ~ Betty Lynn, #NFDB
409:The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone, not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person, painting has itself as it's purpose, which is quite enough. ~ Theophile Gautier, #NFDB
410:The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. . . . I call C the Forgotten Man. ~ William Graham Sumner, #NFDB
411:Why are we willing to accept a new mathematical formula we don't understand as the product of a brilliant mind, while rejecting a new art form we don't understand as the product of a deranged mind? ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
412:Why then had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
413:A votary of ahimsa cannot subscribe to the utilitarian formula (of the greatest good of the greatest number). He will strive for the greatest good of all and die in the attempt to realize that ideal. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
414:no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
415:No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That's what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can't understand moats. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
416:Not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romaticism, but throught the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts, and revaluate the giver. ~ Alain LeRoy Locke, #NFDB
417:Ramones or AC/DC are two bands that have managed to keep their signature sound and their signature formula for years and years and album after album after album, without it seeming like a dead-end street. ~ Dave Grohl, #NFDB
418:There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
419:Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill,
every bee knows the formula of its beehive.
They know it in their own way, not in our way.
Only humankind does not know its own formula. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
420:The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) +
Attitude (belief/mindset) +
Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) +
Action (doing something about it) =
Luck ~ Darren Hardy,#NFDB
421:There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
422:What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
423:Ceremony is-really a protection, too, in times of emotional involvement, particularly at death. If we have a social formula to guide us and do not have to extemporize, we feel better able to handle life. ~ Amy Vanderbilt, #NFDB
424:Many babies (and toddlers) eat very little because they’re drinking too much juice, formula, or breast milk. Your baby should have no more than 4 to 6 ounces of fruit juice and no more than 16 to 24 ounces of ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
425:The Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer and all-embracing Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #NFDB
426:Formula One does very well. It is a very interesting asset. Could it be run in a different way? Sure it could be. Could it be improved? I'm sure it could. But all I can say is, it seems to do pretty well. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
427:For Mark, faith and discipleship have no meaning apart from following the suffering Son of God. Faith is thus not a magical formula, but depends on repeated hearing of his word and participation in his mission. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
428:It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bull-fighters. It's not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
429:It just feels like you want us to give you the formula for Coke in order to convince you that it doesn’t contain arsenic,” King said.
“Nobody’s asked for the formula for Coke!” Jay replied, annoyed. ~ John Carreyrou,#NFDB
430:The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
431:We shall adopt an analogous formula, with the reservation that feelings and cognitive configurations do not depend solely on the existing "field," but also on the whole previous history of the acting subject. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
432:There is no formula for cool content, other than that you can’t make it if you don’t have a deep understanding of what makes your audience tick and what they’re seeking when they use social media. Creating ~ Gary Vaynerchuk, #NFDB
433:This next nugget of salesmanship cannot be perfected in a single afternoon. However, once you have it mastered, your competition will continuously believe you possess some mystical customer attracting formula ~ Chris Murray, #NFDB
434:Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings. ~ Laurie Penny, #NFDB
435:I think we can find a formula that would be to everyone's satisfaction, which would make it possible for Croatia to take some more steps and for Europe to accept us into its midst, and for the talks to start. ~ Stjepan Mesic, #NFDB
436:"Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? . . . Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic -- and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
437:You can do anything if you set your mind to it. Look out for kids, help them dream and be inspired. We teach calculus in schools, but I believe the most important formula is courage plus dreams equals success. ~ Marlee Matlin, #NFDB
438:By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
439:He remained convinced that romantic behaviour was basically monotonous and predictable and that therefore one could write a fairly straightforward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people. ~ John Green, #NFDB
440:Nashville has a formula, and it works a lot of the time, but it wasn't right for me. They're afraid to step outside the box - even though, with me, my success came because I was outside of the box to begin with. ~ Deana Carter, #NFDB
441:A lot of the artists that are coming out right now are sticking to the formula of guns, drugs, money, all that other stuff. I'm not from the 'hood, I've never been arrested, I never shot anybody, I never sold drugs. ~ John Cena, #NFDB
442:In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
443:Map out lofty goals… include reasonable checkpoints along the way... refine, improve, and enhance your behavior in alignment with your goals…. that is the dynamic of true leadership and the formula for success. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
444:Nothing can be more fatal to progress than a too confident reliance on mathematical symbols; for the student is only too apt to take the easier course, and consider the formula not the fact as the physical reality. ~ Lord Kelvin, #NFDB
445:So, I think there's a danger that good stuff can fall by the wayside if it doesn't conform to formula. But I think it comes down to money and they just don't know where it's going if they haven't got any precedent. ~ Colin Firth, #NFDB
446:All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found. ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness, #NFDB
447:Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
448:A talk show is difficult because the formula is always the same: there's a host and there's guests. Really what you can change is only so much. So, I don't have any pre-interviews, which forces real conversation. ~ Jenny McCarthy, #NFDB
449:Here's my author advice: There is no magic pill, so you just have to do the research and the work. Well, coffee is kind of like magic, and energy helps do the research, so maybe that’s my secret magic formula. ~ Michelle M Pillow, #NFDB
450:an old formula; you find the worst psychopathic antisocial losers in a society, give them power, and they would give you their complete, unquestioning loyalty. That was how Hitler and Stalin had come to power. That ~ Craig Alanson, #NFDB
451:Become aware of God, in whose presence you are while you pray . . . Then take a formula of prayer and recite it with perfect attention both to the words you are saying and to the Person to whom you are saying them. ~ John Climacus, #NFDB
452:By leaving cost out of the formula, it was as if U.S. News had handed college presidents a gilded checkbook. They had a commandment to maximize performance in fifteen areas, and keeping costs low wasn’t one of them. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
453:From the Byzantines, Pound derived his non-violent formula for controlling the Jews. "The answer to the Jewish problem is simple," he said. "Keep them out of banking, out of education, out of government. ~ Eustace Clarence Mullins, #NFDB
454:I always wore cowboy boots and drove a truck, and talked like this. So everywhere I would go in comedy people would say, "Foxworthy, you ain't nothing but a redneck from Georgia!" It kind of became a formula joke. ~ Jeff Foxworthy, #NFDB
455:When you drive your car, E = mc2 is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
456:In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat. ~ Pierre Auguste Renoir, #NFDB
457:The reality is that until we can agree on a formula that reduces tariffs globally we cannot meet this Doha promise for development. In order to keep momentum post-Hong Kong, the European Union must be willing to move. ~ Rob Portman, #NFDB
458:When people ask that question, it's very hard to nail down a formula or a circumstance that I always write in, but I definitely do believe that there have been moments, musically, when I have channeled something, you know? ~ Kimbra, #NFDB
459:Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
460:Them white people made hate. They made hate just like they had a formula for it and followed that formula down to the last exact gallon of misery put in. Well ... that's what they made and that's what they got. ~ J California Cooper, #NFDB
461:What is the relationship of the obvious things that we see around us to the things that we believe we understand within ourselves? This is the ancient alchemical formula: "as above, so below, as within, so without." ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
462:I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn't hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
463:Architecture is not about designing somehting from a free, fanciful idea. It is about discovering and establishing one's own principle, some kind of regularity - finding an individual formula to apply to one's buildings. ~ Shigeru Ban, #NFDB
464:The most distinct and beautiful statement of any form must take at last the mathematical form.We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
465:Bayes’ theorem says that P(cause | effect) = P(cause) × P(effect | cause) / P(effect). Replace cause by A and effect by B and omit the multiplication sign for brevity, and you get the ten-foot formula in the cathedral. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
466:happiness formula:” H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do. 34 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
467:Frasier and Friends and Seinfeld, they all pissed each other off, said the wrong thing, drove each other nuts, but in the end, it turns out they'd do anything for their friends. TV Land has really found that formula. ~ David Alan Basche, #NFDB
468:S = k log W
The formula for entropy of a system. Boltzmann committed suicide after failing to convince contemporary scientists of the validity of the formula. Grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.
~ Ludwig Boltzmann, Epitaph,#NFDB
469:The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
470:Within mathematics, assertions must always be proven mathematically and expressed in a valid and scientifically correct formula. The mathematician must be able to stand on a podium and say the words 'This is so because … ~ Stieg Larsson, #NFDB
471:By the time I was a young man, I lived with two deep struggles: I longed to become a cricketer, and I performed miserably in school. Cricket and tennis were all that I lived for. In India, this was a formula for failure. ~ Ravi Zacharias, #NFDB
472:Habits of secrecy, made necessary by the actual relations between states, violate the ‘transcendental formula of public right’, which is that an action is wrong if it is not compatible with being made public (PP, R. 126). ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
473:Kids nowadays...tend to go overboard [on] protein - something I believe to be totally unnecsssary...[I state in] my formula for basic good eating: Eat about one gram of protein for every two pounds of body weight. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
474:My formula is Amor fati: ... not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it.
Semboyanku ialah Amor fati: ... tidak saja tabah menanggung segala keharusan (penderitaan), melainkan juga mencintainya. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
475:My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
476:Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unforeseeability of the future. ~ Brian Boyd, #NFDB
477:Because Social Security is specifically designed to boost the retirement income of low earners with a progressive benefit formula, the program has played an enormous and necessary role in keeping Latinas out of poverty. ~ Grace Napolitano, #NFDB
478:I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
479:This same formula by which Buddhists so anti-rationalistically and anti-banausically describe the "relation" between soul and body also applies to the relation between lover and lover, parent and child, member and community. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
480:I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. —HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
481:There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
482:I think scandal probably attracted more American attention to Formula 1 than anything else in American news in decades. And that`s because it was a sex scandal, a particularly lurid sex scandal involving this guy Max Mosley. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
483:May I share with you a formula that in my judgment will help you and help me to journey well through mortality... First, fill your mind with truth; second, fill your life with service; and third, fill your heart with love. ~ Thomas S Monson, #NFDB
484:And we would play together, like fine musicians should, And it would sound like music, and the music would sound good. But in real life I'm stuck with that same old formula, me and my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra. ~ Harry Chapin, #NFDB
485:[Formula One racing] will be very different - as the technology will be very different and that will make fans consume it in a completely different way. I said before that I believe that Virtual Reality will hit it big time. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
486:Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. ~ Florence Nightingale, #NFDB
487:We can't become unique by copying someone else's formula any more than we can become successful by striving for someone else's definition of success. And really, what's the point of succeeding by someone else's rules anyway? ~ Reshma Saujani, #NFDB
488:When she said ‘Come in!’ the commonplace formula seemed to take on a startling significance. For good or evil, she had called in something explosive from the outside world to break up the ordered tranquillity of the place; ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
489:come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
490:Before it's too late, and time is running out, let us turn from trust in the chain reactions of exploding atoms to faith of the chain reaction of God's love. Love - love of God and fellow men. That is God's formula for peace. ~ Richard Cushing, #NFDB
491:Every child is created uniquely by God. God puts a certain formula in the heart of every child. And it is the parents' challenge to figure out the combination. We need to spend time studying, looking, listening, and observing. ~ David Jeremiah, #NFDB
492:...I still don't know how to live my life except on my haunches at the feet of Jesus, eyes fixed on his face. Nothing else "works." No formula, no method makes me feel so fully human and alive as the radical act of living loved. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
493:My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself - because it was. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
494:One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes." ~ David Eugene Smith, #NFDB
495:A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition, and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas. ~ Felix Frankfurter, #NFDB
496:If you run a country and want to put it on the global map you don't have so many choices. You can get the Olympics, the World Cup or a Formula One race. And the first two are only every four years - and you have them only once. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
497:In the music industry, it's pretty easy to make an album just because you want to keep going, like, 'This is the formula.' But the formula is your life. You have to live your life and you have to live it well - that's the formula. ~ Angel Olsen, #NFDB
498:My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist. I've never made a video where I didn't talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment. Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators. ~ Adria Petty, #NFDB
499:I think that's just what happens when you write a big bestseller. After that you need to find out: What's the best way to go on? And the worst thing you could do would be to try to repeat the formula. That would be suffocating. ~ Daniel Kehlmann, #NFDB
500:Juan Carlos Ortiz has been known to use a startling baptismal formula: “I kill you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve him and to please him. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
501:My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it. —NIETZSCHE ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
502:Never ever go by the book. They will want you to, but you musn’t. If the lust is too strong, tear one page from a hundred books and make your own way. There is no formula for life, no equation on how to be a human being. ~ Christopher Poindexter, #NFDB
503:Philosopher Jean Gebser wrote that ‘Everything that is happening to me is a challenge to have insight into it’. And another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, summed up this attitude in a concise formula: amor fati, ‘love of fate’. ~ Gary Lachman, #NFDB
504:All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
505:Dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, is a reflection for me musically of what's happening in the world, because people are learning how to dialog with each other without any past strategy or any kind of formula from the past. ~ Wayne Shorter, #NFDB
506:Kincaid wondered what universal formula required that a person should sit down to receive bad news. Was it merely a precaution against fainting or falling, or had it become a kind of foreshadowing, effective in easing the shock? ~ Deborah Crombie, #NFDB
507:There are many young talents in Brazil. There is a lot of hope in Felipe Massa. It is very difficult to judge him in his first year, but by the end of the end we are going to have a better position how he does in Formula One. ~ Emerson Fittipaldi, #NFDB
508:good and I’m going to find the formula that will put it over. The market is saturated. Imagine, 75 percent of the potential has already been sold. Better get out. Imagine, 25 percent of the market is still not sold. Count me in. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
509:It is such a simple formula: The more senses we bring to the moment, the more time slows, the more a catalogue of joyful vivid memories grows in our minds, the more life is filled with gratitude, and the more nourished our soul. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
510:What you want to see [in Formula One] is a highly competitive sport - and the more equal it is the more exciting it is... the more volatile in the sense of results. If you have just one winner continuously it dulls the enthusiasm. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
511:A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
512:And if you show me a mathematical formula, all you are showing me is a piece of paper with strange markings on it, and I have no way of knowing not only whether the markings are actually there, but whether the piece of paper exists. ~ F Paul Wilson, #NFDB
513:The experts spent a great deal of time and study working out a formula which would be fair to every State and fair to every county and fair to every child, and would put the education dollar where that dollar is needed most, now. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
514:The thing about walking closely with God is it has to be a minute-by-minute, day-by-day kind of relationship. No formula can suffice. You have to keep listening, keep following, keep being willing to act and to move on when it’s time. ~ Chip Gaines, #NFDB
515:All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its Attributes!" In place of the cowardly phrase, "Obey the law," our cry, is "Revolt against all laws!" ~ Peter Kropotkin, #NFDB
516:Because the Buchanan decision had made it “impossible to find an appropriate legal formula” for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end. ~ Richard Rothstein, #NFDB
517:I'm trying to exploit the bestseller, in a way, but not in the sense of repeating the formula. It's just that the bestseller did so well economically that now I'm freer to do what I want to do, or to try out what I want to try out. ~ Daniel Kehlmann, #NFDB
518:Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
519:The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
520:After I tasted success with erotic thrillers, a time came when I was being offered only films belonging to that genre. The industry loves repeating a success formula, and the audience had formed a certain image of mine in their minds. ~ Emraan Hashmi, #NFDB
521:It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
522:An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einsten's very similar formula: 'E equals MC squared'? ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
523:I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety. My ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
524:Im an extremist so Im either hated or loved. I think its down to when I first got to Formula One not always knowing what I was saying, saying things that mean one thing but people were taking the other way and then people dont forget. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
525:It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing
options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making,
namely the creation of new options. ~ David Deutsch,#NFDB
526:There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, #NFDB
527:Nothing can really prepare you for when you get in the Formula One car. Knowing that you're driving a multimillion-dollar car, and if you crash it it's going to cost a lot of money, and they might not give you another chance, is scary. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
528:I have always been very calm on the outside. I'm not too stressed now just because I'm in formula one. For me, tomorrow will be another day whether I finish first or last. I have to do the maximum and I cannot ask any more from myself. ~ Fernando Alonso, #NFDB
529:Our individualism is rooted in our very nature. It is based on conviction born of experience. Equal opportunity, the demand for a fair chance, became the formula of American Individualism because it is the method of American achievement. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
530:The biggest challenge of being a pastry chef is that, unlike other types of chefs, you can't throw things together at a farmer's market. When you're working with baking powder and a formula, you have to be exact. If not, things can go wrong. ~ Carla Hall, #NFDB
531:In fact, if you were interested in a global platform there are only three sporting events: probably the most powerful - or equally powerful [to F1] - are the World Cup and the Olympics, and then Formula One. And there it gets interesting. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
532:The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
533:The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order “not to rule out our free will,” he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is “the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves. ~ Ross King, #NFDB
534:An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. “I am a soldier.” I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy’s own Dejagoran dialect. “I’ve been distracted before. I’m still alive. ~ Glen Cook, #NFDB
535:Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date. World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker said it all when he remarked, "I can give you a six-word formula for success: Thnk things through-then follow through. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
536:Science has proven that while your genes control your biology, a rather simple, nondrug formula of nutrient-rich food, targeted supplements to address missing precursors, and lifestyle changes can keep your genes in perpetual “repair” mode. ~ Sara Gottfried, #NFDB
537:they frame our whole relationship with nature as one of unremitting tragedy. The core of tragedy is that it cannot be fixed, and that is a formula for hopelessness and inaction. Lazy romanticism about impending doom becomes the default view. ~ Peter Brannen, #NFDB
538:We must avoid the caricature that science means formula or a lack of humanity in work. In fact, science is one of humanity’s most creative pursuits. I believe that applying it to entrepreneurship will unlock a vast storehouse of human potential. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
539:But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do. ~ Michael Stipe, #NFDB
540:Einstein’s theory produced a law of the photoelectric effect that was experimentally testable: the energy of emitted electrons would depend on the frequency of the light according to a simple mathematical formula involving Planck’s constant. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
541:I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
542:If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H Carrier by doing these three things: Ask yourself, ‘What is the worst that can possibly happen?’ Prepare to accept it if you have to. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
543:I had not been prepared for my employer’s approach to vehicular navigation, which was a simple case of being unable to tell the difference between a very large, multi-windowed van that could accommodate a mobile disco and a Formula One racer. ~ Michael Gurnow, #NFDB
544:The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction. ~ Hilary Putnam, #NFDB
545:There can’t be any formula for happiness because happiness is an effect and not a cause. The same activity, which at one time gave you happiness, may now become a source of suffering. Or often a great suffering ends up becoming a source of joy. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
546:We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. that is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
547:As long as you win Monaco, that's the one. In my ten years of Formula One, I've only won here once. This is my second time.Every year, it feels like this is your Achilles heel. You almost have it and then you don't. It's such a hard race to win. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
548:A wise man should not divulge the formula of a medicine which he has well prepared; an act of charity which he has performed; domestic conflicts; private affairs with his wife; poorly prepared food he may have been offered; or slang he may have heard. ~ Chanakya, #NFDB
549:In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
550:It will be seen that the formula - 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' has nothing to do with 'Do as you please.' It is much more difficult to comply with the Law of Thelema than to follow out slavishly a set of dead regulations. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
551:Some things tend not to work so well for science - things that rely on substantial written contributions by key experts are a case in point - but even there I tend to keep an open mind, because it may just be a case of finding the right formula. ~ Aubrey de Grey, #NFDB
552:Formula 1 racing had a personal scandal right up at the top of its governing body that was so weird, that was so flagrantly salacious and bizarre, that I think it not only reassured American racing fans that Formula 1, yes, really is kind of weird. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
553:I mean it's funny, playing music, how of course you want it to do well, you want them to like it, but it's not competitive like an election, it's the Olympics, it's not a Formula 1 race. The Billboard charts are just to show you what people like. ~ Eddie Van Halen, #NFDB
554:Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners. ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
555:And they all share the same formula of shame, comparison, and disengagement. Scarcity bubbles up from these conditions and perpetuates them until a critical mass of people start making different choices and reshaping the smaller cultures they belong to. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
556:There is no magic formula for being able to discern God’s voice. We can learn to recognize it the way we recognize the voices of those close to us: by knowing Him. And when we know Him, we can tell if what we’re feeling led to do is from Him or not. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
557:If you want to get the body you've always dreamed of, you have to earn it. You can't buy it, you can't rent it. You have to earn it. My formula has always been love yourself, move your body, watch your portions. And it sounds so easy, but it is not. ~ Richard Simmons, #NFDB
558:nine categories of value ideas: Graham-style deep value, Greenblatt-style magic formula, small-cap value, sum-of-the-parts or hidden value, superinvestor favorites, jockey stocks, special situations, equity stubs, and international value investments. ~ John Mihaljevic, #NFDB
559:We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. that is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
560:Popularity is a mathematical formula based on desirability criteria. High schools are a classic anthropological case study, and getting people to respond in the way you want is psychology. All science. It’s just not the type of science that you’re used to. ~ Eileen Cook, #NFDB
561:The banks don't have anything - no rights whatsoever. The banks are shareholders of SLEC, and SLEC has no rights. I am the CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration, which runs the business in F1. From this point of view, I own F1. ~ Bernie Ecclestone, #NFDB
562:There is no magic formula that can generate all prime numbers, and it is suspected that no such formula exists. If it did, and it was found, there would be a major crisis in the world. Any government agency that found it would undoubtedly keep it top secret. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
563:There’s no magic formula—not for ourselves, and not for the people around us. We won’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
564:What it leads to is the mischief of confusing liturgy with magic -- of imagining there are only a handful of properly effective formulas for conjuring up the mystery, when in fact the mystery is always at work, independent of any formula whatsoever. ~ Robert Farrar Capon, #NFDB
565:When you try to talk about yourself, you dont know who you are, or what your like, or what your like to other people. And the moment you do it's a formula for yourself, and then you're imitating yourself, and then nobody likes you and they dont know why. ~ Carol Channing, #NFDB
566:Never be frightened by those you assume have more talent than you do, because in the end energy will prevail. My formula is: energy plus talent and you are a king; energy and no talent and you are still a prince; talent and no energy and you are a pauper. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
567:The Chinese had this empire-degeneration mambo wired. They actually devised a formula for it, since after several centuries a pattern emerged that was so regular you could pretty much set your sundial by it: Repeat, ad nauseum, for thousands of years. It’s ~ Cintra Wilson, #NFDB
568:Every human being with whom we seek relatedness is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being... If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. ~ Bernard Phillips, #NFDB
569:Work/Loaf Ratio”...I have spent fourteen years perfecting... I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of the “W/LR” save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos. ~ Gary Reilly, #NFDB
570:Basic Formula for Delicious Candy or Cake Dough 1 cup any nuts 1 cup any dried fruits 1 tablespoon oil to make it stick together Spices (optional) Mix in a food processor. Roll candies or use as crust layers for the cake. Yield: 2 cups of delicious dough ~ Victoria Boutenko, #NFDB
571:I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
572:The formula that allowed Murphy to overtake Paley’s QE2 was deceptively simple: focus on industries with attractive economic characteristics, selectively use leverage to buy occasional large properties, improve operations, pay down debt, and repeat. ~ William N Thorndike Jr, #NFDB
573:hen Maistre adopts Bossuet's bold idea that "the heretic is he who has personal
ideas"—in other words, ideas that have no reference to either a social or a religious tradition—he provides
the formula for the most ancient and the most modern of conformities. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
574:Some people may complicate it for you, but the formula is simple: Love God more than anything else. More than your ego. More than your money. More than your desires...More than your sleep at dawn. Love God more than anything else, and submission comes natural. ~ Yasmin Mogahed, #NFDB
575:When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing. ~ Sheila Heti, #NFDB
576:It was so hard [to do Gigi Does It show]. On paper, that formula is almost impossible to create a winning show with, but then you add four and a half hours of prosthetic makeup every morning, three-inch nails, acrylics, the whole thing, and it nearly killed me. ~ David Krumholtz, #NFDB
577:Why does a symbol of the Self age? If you study the comparative history of religions, you will note the tendency for any religious ritual or dogma that has become conscious to wear out after a time, to lose its original emotional impact and become a dead formula. ~ ML von Franz, #NFDB
578:I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex. ~ Ronald Fisher, #NFDB
579:I'd learned balance is internal; that there really wasn’t one set formula for how to live your life nor how to handle the wife-mother-businesswoman juggling act. Maybe it was just being tuned in to every role and knowing when one or the other needed to be the focus. ~ Kaira Rouda, #NFDB
580:If I were to be super critical, I would say Formula One is too tactical and not strategic enough. And that brings us back to the digital issue: you may have to invest in order to gain - sacrifice some short-term effects in order to make high returns in the future. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
581:To be honest with you, I'm not sure what a pop tune is. I'm sure if I hear it on the radio, I'd say that's pop or this or that. But, really, what I pay attention to the most is just music that moves me. It's all at least a root-type music instead of a formula. ~ Stevie Ray Vaughan, #NFDB
582:"Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious . . . ? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic -- and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
583:Formula One gives a platform to companies like Rolex - and that's just in media space, watching television or reading newspapers, digital or physical. You see the brand in the context of the competition and bring it to the attention of everybody on a regular basis. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
584:I am very proud of what we have built in Spain, because it is not a traditional Formula 1 country. I think we have found passionate fans, and built up a strong culture for the sport - and things are improving every day, with more and more people getting interested. ~ Fernando Alonso, #NFDB
585:Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done. ~ Joe Shuster, #NFDB
586:When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say 'Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.' ~ Arthur Eddington, #NFDB
587:Women do not win formula one races, because they simply are not strong enough to resist the G-forces. In the boardroom, it is different. I believe women are better able to marshal their thoughts than men and because they are less egotistical they make fewer assumptions. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
588:I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time. ~ Junot Diaz, #NFDB
589:To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running, and if you have a good team around you and more than a fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can't guarantee it just by following someone else's formula. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
590:. . . She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays. ~ Margaret Mitchell, #NFDB
591:Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors. ~ G Edward Griffin, #NFDB
592:With those organizations, it's like time travel. I just reach back and find little kids who were like me. Maybe the circumstances vary, but the formula is the same. They're having problems reading, having problems grasping some of the things that are being taught to them. ~ Malik Yusef, #NFDB
593:Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
594:I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say, 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening. ~ Chad Kroeger, #NFDB
595:I have learned that part of the formula for success is to keep quiet about your objective until you get it. Just as the universe is filled with positive energy waiting to join your own, there is also destructive energy emanating from people who do not like you. ~ Sheilah Graham Westbrook, #NFDB
596:I smiled. Mom laughed, shaking her head. “That’s the punchline? Why is that even funny?” “It’s the Pythagorean theorem,” said Lauren. “It’s a math formula for . . . something.” “Right triangles,” I said, and looked pointedly at Margaret. “I told you I’d already done geometry. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
597:Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living. ~ Jack White, #NFDB
598:I wasn’t looking for a formula in the text, a few steps to make my life better; instead, I was reading it like literature, as though a human being were trying to tell me something about life, something he thought was beautiful or ugly, true or inspiring—you know the drill. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
599:The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
600:Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
601:Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. ~ Kingsley Amis, #NFDB
602:Someone once told her there's a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it's half as long as the time you've been together. Hadley has her doubts about how accurate this could possibly be, a calculation so simple for something as complicated as heartbreak. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
603:Jesus Christ is the greatest man in the history of the world. And to me, he's the greatest person in the history of mankind and the universe. We can't prove it, I can't put it in a test tube or in an astronomical formula, but by faith I believe it because the Bible teaches it. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
604:quando aveva cinque anni che ha sposato due bambolotti e gli ha recitato la formula di rito che era questa qua: «E vi promettete di massacrarvi e di volervi bene per tutta la vita?».
E loro han risposto: «Sì, ci promettiamo di massacrarci e di volerci bene per tutta la vita». ~ Paolo Nori,#NFDB
605:This formula of Love is universal; all the laws of Nature are its servitors. Thus, gravitation, chemical affinity, electrical potential, and the rest - and these are alike mere aspects of the general law - are so many differently-observed statements of the unique tendency. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
606:For one ridiculous moment she considered changing into something sexier—at least from the waist up, as that was all he’d see on his camera—but decided not to bother. Logan had fallen in love with her in striped T-shirts and jeans. There was no need to mess with a winning formula. ~ Rob Thomas, #NFDB
607:how the groups who wore different colors were warring with one another, how these things typically went downhill fast with the barest of nudges, that the formula was as old as time. ‘The combustibles are always there,’ Thurman said. ‘You’d be surprised at how few sparks it takes. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
608:The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
609:I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
610:The formula for the circuit of capital: M-C...P...C'-M', is the self-evident form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the availability of the class of wage-labourers in sufficient numbers throughout society. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
611:Because relationships are so predictable, right? Well, I’m finding a way to predict them. Take any two people, and even if they’ve never met each other, the formula will show who’s going to break up with whom if they ever date, and approximately how long the relationship will last. ~ John Green, #NFDB
612:Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
613:Many teachers are concerned about the amount of material they must cover in a course. One cynic suggested a formula: since, he said, students on the average remember only about 40% of what you tell them, the thing to do is to cram into each course 250% of what you hope will stick. ~ Paul Halmos, #NFDB
614:Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience. Take colour as a totality of relations within a framecolour is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it. ~ Ernst Haas, #NFDB
615:To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives? - and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and profitably? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
616:When it comes to yourself, follow God's formula-
deny yourself of overindulgence (Proverbs 23:2 and 30:8),
examine yourself for any sinful habits (1 Corinthians 11:28),
% exercise yourself to godliness (1 Timothy 4:7), and
IK- develop self-control (Galatians 5:23). ~ Elizabeth George,#NFDB
617:There is much romanticism about Formula One of the past. Today it has to be more of a family sport, not less. It is a fixture in the Sunday afternoon TV programmes, and probably flamboyance - those white silk suits and devil-may-care attitudes - would be outworn attributes today. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
618:The thing we all had in common wasn’t muscle; it was the will to do whatever it takes. Getting through BUD/S and being a SEAL is more about mental toughness than anything else. Being stubborn and refusing to give in is the key to success. Somehow I’d stumbled onto the winning formula. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
619:What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process. ~ Ronnie Dunn, #NFDB
620:Mitch had a particular way with women—a formula of giving and withholding that almost always managed to hook them. Getting them to talk about themselves was the first step; remaining enigmatic was the second. There were other steps, but he used only the first two during that encounter. ~ Lisa Lutz, #NFDB
621:My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
622:No magic formula can completely prepare us for crises in life. However, each choice we make now will impact how we handle those crises in the future. Make your choice count. Dedicate time each day to developing your character. If you do, courage will be there when you need it most. ~ Rudy Giuliani, #NFDB
623:PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE HELP ME TO PASS THIS TEST! I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT SNOOZING IN CHURCH LAST SUNDAY AND IT WON’T HAPPEN AGAIN. ALSO, CAN YOU TELL ME IF THE FORMULA FOR THE VOLUME OF A CYLINDER IS πr2h OR πhr2? AND, WHEN YOU CALCULATE A SPHERE, DO YOU MULTIPLY THE . . . ? ~ Rachel Ren e Russell, #NFDB
624:The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
625:In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
626:It is the Father's life, and the Father's life alone, that ever lives the Christian life. It is the Father's life, and Father's life alone, which will live the Christian life in you. Embrace a formula or a list in order to "live the Christian life," and you are doomed to frustration. ~ Gene Edwards, #NFDB
627:I love racers from that early vintage antique era of the 1950s. There's just something about them. It's the last romantic epoch of car-making. They were not efficient, necessarily. They were put together with intuition and enthusiasm, not with a formula. That's as technical as I'll get. ~ Jon J Muth, #NFDB
628:Richard Bach, the author of Illusions and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who said, “You are never given a wish without the power to make it come true.” The positive energy formula was inspired by the formula E + R = 0, which Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles, shared with me. ~ Jon Gordon, #NFDB
629:Whether I'm at home and researching online or whether I'm in the studio just drawing, I think I'm more interested in practical research - discussing with other people, trying to find the exact formula of putting things on the canvas, what is the consistency of paint that works best. ~ Camille Henrot, #NFDB
630:But love isn't a career. It isn't a degree you earn or a formula you pull out of a textbook. It's bumpy and blotched and painful and completely irreplaceable. Aren't there times when it might be better to let go? Sometimes the best part of life grows out of what you have no say over. ~ Carol Cassella, #NFDB
631:But love isn’t a career. It isn’t a degree you earn or a formula you pull out of a textbook. It’s bumpy and blotched and painful and completely irreplaceable. Aren’t there times when it might be better to let go? Sometimes the best part of life grows out of what you have no say over. ~ Carol Cassella, #NFDB
632:Severe isn't a word normally associated with a cold. Severe is for weather or third-degree burns...No one responds 'severe' when someone asks how her cold is.In fact, nine out of ten Americans respond to 'How's your cold' with 'It sucks.' So there should be an It Sucks cold formula. ~ Celia Rivenbark, #NFDB
633:My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
634:You have to love what you do. Without passion, great success is hard to come by. An entrepreneur will have tough times if he or she isn't passionate about what they're doing. People who love what they're doing don't give up. It's never even a consideration. It's a pretty simple formula. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
635:Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government? ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
636:For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong. ~ Northrop Frye, #NFDB
637:My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
638:Only someone who doesn’t understand art tells an artist their art somehow failed. How the fuck can art fail? Art can’t be graded, because it’s going to mean something different to everyone. You can’t apply a mathematical absolute to art because there is no one formula for self-expression. ~ Kevin Smith, #NFDB
639:You have a unique body and mind, with a particular history and conditioning. No one can offer you a formula for navigating all situations and all states of mind. Only by listening inwardly in a fresh and open way will you discern at any given time what most serves your healing and freedom. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
640:Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
641:There is a familiar formula—perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas—developed by Euler from a discovery of De Moivre: eiπ + 1 = 0. ...It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician. ~ Edward Kasner, James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)., #NFDB
642:You just say it. That’s how you say something that’s hard. You put one foot in front of the other. You take it step by step. You say the words. There is no magic formula. There is no secret sauce. But there are words,” she says emphatically, as if she’s delivering an impassioned speech. ~ Lauren Blakely, #NFDB
643:I'm always surprised when you do something very different that people don't get behind you more, because you're always told, "Take chances! Stretch!" And when you do it, sometimes people get really supportive and excited, but sometimes people go at you because you've tossed out the formula. ~ Judd Apatow, #NFDB
644:How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
645:Until the late 1970s there'd either be only black or white in the paintings or if there were colours it would be a small amount, not a large area, and with the color separated from other colors by black or white (which is formula for Damien Hirst's successful dot paintings, incidentally). ~ Matthew Collings, #NFDB
646:What grinds me the most is that we’re sending kids out into the world who don’t know how to balance a checkbook, don’t know how to apply for a loan, don’t even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world? ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
647:It is in the very nature of conjugal love to be definitive. The lasting union expressed by the marriage vows is more than a formality or a traditional formula; it is rooted in the natural inclinations of the human person. For believers, it is also a covenant before God that calls for fidelity. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
648:Severe isn't a word normally associated with a cold. Severe is for weather or third-degree burns...No one responds 'severe' when someone asks how her cold is.
In fact, nine out of ten Americans respond to 'How's your cold' with 'It sucks.' So there should be an It Sucks cold formula. ~ Celia Rivenbark,#NFDB
649:Movies, the truly great ones and sometimes the truly bad, should be a drop in the overall fuel formula for your life. A fuel that should include sex and love, and food and movement, and friendships and your own work. All of it feeding the engine. But the engine of your life should be your life. ~ Patton Oswalt, #NFDB
650:As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him', may be an adequate formula for prayer. 'I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet', is the only possible formula for worship. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
651:Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
652:I don't have some songwriting formula that I kinda go by. Usually it just comes by way of inspiration. Sometimes I'm inspired by a melody first and sometimes I'm inspired by a lyric. Typically, I'm inspired by an idea for a lyric and then after we get the lyric going then we write a melody to it. ~ Natalie Grant, #NFDB
653:I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. —HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize Everything popular is wrong. —OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
654:I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together. ~ Queen Elizabeth II, #NFDB
655:One of the beautiful things about running is that it is direct and elegant. The formula is simple: put one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t take much to figure out that if you want to improve sprint speed, you run faster. If you want to improve distance-running performance, you run farther. ~ Bernd Heinrich, #NFDB
656:In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place. ~ Edgar Wright, #NFDB
657:There's so much more work that goes into developing a makeup line than one would imagine. Personally, I like to be involved in the entire creative process - everything from art direction, collection concepts, formula testing, packaging artwork, to naming the shades and also the marketing side of things. ~ Kat Von D, #NFDB
658:To be fair to Pete, I had just come off a very difficult owner relationship with my then head coach and I was looking for a different style. So I didn't give Pete all the power he should have had. I don't think there's any exact formula for how it's done. It's really what fits each individual system. ~ Robert Kraft, #NFDB
659: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
660:nightmarish memories of the trauma of birth into postnatal freedom and the oceanic bliss of the womb. And even that was only the surface. Behind all biologically determined needs there was also dearly a genuine craving for transcendence that could not be reduced to any simple formula of natural sciences. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
661:What you don't want is to repeat a formula over and over or impose a formula to a movie that...when you impose yourself and you impose a formula and you're not open to explore and to find what is right for the movie, I think you're doing a disservice to the story and what you're trying to express. ~ Emmanuel Lubezki, #NFDB
662:If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced. ~ Ryan Tedder, #NFDB
663:Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
664:Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
665:The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don’t really know . . . but it’s a substantial ratio. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
666:There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers' ... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas. ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
667:He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses. ~ Joost Meerloo, #NFDB
668:As a young girl I thought, with fervent hope, that ten years was some kind of magic formula. That if I were seventeen instead of seven, I would know how to handle myself better in a situation. That a passing decade would fill in all the cracks where I ached, by adding wisdom or, at the very least, understanding. ~ Gwen Hayes, #NFDB
669:In TV, kid roles are like this: You're either in a couple minutes of an episode playing somebody's kid, or you get in these procedurals where you're crying or you're playing a witness or you're playing a crazy person. Every once in a while you get a big guest star role, but there's a formula to those TV shows. ~ Kyle Gallner, #NFDB
670:Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do. Pinballing through our day like a confused character in a B-horror movie, we end up running up the stairs instead of out the front door. The best decision gets traded for any decision. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
671:The old, been-around-forever, profitless formula is: Sales – Expenses = Profit The new, Profit First Formula is: Sales – Profit = Expenses The math in both formulas is the same. Logically, nothing has changed. But Profit First speaks to human behavior—it accounts for the regular Joes of the world, like me, ~ Mike Michalowicz, #NFDB
672:There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don't notice it. ~ Charles Tart, #NFDB
673:This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”23 This is the formula of humanity as an end. ~ Michael J Sandel, #NFDB
674:Experience has taught me that there is one chief reason why some people succeed and others fail. The difference is not one of knowing, but of doing. The successful man is not so superior in ability as in action. So far as success can be reduced to a formula, it consists of this: doing what you know you should do. ~ Roger Babson, #NFDB
675:If you take the Planck formula for the energy of a single photon, and combine it with equations from Einstein’s special relativity, you find that a single photon of light ought to carry a small amount of momentum, given by the formula: p = h/γ where p is the symbol for momentum and γ is the wavelength of the light. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
676:If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
677:The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
678:Yes. Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it. The old hopeless passion, isn't it? ~ Kingsley Amis, #NFDB
679:I think we ought to use the same formula that we used when we took out Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. We have unique resources that no other country has, especially in the air. Intelligence and the ability to find where things are. I think the governments need to get together, because this is getting very serious. ~ Dutch Ruppersberger, #NFDB
680:Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
681:Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the formula to break the spell. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
682:In international affairs the same formula of federalism will apply: self-determination for every group in regard to matters which concern it much more vitally than they concern others, and government by a neutral authority embracing rival groups in all matters in which conflicting interests of groups come into play. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
683:Even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control. There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself. ~ Bill Walsh, #NFDB
684:Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel. ~ Bill Keller, #NFDB
685:Most humans subscribe to the policy of 'an eye for an eye, a life for a life'. Many of your religions are famous for this formula, which is well known throughout the UNIVERSE for its stupidity. Your christ and your buddah had a different vision, but nobody paid any attention to them, not even the christians and buddhists. ~ Gene Brewer, #NFDB
686:Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
687:The campaign for Pakistan had, in its final stages, become a religious movement even though its leaders initiated it as a formula for resolving post-independence constitutional problems. This created confusion about Pakistan’s raison d’être, which Pakistan’s leadership has attempted to resolve through a state ideology. ~ Husain Haqqani, #NFDB
688:The problem I have with Bill Parcells is him quitting. I don't like guys quitting. If you sign up for something, finish the job get the job done. Don't quit. It is a three-year formula, he goes in, gets his three years and then he quits and walks out of there with a bucket full of money. I don't like that part of it ~ Deion Sanders, #NFDB
689:Roughly speaking, the greater the value of the metric tensor, the greater the crumpling of the sheet. No mattet how crumpled the sheet of paper, the metric tensor gives us a simple means of measuring its curvature at any point. If we flattened the crumpled sheet completely, then we would retrieve the formula of Pythagoras. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
690:There was a formula—a sort of list of things to say and do—which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe’s guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
691:There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without another's having less; hence "Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual," was the formula of modern proletarian thought. As ~ Upton Sinclair, #NFDB
692:Jesus has not given us an effortless step-by-step formula for impacting nations for his glory. He has given us people, and he has said, 'Live for them. Love them, serve them, and lead them. Lead them to follow me, and lead them to lead others to follow me. In the process you will multiply the gospel to the ends of the earth. ~ David Platt, #NFDB
693:How do you spell peace? P-R-A-Y-E-R! Anything you believe you need is available to you through prayer. We are not talking here about a magic formula of proper and distinct words. Oh no! We are talking about opening your heart and your mouth, saying what's on your mind, knowing that once you do, the answer will be revealed. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
694:The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
695:The Patriarch Joseph, after agreeing with the Latins that their formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Son meant the same as the Greek formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding through the Son, fell ill and died. An unkind scholar remarked that after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do? ~ Steven Runciman, #NFDB
696:Too many dreams have been cast aside in the pursuit of a career or financial security, based on a formula of success as written by the societal pressures of the “rational mind.” Yet deep and lasting happiness requires expression of the soul—and not in between the tasks of one’s working life but as a fundamental way of being. ~ Tami Lynn Kent, #NFDB
697:The formula "the Church is the Body of Christ" thus states that the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his body, forever remains the place where the Church is generated, where the Lord himself never ceases to found her anew; in the Eucharist the Church is most compactly herself - in all places, yet one only, just as he is one ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
698:The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice. ~ Stephanie Coontz, #NFDB
699:The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true. I think for a lot of men, too - certainly for most women - there's enough real conflict without manufacturing it. The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be ten sides. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
700:What I’m talking about is trying to solve a riddle or crime. Emotions play no role there. They’re too messy and complicated.” He leaned on his elbows, staring into my eyes. “But they’re good in other situations, I suppose. For instance—I’ve not yet figured out the formula for love or romance. Perhaps I shall learn one day soon. ~ Kerri Maniscalco, #NFDB
701:If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
702:I think very few people do find a relationship where, every moment of every day, everything they do comes together. That's why, in a nutshell, everyone loved Barbara in 'The Good Life.' She was the perfect partner. It was a formula. She wasn't glamorous. She wasn't clever. But she was a good partner. That's too easy, too perfect. ~ Felicity Kendal, #NFDB
703:Newton, for instance, attempted to comprehend the diversities of the universe with a single system of mathematical laws, the objectivity, sobriety and logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which, while accepting variations and adjustments according to climate and other needs, could be applied universally. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
704:Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
705:Socialism was made to be an ideology of radical democracy, of working-class self-emancipation, not a tool for state-managed development. A revolution from above, with an unelected party overseeing the creation of a social surplus and rerouting it to certain ends, even with the best of intentions, is a formula for authoritarianism. ~ Bhaskar Sunkara, #NFDB
706:If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
707:The facilities are amazing here in McLaren. If you compare them to Sauber, who have good facilities in Formula 1, it's another level. But in terms of the people, the way they approach their jobs, is really amazing when you come into McLaren. The emphasis they have is very good and it gives you a big boost when you drive for this team. ~ Sergio Perez, #NFDB
708:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
709:President Bush had an opportunity tonight to say, 'Look ... things aren't going very well in Iraq and we did make some miscalculations and misjudgments there,' but he is so stubbornly arrogant - he just sticks with that same formula that he has in talking about the war on Iraq that just defies the reality that we all see on the ground. ~ Mike McCurry, #NFDB
710:The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.” To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one’s self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend,—that is the final patent of nobility, the last formula of the superman. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
711:I have a basic theorem as to how I do my jokes. Growing up, I knew when to cross the line and when not to cross the line. It's the same with my comedy. I know what my audience will take and how much they won't take. I can't give you a formula for it. It's my own personal formula inside my head. Somebody else's might be different. ~ Larry the Cable Guy, #NFDB
712:It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
713:The best formula for a prayer that gives J.O.Y:
J- 1st, Pray to JESUS
O- 2nd, Pray for OTHERS
Y- 3rd, Pray for YOURSELF
Most people distort the formula by praying selfish prayers for their own personal gains. JYO is not the spelling for joy. In JOY, O comes before Y. It means you pray for OTHERS before YOURSELF. ~ Israelmore Ayivor,#NFDB
714:The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
715:To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
716:Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit—“like a vision in a pure ideal world.” Islam, on the other hand, is “a complete system” with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus ~ Lawrence Wright, #NFDB
717:I never had any great desire to be well-known or to sell a lot of books. … Maybe that’s paradoxically one of the reasons why I’ve done well. People sense that I’m doing things out of pure enjoyment. I’m not pandering to an audience or following a formula. I’m just writing about cool stuff that interests me, and people respond to that. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
718:An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
719:The life of faith cannot be treated in the way we approach objects such as computers (which become more understandable the more we dissect and explore them). Persons of faith are not ones who act like rational detached individuals who are coldly assessing the evidence of their faith in the same way that a mathematician considers a formula. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
720:The presumption that the law can tell us what natural institution is supposed to be is a formula for totalitarianism. There's not equality in a family; there never is. And yet for that reason, the family is condemned as patriarchal. The goal of this sort of legislation is about the destruction of the traditional family, not just marriage. ~ Francis George, #NFDB
721:The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words — explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful. ~ Y ko Ogawa, #NFDB
722:The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words - explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful. ~ Yoko Ogawa, #NFDB
723:Bringing humility to the material and to the world and to the talent that was present, that's the true formula for success. When people are allowed to bring their best and you have a director who's not afraid to go in a certain way because he doesn't have an answer all the time... It is such a beautiful lesson and a beautiful experience. ~ Enrico Colantoni, #NFDB
724:Miss Manners remembers who should be introduced to whom, but then she also remembers the difference between “who” and “whom.” The formula is simple: One introduces inferiors to their superiors. Thus, gentlemen are introduced to ladies, young people to old, unranked ones to those of exalted stature and your own relatives to everyone else. It ~ Judith Martin, #NFDB
725:You just can never count on a formula, on a movie that you think is going to be a big hit, and that's why you do it. You have to choose each one for what you think you'll learn and the fun you'll have. And maybe the cool people that you work with or a character that you're going to be able to explore ... You just keep your fingers crossed. ~ Susan Sarandon, #NFDB
726:If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
727:I think that’s nonsense. We’re not snowflakes. We’re just outputs for a set of inputs.” I stop nodding. “Like a formula?” “Exactly like a formula.” He props himself up to his elbows and looks at me. “I think there are one or two inputs that matter the most. Figure those out and you’ve figured out the person. You can predict anything about them. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
728:The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise. A college which kept tuition affordable could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money available to cover costs over and above what students can afford, according to a financial aid formula. Arguments ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
729:imaging has its own formula: 1) the goal, 2) the purpose, 3) prayer activity, 4) thoughtful planning, 5) innovative thinking, 6) enthusiasm, 7) organized hard work, and 8) always holding the image of success firmly in mind. If this formula is faithfully carried out, the desired results will be achieved despite all difficulties or setbacks. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
730:Prayer is intended to increase the devotion of the individual, but if the individual himself prays he requires no formula; he pours himself forth much more naturally in self-chosen and connected thoughts before God, and scarcely requires words at all. Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
731:It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
732:Someone once told her there’s a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it’s half as long as the time you’ve been together.
But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. ~ John Green,#NFDB
733:Their pursuits were by now so mysterious to one another that neither showed surprise at anything the other did or said, each, in fact, depending more and more heavily on the other for encouragement, an arrangement somewhat similar to that magic formula of modern marriage, whose parties are encouraged by disapprobation and disinterest respectively. ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
734:It was the same with Schumacher: the need for the adrenaline rush, to push himself to the limit was always there. So without a Formula One car to race with he went on to do motorcycle racing and other stupid things, and obviously that wasn't enough to keep him happy, so he had a problem to sort out and returning to racing was his answer to the problem. ~ Niki Lauda, #NFDB
735:The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
736:It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. (402) ~ Charles S Peirce, #NFDB
737:I have now become something of an expert in the ways of “decisive” men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
738:All you have to do is to make it your business to find out what people want ~ Harry Browne instead of assuming it, instead of telling them.
The one rule that sums up the job to be done ~ Harry Browne the one formula that is fully in harmony with the real world ~ Harry Browne the secret of success is:
Find out what people want and help them get it! ~ Harry Browne,#NFDB
739:I want to see more young filmmakers, and specifically filmmakers who have a unique voice. I wouldn't mind seeing less of the attempt to force-feed people what others think they want, if that makes sense - whatever the formula is that some people seem to operate under, like needing a certain star, or needing a certain thing in order to get a piece made. ~ Andre Holland, #NFDB
740:Only about 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals. These people accomplish five and ten times as much as people of equal or better education and ability but who, for whatever reason, have never taken the time to write out exactly what they want. There is a powerful formula for setting and achieving goals that you can use for the rest of your life. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
741:We might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
742:In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
743:All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all originality and authorship is lost. That's why you're seeing superstars like Brad Pitt in THE FIGHT CLUB and Tom Cruise in MAGNOLIA. They're desperately searching for people writing and directing off-formula movies. ~ Paul Schrader, #NFDB
744:Thrust into this dingy classroom we die like lampless moths locked into the desolation of fluorescent lights and metal desks. Ten minutes until the bell rings. What use is the quadratic formula in our daily lives? Can we use it to unlock the secrets in the hearts of those we love? Five minutes until the bell rings. Cruel Algebra teacher, won’t you let us go? ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
745:Vipassana arises as you pay awareness to the inner and outer experience unfolding at the present moment. Vipassana is not associated with any rigid formula or methods. Whenever you are aware of your mental or physical feelings like tension in the muscles, movement of limbs, stiffness, heat or cold, you have begun to develop special understanding of realities. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
746:This one simple change—seeking and finding peace within—could, were it undertaken by everyone, end all wars, eliminate conflict, prevent injustice, and bring the world to everlasting peace. There is no other formula necessary, or possible. World peace is a personal thing! What is needed is not a change of circumstance, but a change of consciousness. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
747:Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
748:Nobody knows. What good's an opinion if you don't know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty's beard. I don't even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that makes a rock or table. I don't even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We've got nothing to go on -- got no way to think about things. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
749:How many kittens did she have?”
“Four, including Tod. We fed the kittens this special formula from the vet, since Juno didn’t have enough milk.” I sat beside Bailey on the rug, wishing I could trade places with my cat. “Tod almost died, so my sister named him after a grim reaper from one of her favorite books. I think she thought it would protect him. ~ Jeri Smith Ready,#NFDB
750:The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis. ~ Robert Farrar Capon, #NFDB
751:I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life. Or some kind of energy or antigravity. It's like the answer to an equation and it's become mythical over the years. But at one time we all knew what it was. I don't know when it was exactly, but that was the ancient knowledge. It's become diffused as it was handed down and turned into myth. ~ Debbie Harry, #NFDB
752:Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
753:We love Formula One and think Formula One's great. But we think Formula E is different. We would be making a big mistake if we tried to compete with Formula One and be similar to Formula One, we have to be radically different to Formula One to have a chance of survival. I don't mean survival by beating Formula One but co-existing complimentary to Formula One. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
754:Anxiety is the experience of growth itself. In any endeavor, how do you feel when you go from one stage to the next? The answer: You feel anxious. Anxiety that is denied makes us ill; anxiety that is fully confronted and fully lived through converts itself into joy, security, strength, centeredness, and character. The practical formula: Go where the pain is. ~ Peter Koestenbaum, #NFDB
755:But I see good grooming and feminism as entirely complementary. For some, beauty is a matter of pride and self-respect, of feeling your best and worthy of attention. While a man with an interest in football, wine, Formula 1 or even paintballing would never see his intelligence called into question, a woman with an interest in surface is perceived to have no depth. ~ Sali Hughes, #NFDB
756:The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman, #NFDB
757:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
758:Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration-of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine. ~ Lance Secretan, #NFDB
759:... the social scientist who lacks a mathematical mind and regards a mathematical formula as a magic recipe, rather than as the formulation of a supposition, does not hold forth much promise. A mathematical formula is never more than a precise statement. […] The chief merit of mathematization is that it compels us to become conscious of what we are assuming. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel, #NFDB
760:Una dintre cele mai răspicate afirmări a conștiinței unității de neam o oferă formula folosită de Ștefan cel Mare (în solia către Veneția din anul 1477), pentru a desemna statul de dincolo de Milcov: „cealaltă Țară Românească” (l’altra Vlachia). Voievodul moldovean știa, așadar, că țara sa și cea dintre Carpați și Dunăre erau două structuri politice ale aceluiașipopor. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
761:It all turns on affection now,” said Margaret. “Affection. Don’t you see?” Resuming her usual methods, she wrote the word on the house with her finger. “Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much. Mr. Mansbridge doesn’t know her. That’s all. And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your note-book, Mr. Mansbridge. It’s a useful formula. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
762:Jesus did not simply die to save us from our sins; Jesus lived to save us from our sins. His life and teachings show us the way to liberation. But you can't fit all that on a bumper sticker. So we try to boil it down to a formula. Four steps. The "Romans Road." John 3:16. And yet the gospel itself, in its eternal scope and scandalous particularity, defies reduction. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
763:Marc Andreessen (here) long ago referred to the above double-/triple-threat concept, citing Scott’s writing, as “even the secret formula to becoming a CEO. All successful CEOs are like this.” He reiterated that you could also cultivate this in school by getting unusual combinations of degrees, like engineering + MBA, law degree + MBA, or undergrad physics + economics. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
764:There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with. ~ Paul Rankin, #NFDB
765:But I hate the way our identity has changed. We used to establish the run and wear teams down and try not to make mistakes, and we’d rely on our defense to keep us in the game and make big plays to put us in position to win. Kyle Orton might not be the flashiest quarterback, but the guy is a winner, and that formula worked for us. I hate to say it, but that’s the truth. ~ Brian Urlacher, #NFDB
766:California, because of their Equity Funding Formula, moves a step in that direction by sending more resources to communities and students that face greater levels of poverty. But California is doing that from a greater position of real weakness, because they were already so far behind other states in funding per student. It’s a step, but many more steps need to be taken. ~ Pedro Noguera, #NFDB
767:Against a backdrop of stark group inequality, the most successful extremist groups offer their members precisely what existing societal institutions do not: a tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose, an enemy to hate and kill, and a chance to reverse the group polarity, turning humiliation into superiority and triumph. This is the formula that al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
768:I can control what happens in the chemistry lab. There's a formula and an equation, and I know exactly what the reaction will be when I mix one thing with another. Life, not so much. Love, not at all. No matter what elements you combine, you really have no idea what happens next. It's scary not knowing what comes next. But not knowing might also be the best part. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, #NFDB
769:I still believe that for good business analysts a concentrated portfolio is a good strategy combined with a long term horizon. Once again, the secret to success in following the formula strategy is patience, a quality in short supply for both professionals and individual investors alike. I think investors should have a large portion of their assets in equities over time. ~ Joel Greenblatt, #NFDB
770:The Trojans lost the war because they fell for a really dumb trick. hey, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside and all the Greeks have left. Let's bring it inside! Not a formula for long-term survival. Now if they had formed a task force to study the Trojan Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been massacred.. Who says middle management is useless? ~ Adam C Engst, #NFDB
771:The ultimate success formula: I) Decide what you want (Be precise! Clarity is power) II) Take action (because desire is not enough) III) Notice what's working or not (You don't want to continue to expend energy on an approach that's worthless IV) Change your approach until you achieve what you want (Flexibility gives you the power to create a new approach and a new result.) ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
772:You know those high school teachers who so quintessentially and stereotypically embody their subject matter that it is as if they were cast by a director? Mr. Carter was like that. I did not know they still made glasses like his glasses. He told us his dog was named “Dooty,” short for Dooty Dexy, which is a phoneticized version of the calculus formula for second derivatives. ~ Katie Heaney, #NFDB
773:They don’t need another dogma or formula for living. They don’t need another tight schedule where they are expected to rush to the next activity, where time is experienced more like a noose than a pillow. What they need most, I believe, is simply an environment in which to love and be loved—to be cherished, accepted, and celebrated for who they truly are. And I cannot underscore ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
774:What I've learnt is that if you do the GL diet strictly it really works. It gives you a means to control weight and, if you slip off the wagon, you know what to do. What's also become clear is that the combination of the diet, plus the supplements I recommend - chromium, HCA and 5-HTP is a winning formula. If you add in regular exercise, as I recommend, that's even better. ~ Patrick Holford, #NFDB
775:He is your sanctification. Any system that tries to draw your attention away from the person of Christ and onto your own efforts is antichrist in nature. Your union with God is not an incomplete relationship that comes progressively. Time is not the magic formula that makes you holy. Jesus’ sacrifice made you holy. Christ’s work was enough to purify you, spirit, soul and body. ~ John Crowder, #NFDB
776:In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.*
*This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
777:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
778:Leadership is more than management. Leadership is: • People more than projects • Movement more than maintenance • Art more than science • Intuition more than formula • Vision more than procedure • Risk more than caution • Action more than reaction • Relationships more than rules • Who you are more than what you do If you want to influence others, then you must learn to lead. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
779:Whether it's one scene or 15 scenes in a film, whether it's the lead or a cameo part, if I don't find it interesting, I tend not to do it. You never really know what it is. It could be a one-scene part. I remember I read the one scene in Crash and was asked to do it. I was like, "Absolutely!" There's no formula for how something has to be. I always try to keep it that way. ~ William Fichtner, #NFDB
780:I think a band - even a band that's been around as long as the Rolling Stones - I think that's still the formula. You know you're gonna get those songs, and you don't mind sitting through the ones that you maybe don't know very well because you know they're not gonna let you down - they're not gonna mess with you. And I kind of feel the same way about the way I structure my shows. ~ DJ Shadow, #NFDB
781:The Patriarch Joseph, after agreeing with the Latins that their formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding FROM the Son meant the same as the Greek formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding THROUGH the Son, fell ill and died. An unkind scholar remarked that after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do?' (Sir Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, pp. 17-18). ~ John Julius Norwich, #NFDB
782:The very fact that they were naturally caring and loving would be the milestone that weighed them down. The formula is perfect. The nurse becomes willing to sacrifice herself in the patient. But the patient isn’t suffering from an external illness, he’s suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The nurse wants to prevent him from this pain. The patient wants her to feel the pain, too. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
783:I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within. Jesus said, 'Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you. If with all your hearts, you truly seek me, you shall ever surely find me.' If you commit yourself to the love of Christ, then that is how you run a straight race. ~ Eric Liddell, #NFDB
784:If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
785:Time, he realized, must be warped by the masses of heavy bodies such as the Earth or a black hole, and that warping is responsible for gravity. He embodied this insight in what I like to call “Einstein’s law of time warps,” a precise mathematical formula that I describe qualitatively this way: Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there. ~ Kip S Thorne, #NFDB
786:I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
787:The reason everybody is so amazed and enamored with me right now is because I have worked every angle, I have worked every formula, I have worked every equation, I have seen every club, I have seen every performance, I have seen every joke, I have studied, I have done my job. That's why I'm good. It's not because I got up one night and decided I wanted to tell some f - -ing jokes. ~ Leslie Jones, #NFDB
788:There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church’s propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of “male and female. ~ Walter Brueggemann, #NFDB
789:There's a great blunder which we commit. Through communication, we try to control people...The fact is that nobody can control anybody. All you can do is flow. You can flow with each other, like rivers and streams flow with each other and they all end up in the same ocean. All things come from God and all things go to God. It's a very simple formula which you have learned. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
790:We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
791:In 1971, for instance, a trio from Harvard observed ninety mother-toddler pairs for five hours and found that on average, mothers gave a command, told their child no, or fielded a request (often “unreasonable” or “in a whining tone”) every three minutes. Their children, in turn, obeyed on average only 60 percent of the time. This is not exactly a formula for perfect mental health. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
792:One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. ~ Marshall Sahlins, #NFDB
793:The greatest thing about form and convention is that it saves you from having to reinvent the wheel. Now, whether you mount the wheel to a horse carriage or a Formula One racing car, make it plain or give it spinning rims, those are all craft decisions. But the fact of the wheel remains: it will turn if you set it down. That's what I mean about the beauty of the gifts genre can offer. ~ Chris Abani, #NFDB
794:The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units. ~ Lee Smolin, #NFDB
795:The PREP Formula Once you have your points, you can use the “PREP” formula for each point in your presentation. P: Point of View State your opinion, idea, or fact at the beginning. R: Reasons State your reasons for holding this point of view. E: Example Reinforce your point of view with an example. P: Point of View Restate your first “P” to emphasize your idea and to come full circle. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
796:As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
797:Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine. Lance Secretan ~ Henry Kimsey House, #NFDB
798:There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love...Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #NFDB
799:I pick out a sealed bag of fluid, which has the approximate shape and feel of a packaged pork loin, from the pile produced by the tech who is “pumping bags,” filling them by the liter with either normal saline or Ringer’s solution—a weakly sugared saline named after Sydney Ringer, who in 1882 found that he could make a dead frog’s heart beat by repeatedly bathing it in this very formula. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
800:Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
801:I also have a brand-new prescription for gunfire jitters: When the shooting gets loud, proceed to the nearest wooden staircase. Run up and down a few times, making sure to stumble at least once. What with the scratches and the noise of running and falling, you won't even be able to hear the shooting, much less worry about it. Yours truly has put this magic formula to use, with great success! ~ Anne Frank, #NFDB
802:Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
803:THE OBSESSION of Speer’s life after Nuremberg, as I have pointed out, was Hitler’s murder of the Jews. The ambivalence, however, was that while he sincerely grasped every opportunity to reiterate his sorrow and his pain at having been–the automatic formula he used–“a part of a government that committed such crimes”, he was totally incapable of saying that he had known about them at the time. ~ Gitta Sereny, #NFDB
804:Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains.[...] It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain? ~ Henri Barbusse, #NFDB
805:To love him who makes one happy, is to a reflective mind an inadequate definition of what love is; to love him who made one unhappy out of malice, is virtue; but to love him who out of love, though by a misunderstanding, yet out of love, made one unhappy – that is the formula never yet enunciated, so far as I know, but nevertheless the normal formula in reflection for what it is to love. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
806:Viktor Frankl's timeless formula for survival. One of the classic psychiatric texts of our time, Man's Search for Meaning is a meditation on the irreducible gift of one's own counsel in the face of great suffering, as well as a reminder of the responsibility each of us owes in valuing the community of our humanity. There are few wiser, kinder, or more comforting challenges than Frankl's. ~ Patricia J Williams, #NFDB
807:A sense of accomplishment. It is the most important ingredient in any rational being's formula of happiness. It is the element that builds confidence and allows us to go on to other, greater tasks. It is the item that promotes a sense of self-worth, that allows any person to believe there is value in life itself, that gives a sense of purpose to bolster us as we face life's unanswerable questions. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
808:A sense of accomplishment. It is the most important ingredient in any rational being’s formula of happiness. It is the element that builds confidence and allows us to go on to other, greater tasks. It is the item that promotes a sense of self-worth, that allows any person to believe there is value in life itself, that gives a sense of purpose to bolster us as we face life’s unanswerable questions. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
809:I don’t trust painting. At least not in New York. Most painting here relies on formula and repetition, whoring itself to the market. There seems to be no risk and once a painter gets a strategy, very little exploration. As a result, I stopped thinking about painting a long time ago. I prefer forms of art that are more market-resistant, more idea-based, more - for lack of a better word - risky. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith, #NFDB
810:You cry, "give us war!" You are visionaries. When will you become thinkers? The thinkers do not look for power and strength from any of the dreams that constitute military art: tactics, strategies, fortifications, artillery and all that rubbish. They do no believe in war, which is a fantasy; they believe in chemistry, which is a science. They know the way to put victory into an algebraic formula. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
811:You might think that Social Security's family benefit maximum is what it sounds like, a straightforward dollar ceiling on the total amount that you, your spouse, and your children can receive on your earnings record and that the same ceiling would apply to everyone. But you'd be wrong. For starters, there's a rather weird and arguably unfair formula for calculating the family benefit maximum. ~ Laurence Kotlikoff, #NFDB
812:Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. “If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are,” Burry said. “At one point I recognized ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
813:I think there's a faith formula in that verse: believe plus receive equals become. So I think believing's important, having intellectual agreement with Christian doctrine is important, but there has to be a time when we receive God's gift of grace - not that we've earned it or merit it or deserve it - but receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased on the cross for us. ~ Lee Strobel, #NFDB
814:I describe it ( the new aesthetics) 'radically': I say aesthetics = human being. That is a radical formula. I set the idea of aesthetics directly in the context of human existence, and then I have the whole problem in the hand, them I have not a special problem, I have a "holography" (reacting on a former suggestion of the public as a slight joke, fh) I don't know exactly what a holography is.. (1973 ~ Joseph Beuys, #NFDB
815:Look, if somebody said tomorrow, "We're making a Lethal Weapon formula movie, but it's incredibly well-written and for two women," I'm not going to say, "Oh, forget it, it's formula." I got an idea the other day, that somebody should write a typical formula movie, a Lethal Weapon, and make it with me and my dad. It could be all father-and-daughter capers. But I'd want someone really weird to direct it. ~ Laura Dern, #NFDB
816:It is for these reasons that I believe we must expand day-care centers and provide other assistance which I have recommended to the Congress. At present, the total facilities of all the licensed day-care centers in the Nation can take care of only 185,000 children. Nearly 500,000 children under 12 must take care of themselves while their mothers work. This, it seems to me, is a formula for disaster. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
817: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
818:La grande scoperta che ho fatto a Daigo è che si hanno dentro ancora (certo un bel giorno poi no!) tante e tante risorse che basta mettersi nelle condizioni per farle venir fuori. La solitudine, il prender distanza dal mondo, lp star lontano dalle gabbie in cui uno per necessità o per malriposto senso del dovere si mette, servono enormemente. Se ci aggiungi la natura, la formula mi pare infallibile. ~ Tiziano Terzani, #NFDB
819:There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. “In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
820:A 1956 professional journal article recommended solid foods on the second or third day of life and encouraged omitting the night feeding by age 15 days. After that, the infants were to continue on three meals per day.1 This nutritional underprotection extended to the milk feeding as well, with many professionals recommending infants be shifted at 3 or 4 months from formula or breastmilk to 2 percent milk. ~ Ellyn Satter, #NFDB
821:The fast growing markets - the BRICS and Next Eleven - are the key. The next billion consumers are not going to come from the US or Western Europe - they are coming from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Formula One follows our strategy: fast growing markets, data, and digital. All those three things Formula One has. And it involves a stunning array of companies. Now that doesn't mean there can't be more. ~ Martin Sorrell, #NFDB
822:It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
823:There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own. ~ Morrie Schwartz, #NFDB
824:Consumir es una forma de tener, y quizá la más importante en las ricas sociedades actuales. Consumir tiene cualidades ambiguas, alivia la angustia, porque lo que tiene el individuo no se lo puede quitar, pero también requiere consumir más, por que el consumo previo pierde su carácter satisfactorio. Los consumidores modernos pueden identificarse con la formula siguente: yo soy == lo que tengo y lo que consumo. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
825:Donna learned quickly that there’s no point in beating yourself up when you screw up or fail to follow through. Guilt trips and self-criticism don’t motivate you to make meaningful changes; they just keep you stuck, dwelling on the past. So after each relapse, Donna came back to the basic ACT formula: A = Accept your thoughts and feelings and be present. C = Connect with your values. T = Take effective action. ~ Russ Harris, #NFDB
826:Here, however, is where his genius truly took off. Galois managed to associate with each equation a sort of "genetic code" of that equation-the Galois group of the equation-and to demonstrate that the properties of the Galois group determine whether the equation is solvable by a formula or not. Symmetry became the key concept, and the Galois group was a direct measure of the symmetry properties of an equation. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
827:A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
828:Ode to Algebra
Thrust into this dingy classroom
we die like lampless moths
locked into the desolation of
fluorescent lights and metal desks.
Ten minutes until the bell rings.
What use is the quadratic formula
in our daily lives?
Can we use it to unlock the secrets
in the hearts of those we love?
Five minutes until the bell rings.
Cruel Algebra teacher,
won't you let us go? ~ Meg Cabot,#NFDB
829:The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton's formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new. ~ Kenneth Prewitt, #NFDB
830:And who knows (one cannot vouch for it), perhaps the whole goal mankind strives for on earth consists just in this ceaselessness of the process of achievement alone, that is to say, in life itself, and not essentially in the goal, which, of course, is bound to be nothing other than two times two is four--that is, a formula; and two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
831:Some people believe that, having debauched themselves in one political party or front, they can, like the phoenix, arise from the ashes of the old in the feathers of a new party, front or movement as fresh as if nothing had happened. In fact, there is no such magic formula for longevity in political life other than the simple and the obvious: just honour your promises; do not corrupt and debauch your party. 1956 ~ Lee Kuan Yew, #NFDB
832:One of my favorite sketches, and a popular comedy formula, is to put someone with a mental handicap in some kind of unlikely situation. For example: The retarded gynecologist, the retarded Jesus, the retarded Osama Bin Laden. It works. It's funny. Inappropriate? I dunno. I feel like I'm a pretty good judge of what crosses the line of good taste being that I am retarded. Socially perhaps, but severly retarded. ~ Bonnie McFarlane, #NFDB
833:What if someone had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer?
What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering?
There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don't coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness? ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka,#NFDB
834:Astă-noapte, am fost foarte atent la cîntecul cocoşului. Era atît de sincer, de plin de elan, îneît nu pot concepe că nu se adresează nimănui, că o face doar pentru sine. în mod vădit, are ceva de comunicat, deşi registrul lui rămîne acelaşi şi nu pare să-şi schimbe formula. Şi ce dacă! Atîta convingere trebuie să corespundă unei realităţi şi să exprime un mesaj. Nu poţi să crezi că-i vorba de un simplu exerciţiu. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
835:El argumento se formula más o menos así: si nuestras diferencias indican diferencias de género, y por tanto las tratamos de modo disyuntivo (igual-distinto), entonces estamos en un aprieto; pero si los conceptos se entienden como una cuestión de más-o-menos, lo que indica solo diferencias de grado, entonces nuestros problemas se pueden resolver mediante la medida y el verdadero inconveniente será el cómo medir. ~ Giovanni Sartori, #NFDB
836:In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.
It's Magic Dick Lit. ~ Leah Raeder,#NFDB
837:Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground...All the same, it is His invention, not ours...All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden...An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
838:The rule for working out prime numbers is very simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. […] Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB
839:Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
840:There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning. This is a good sentence: "Just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, Shrike caught his arm." "Warm mud of alcoholic gloom" is exact and right and accurate. ~ Rachel Kushner, #NFDB
841:In Formula 1, the neck is really important. There's a lot of force that's going to your head. We also have a helmet and it's not that light. When it's all about g-force, all of that extra weight in the helmet compounds and puts more and more pressure. To be able to maintain your head in a straight position - especially around the corners and while braking - you need to have strong neck. To train that, it's difficult. ~ Valtteri Bottas, #NFDB
842:For to define the infinite you must use quantity in your formula, but not substance or quality. If then Being is both substance and quantity, it is two, not one: if only substance, it is not infinite and has no magnitude; for to have that it will have to be a quantity. Again, (5) ‘one’ itself, no less than ‘being’, is used in many senses, so we must consider in what sense the word is used when it is said that the All is one. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
843:Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
844:Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
845:The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness – and by no means a way back to ‘virtue’, to ‘health’, to happiness…. To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. – ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
846:Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
847:Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS and Wal-Mart have all figured out the evolution of life and they grabbed all the products that are necessary for a life. And they stuck them in one aisle and they put them in order according to how you mess up... First thing you're going to see: condoms. Next to that: lubricant. Next to that: pregnancy test. Next to that: Pampers. Next to that: formula. And at the end of the aisle they sell beer. ~ Gabriel Iglesias, #NFDB
848:Posso controllare ciò che succede nel laboratorio di chimica. C’è una formula e un’equazione e so esattamente quale sarà la reazione quando mescolo una cosa con un’altra. Nella vita, non proprio. In amore, proprio per niente. Non importa quali elementi combini, non hai assolutamente idea di cosa accadrà dopo.
Fa paura non sapere cosa accadrà dopo.
Ma non sapere potrebbe anche essere la parte migliore ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn,#NFDB
849:argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) If you believe this formula, then Grant’s habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
850:'Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman' is the triple formula of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of self-manifestation in three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its self-view as the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the cosmos.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 01: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe, The Supreme Truth-Consciousness [149] [T1],#NFDB
851:The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
852:I look for stories that tell transformative, emotional journeys, have big emotional worlds, feel very relevant and true to the times we're living in - even though they might be of a different time - have a sense of real intimacy with larger forces at work, where there's some kind of social injustice and inequity happening that needs to be conquered or addressed. I find historically that's the formula for a lot of successful operas. ~ Jake Heggie, #NFDB
853:It really started after The Long Kiss Goodnight sold for just a sinful amount of money. People were angry that I took the money. People offer you $4 million for a script - what are you going to say? "No, I'd rather sell it for $100,000"? But it engendered so much anger, I lost friends over it. And no one talked about the creative content of anything I did any more. They all just assumed I was this guy with a formula, a hack formula. ~ Shane Black, #NFDB
854:Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
855:The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
856:Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the reader likes and relates to (2) overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles (3) to reach an important goal. The more important the goal, the stronger the novel. And the most important goal that any of us have is survival. That's why murder mysteries are more gripping than a story titled "Who Stole My TV Set. ~ Lois Duncan, #NFDB
857:In a way, I feel that we're always connected, maybe you and me, we've been connected - not only now, but before. That's why we've crossed paths. And this manifests beautifully for me in fables, old television, novels in Thailand, but now we try to ignore these themes and stories. That's why now when we make "ghost" films, they have a certain stock quality to their effects, a certain formula, and I miss how it used to be. ~ Apichatpong Weerasethakul, #NFDB
858:(The above Spanish poem, 1975, can be found in the bilingual collection "The Sonnets"
and is presented here for educational, i.e. non commercial, purposes only.
The English translation is by Jackie Joseph 2011
Heraclitus was a philosopher living in the region now known as Turkey, when it was part of the Persian Empire; he believed in Logos (a cosmic formula) and is credited with the phrase (panta rhei) "everything flows") ~ ~ ~
,#NFDB
859:I began to understand why so many people chose to be “born-again” and follow strict rules that would tell them what to do, once and for all. It was tempting to rely on a formula— “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior,” for example—that became itself a form of idolatry and kept you from experiencing God in your flesh, in the complicated flesh of others. It was tempting to proclaim yourself “saved” and go back to sleep. ~ Sara Miles, #NFDB
860:It is important to notice that these badly functioning designs were praised for 'elegance.' But elegance as theoretical scientists apply it is quite different. The elegance of a mathematical formula is that it explains a phenomenon beautifully, with no parts left over. In design, elegance is more readily perceived as a property of product than of process. If we had more elegant theories, we might look to design for more than elegance. ~ Ralph Caplan, #NFDB
861:Planck knew that the spectrum had a very particular shape, with lots of light emitted at low frequencies and very little at high frequencies, and that the peak of the spectrum—the frequency at which the light emitted is brightest—depends only on the object’s temperature. He had even discovered a formula to describe the characteristic shape of the spectrum, but was stymied when he tried to find a theoretical justification for the formula. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
862:The Christian formula for the Trinity—God is one essence in three persons—may seem to be contradictory because we are accustomed to seeing one being as one person. We cannot conceive of how one being could be contained in three persons and still be only one being. To that extent, the doctrine of the Trinity in this formulation is mysterious; it boggles the mind to think of a being who is absolutely one in His essence yet three in person. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
863:The formula of the Cup is not so well suited for Evocations, and the magical Hierarchy is not involved in the same way; for the Cup being passive rather than active, it is not fitting for the magician to use it in respect of anything but the Highest. In practical working it consequently means little but prayer, and that prayer the 'prayer of silence.'
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formuale of the Elemental Weapons [148],#NFDB
864:I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that. ~ Rachel Kushner, #NFDB
865:And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
866:In the Confucian tradition is a simple formula that appeals to me deeply: 'If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.' I urge everyone to reflect deeply on these words, as simple as they are profound. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #NFDB
867:I'll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize . You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you'll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
868:I’m here to tell you that it’s not important initially to know how you’re going to create a result. What’s important is to decide you will find a way, no matter what. In Unlimited Power, I outlined what I call “The Ultimate Success Formula,” which is an elementary process for getting you where you want to go: 1) Decide what you want, 2) Take action, 3) Notice what’s working or not, and 4) Change your approach until you achieve what you want. ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
869:That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
870:When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction. ~ Jane Urquhart, #NFDB
871:There’s an arrest warrant out for her. Did you even consider taking her to the Commander?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Valek didn’t try to hide his disbelief. “Killing isn’t the only solution to a problem. Or has that been yourformula?”
“ My formula! Excuse me, Mr. Assassin, while I laugh as I remember my history lessons on how to deal with a tyrannical monarch by killing him and his family.”
Valek flashed me a dangerous look. ~ Maria V Snyder,#NFDB
872:Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock. ~ E B White, #NFDB
873:The pet food recall, which was after all just about pets, and treated as if it were an inconsequential matter, was an absolute forerunner of what's going on in China, where 50,000 infants have been sickened because of a contaminated infant formula. So these things are all closely related. You cannot separate the food supply for pets, farm animals, and people, and you cannot separate problems in one area of a country from problems in another area. ~ Marion Nestle, #NFDB
874:The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man. ~ William Graham Sumner, #NFDB
875:In the early days, Porter Wagoner would not exactly scold me, but he's say, 'You're writing too many damn verses. You're makin' these songs too damn long.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, but I'm tellin' a story. I have a story to tell.' And he'd say, 'Well, you're not going to get it on the radio.' If I start writing a song, I'm writing it for a reason. People would say that I had to have two verses, and a chorus, and a bridge. I tried to learn that formula. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
876:The child proud of learning its alphabet will soon master reading a verse or a saying, and then its first little story, and its first fairy tale, and while those who are not destined to be readers soon content themselves to practicing their ability to read on the news and financial sections of their newspapers, the select few remain forever bewitched by the strange miracle of letters and the words (each of which was once a charm, a magic formula). ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
877:There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
878:Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man’s trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
879:No one, especially not Birkhoff himself, would claim that the intricacies of aesthetic pleasure could be reduced entirely to a mere formula. However, in Birkhoff's words, "In the inevitable analytic accompaniment of the creative process, the theory of aesthetic measure is capable of performing a double service: it gives a simple, unified account of the aesthetic experience, and it provides means for the systematic analysis of typical aesthetic fields. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
880:As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve. ~ Andrew Loomis, #NFDB
881:Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock. Last ~ E B White, #NFDB
882:There’s no magical formula here, just simple truths that always apply. Here’s what you must do: repent of your sin, trust in Christ, join a church where the gospel is preached and the Bible is explained, read your Bible, and pray. Walk with God. Know your Bible. Read the world through the interpretive grid built for you by the Bible. Reject the interpretive grid pushed by the world. Be a student of Scripture, and reflect on life informed by the Scriptures. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
883:Yes, in Math City: 2 + 2 + him (her) = 5 not 4.
And again yes: A stupid man + 5 stupid women + him (her) = 7 stupid or A stupid woman + 5 stupid men + him (her) = 7 stupid.
Professor Six discovered this formula when he was studying about businessman. He saw that a businessman buys 3 apple, but the businessman sales 3 apple + his own benefit which is = 4 apple. Yes, Professor Six announced: "Businessman means "Business" + "Man" = Business + Him = 2 ~ Ahmad Amani,#NFDB
884:Hidden away among Aschenbach’s writings was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work; ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
885:Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
886:Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences! ~ Dusa McDuff, #NFDB
887:He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute and then he'll come back and say, "Excuse me. A nine year old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we? ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
888:9. Solving quadratic equations: using a standard formula and by completing the square Solve each of the following quadratic equations twice: once by using the formula, then again by completing the square. Obtain your answers in surd, not decimal, form.1. x 2 + 8x + 1 = 0 2. x 2 + 7x − 2 = 0 3. x 2 + 6x − 2 = 0 4. 4x 2 + 3x − 2 = 0 5. 2x 2 + 3x − 1 = 0 6. x 2 + x − 1 = 0 7.−x 2 + 3x + 1 = 0 8.−2x 2 − 3x + 1 = 0 9. 2x 2 + 5x − 3 = 0 10.−2s 2 − s + 3 = 0 11. 9x 2 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
889:because our workforce is so productive; our infrastructure and Internet bandwidth are so advanced; our openness to talent from anywhere is second to none; our funding for basic research is so generous; our rule of law, patent protection, and investment- and manufacturing-friendly tax code is superior to what can be found in any other country; and our openness to collaboration is unparalleled—all because we have updated and expanded our formula for success. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
890:I'm constantly watching my weight for my job, and I've trained so hard this year to be ready for this season-more rigorously than ever - but people who tune in to Formula One have no comprehension of what we have to do to be fit. It's so physical. This year, the car is way faster than when you came to the race. And the physicality has gone up quite a lot, at least 20 to 30 percent. People don't see that. They don't see us as athletes. They just see us driving. ~ Lewis Hamilton, #NFDB
891:This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world." ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
892:As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
893:„We didn’t anticipate that the formula would trigger such a violent response. In the future, you’ll only receive the unprocessed raw materials.”
“So it’s because I’m young.”
“No,” he said. “It’s because you’re young and you refuse to acknowledge what you are. What it means. What it promises. You’re fighting your condition, and that makes it almost impossible for you to control yourself. You need to admit it to yourself, Michael. You’ll never be human again. ~ Rachel Caine,#NFDB
894:Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye. ~ Pierre Simon Laplace, #NFDB
895:To see," the poet Paul Valery once wrote, "is to forget the name of the things that one sees." To see DNA is to forget its name or its chemical formula. Like the simplest of human tools-hammer, scythe, bellows, ladder, scissors-the function of the molecule can be entirely comprehended from its structure. To "see" DNA is to immediately perceive its function as a repository of information. The most important molecule in biology needs no name to be understood. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
896:If a spaceship from the outer reaches of the galaxy landed on Earth in the next two months, and its occupants climbed out and presented Earthlings with a list of secrets - a simple formula - for making life finally work on this planet without violence, killing, and war, without turmoil, pain, and suffering, without want, lack, and despair, do you think we would be wise to look it over? Even if it contradicted everything we knew to be true or thought to be so? ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
897:If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual…Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
898:One Thanksgiving Porter and June were getting ready to leave, back when their children were small, and June was heading toward the door with the baby in her arms and Danny hanging onto her coat and this load of toys and supplies when Porter called out, ‘Halt!’ and started reading from one of those cash-register tapes that he always writes his lists on: blanket, bottles, diaper bag, formula out of the fridge … June just looked over at the other two and rolled her eyes. ~ Anne Tyler, #NFDB
899:He had envisioned a river of rent payments from apartments and businesses that would eventually pay off his financiers and yield millions of dollars in net revenues even as inflation drove up the value of the property. This formula—investment + time = revenue and higher value—was the magic of real estate. By following it, Fred Trump had amassed assets that allowed him to develop ever bigger projects while simultaneously reducing the risk to his personal fortune. ~ Michael D Antonio, #NFDB
900:Let us examine briefly a formula that has had some currency in our day: “The Bible is the Word of God, which errs.” Now let us expunge some of these words. Remove “The Bible is,” so that the formula reads: “The Word of God, which errs.” Now erase “The Word of” and “which.” The result is “God errs.” To say the Bible is the Word of God that errs is clearly to indulge in impious doublespeak. If it is the Word of God, it does not err. If it errs, it is not the Word of God. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
901:I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man ~ Leonard Bernstein, #NFDB
902:Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
903:Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
904:There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
905:To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is. ~ Robert Thurman, #NFDB
906:America comes with both rights and responsibilities. You have, for example, the right to free speech, but you have the responsibility to not yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. If you don't live up to that responsibility, you face certain consequences. It's a simple but effective formula. Unfortunately, tenured professors are completely insulated from it. They can scream fire in their classrooms all they want - and then hide behind their tenure if anyone questions them on it. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
907:To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is. ~ Robert A F Thurman, #NFDB
908:As Denise Pope outlined in “Doing School,” kids today have tremendous pressure to simply get the work done—to “do school”—rather than to learn. They learn to do tasks, to produce every element the teacher wants to see in a five-paragraph essay, or to memorize every term in bio and every formula in math. They think their next task is to get into certain schools in order to be a success in life, and this mind-set often then extends to career and professional pursuits. I ~ Julie Lythcott Haims, #NFDB
909:Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
910:Given the fluid, ever-changing nature of thought and therefore of meaning, the best approach is to believe whatever you believe but hold it lightly. We need a certain structure of belief to function and orient in the world. But we don't need a final belief or formula for how something works or what something means. You can play with beliefs and meanings and see what effect they have. If a belief is working—great. And if a belief isn't working—great, because then you can change it. ~ Nirmala, #NFDB
911:I had these Whitman coin boards with slots for the coins. I said to Don, ‘It looks to me like we could take these coin boards and use them as molds for casting slugs.’ “Danly was the brains of the operation. And so, sure enough, he learned how to pour these molds for casting slugs, and I supplied the coin boards. We would try to use the slugs for vending machines for soda pop and things like that. Our basic formula was to have our income in currency and our outgo in slugs. ~ Alice Schroeder, #NFDB
912:The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
913:Skye gli ha detto che si può chiedere all'universo di fare delle cose, ma bisogna stare attenti a come si formula la propria richiesta. Bisogna sempre chiedere delle cose positive all'universo. Mai dire "non voglio più essere povero", quando quello che si intende è "voglio essere ricco". Perché se usi la parola povero, l'universo la sente, ed è quello che ti dà. Ma anche chiedere di essere ricchi è problematico, e potresti diventare ricco perché tutta la tua famiglia è morta. ~ Scarlett Thomas, #NFDB
914:The parable is given to us, but at the same time its full wealth of meaning will never be fully mined. It is not reducible to some clear, singular, scientific formula but rather gives rise to a multitude of commentaries. In opposition to this, many Christian communities view the stories and parables of the Bible as raw material to be translated into a single, understandable meaning rather than experienced as infinitely rich treasures that can speak to us in a plurality of ways. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
915:Aman thinks he scores high with a woman when he does something very big for her, like buying her a new car or taking her on a vacation. He assumes he scores less when he does something small, like opening the car door, buying her a flower, or giving her a hug. Based on this kind of score keeping, he believes he will fulfill her best by focusing his time, energy, and attention into doing something large for her. This formula, however, doesn’t work because women keep score differently. ~ John Gray, #NFDB
916:Making disciples is not an easy process. It is trying. It is messy It is slow, tedious, even painful at times. It is all these things because it is relational. Jesus has not given us an effortless step-by-step formula for impacting nations for his glory. He has given us people, and he has said, “Live for them. Love them, serve them, and lead them. Lead them to follow me, and lead them to lead others to follow me. In the process you will multiply the gospel to the ends of the earth. ~ David Platt, #NFDB
917:Saxton, the King’s solicitor and Qhuinn’s own cousin, put his perfect blond head in. “I have those documents that you—” The recoil would have been comical if Qhuinn hadn’t been up to his elbows in baby poop. The attorney let out a cough. Or maybe that was a gagging noise. “Dearest Virgin Scribe, whatever are you feeding them?” “Enfamil formula.” “And this is legal?” “For the most part, yes. Although depending on the digestive tract it goes into, clearly there are military applications. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
918:Paul’s approach to culture, then, is neither completely confrontational nor totally affirming. He does not simply rail against Greek pride in intellect and Jewish pride in power; instead he shows them that the ways they are pursuing these good things are ultimately self-defeating. He reveals the fatal contradictions and underlying idolatry within their cultures and then points them to the resolution that can only be found in Christ. This is the basic formula for contextualization. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
919:Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about "a new Silas Weekly" or "a new Lavinia Fitch" exactly as they talked about "a new brick" or "a new hairbrush." They never said "a new book by" whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like. ~ Josephine Tey, #NFDB
920:It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
921:Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat." She always tells whiners how charming they are--bullies how brave--bad sports how good--sneaks how honest! ~ Betty MacDonald, #NFDB
922:A longevity cocktail is a patented weight-loss formula consisting of ...” Olivia said, pausing for us to take notes, “hot purified water with lemon juice and psyllium husks. Stirred briskly.” Randy added, “You’ve got to stir briskly.” Zoe leaned in and asked, “Isn’t that Metamucil?” The chubby gangster girl heard Zoe and demanded to know if this was accurate. “Metamucil is a brand name,” Olivia said. “It’s a kind of psyllium husk,” Randy said, adding her usual nothing to the discussion. ~ Jennifer Coburn, #NFDB
923:Success is a planned outcome, not an accident. Success and mediocrity are both absolutely predictable because they follow the natural and immutable law of sowing and reaping. Simply stated, if you want to reap more rewards, you must sow more service, contribution, and value. That is the no-nonsense formula. Some of God’s blessings have prerequisites! Success in life is not based on need but on seed. So you’ve got to become good at either planting in the springtime or begging in the fall. ~ Tommy Newberry, #NFDB
924:That night he wrote in his diary, "Challenge a remaining taboo." It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo "Thou shalt not question Aristotle." Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
925:All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
926:Some say they are not bound by the doctrine which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility of Christian Faith. These and like errors, it is clear, have crept in among certain of our sons who are deceived by imprudent zeal for souls or by false science. ~ Pope Pius XII, #NFDB
927:I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself. ~ Thelonious Monk, #NFDB
928:However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake: every individual has different talents and responsibilities as well as different opportunity costs, so equal amounts will seem arbitrary and unfair from the start. On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair. Resentment at this stage can kill a company, but there’s no ownership formula to perfectly avoid it. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
929:How much energy will it take to propel a spaceship to ultra-high speeds? To keep things easy to visualize, we are going to calculate the energy needed to propel a one-pound object to 50% of the speed of light. The formula to determine this is: Kinetic Energy = 1/2 (mass) (velocity) (velocity) To propel an object that weighs one pound to a velocity 50% of the speed of light would require an energy source equal to the energy of 98 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. That's a tremendous amount of energy.[24] ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
930:Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, #NFDB
931:the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent. Yes, we are compelled to make peace, we submit to force majeure, but leave us at least a piece of clothing to cover our nudity. This is the motivation behind every formula of diplomatic contrivance that is sometimes described as face-saving, and wise indeed is the victor who knows that, in order to shield his own rear from the elements, he must not denude his opponents. ~ Wole Soyinka, #NFDB
932:By exchanging the burning-coal idea for the notion of nuclear fusion, science was really trading an amazing wrong idea for an amazing right one. Given the total power emitted by the Sun, which delivers nearly a kilowatt of energy to each square yard of Earth’s sunlit surface every second, and the formula E = mc2, it’s easy to calculate how much of the Sun’s body gets continuously consumed and turned into light. The truth is a little disconcerting: the Sun loses four million tons of itself each second. ~ Bob Berman, #NFDB
933:Fresh tadpoles coming out in the spring should be washed clean in cold well-water, and swallowed whole three or four days after menstruation. If a woman swallows fourteen live tadpoles on the first day and ten more on the following day, she will not conceive for five years. If contraception in still required after that, she can repeat the formula twice and be for ever sterile... This formula is good in that it is effective, safe and not expensive. The defect is that it can be used only in the spring. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
934:In other words, Birkhoff proposed a formula for the feeling of aesthetic value: M = O / C. The meaning of this formula is: For a given degree of complexity, the aesthetic measure is higher the more order the object possesses. Alternatively, if the amount of order is specified, the aesthetic measure is higher the less complex the object. Since for most practical purposes, the order is determined primarily by the symmetries of the object, Birkhoff's theory heralds symmetry as a crucial aesthetic element. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
935:early on in the Synoptics, only the demons grasp Jesus' full identity. Surprisingly to us, Jesus always rebukes these proclamations, but, in fact, this is spiritual warfare at work. One of the keys to gaining supernatural power over an opponent is to invoke his name (cf. Jesus' own strategy in Mark 5:9). “The recognition-formula is not a confession, but a defensive attempt to gain control of Jesus … [in hopes that] the use of the precise name of an individual or spirit would secure mastery over him. ~ Craig L Blomberg, #NFDB
936:There is no formula to it because writing every song, for me, is a little journey. The first note has to lift you and make you go, 'What's this?' You play C, but why is it that one day it leads to G and it didn't yesterday? I don't know. It's everything. It's the walk you take in the morning, it's the night before, the meeting with people, landscapes, the chats, all of that evolves in some way into melody, but I'm not sure how it's going to happen. I'm dealing with the unknown all the time and that is exciting. ~ Enya, #NFDB
937:The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice. Every day I hear someone say, 'I'm to fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can't. I never seem to improve.' I'd hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. I can lose ten to forty pounds rapidly, easily, painlessly, by simply setting my mind to it. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
938:You just say it. That’s how you say something that’s hard. You put one foot in front of the other. You take it step by step. You say the words. There is no magic formula. There is no secret sauce. But there are words,” she says emphatically, as if she’s delivering an impassioned speech. As if she’s saying something that matters deeply to her. “And words are all we have. That’s all there really is between people. At the end of the day, we have our actions, and we have our words. And you simply say them. ~ Lauren Blakely, #NFDB
939:Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
940:Keppel discovered, quite by accident, that if he mixed potassium of a certain sort with sulfate it produced a beautiful dark blue that would hold on all sorts of surfaces. He sold the pigment to others, but kept his formula secret for years. Guarded it. Made his fortune that way. I think he was perhaps something of a scoundrel. Finally, another scientist was able to decipher his formula, not just for himself but for all, and there is the story of Prussian blue. The first color brought to us through science. ~ Nancy Bilyeau, #NFDB
941:There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. ~ Sam Keen, #NFDB
942:Why do some folks insist that the first draft is crap? I’ve heard a couple of answers for this question. One is to blame Hemingway, which I’m rather fond of. A lot of the bad advice being passed around for writers can be laid at his feet. He got tired of new writers coming to him and asking him for the secret formula for success, so he started making up outrageously bad advice to tell them. Sadly, much of that has ended up in Writer’s Digest articles over the last few decades and is now accepted as fact. ~ Kevin McLaughlin, #NFDB
943:Saxton, the King’s solicitor and Qhuinn’s own cousin, put his perfect blond head in. “I have those documents that you—”
The recoil would have been comical if Qhuinn hadn’t been up to his elbows in baby poop.
The attorney let out a cough. Or maybe that was a gagging noise. “Dearest Virgin Scribe, whatever are you feeding them?”
“Enfamil formula.”
“And this is legal?”
“For the most part, yes. Although depending on the digestive tract it goes into, clearly there are military applications.”
“Indeed. ~ J R Ward,#NFDB
944:The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the 'Newton of Electricity'. It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics. ~ James Clerk Maxwell, #NFDB
945:Feeding (more on this in chapter 8) Breast pump Breast pads Breast cream (Lansinoh) Breast milk containers Twin nursing pillow Boppy Formula Baby bottles (8-oz. wide neck; 16–20 bottles if you’re doing formula exclusively) Dishwasher baskets Bottle brush High chairs Booster seat Food processor or immersion blender Bottle warmer Bottle drying rack Bowls and spoons Baby food storage containers Keepsakes Baby books Thank-you notes/stationery Newspaper from birthday CD player/dock for music Twin photo albums/frames ~ Natalie D az, #NFDB
946:Straining to see the world through triangle-shaped lenses, Pythagoreans argued that in heredity too a triangular harmony was at work. The mother and the father were two independent sides and the child was the third—the biological hypotenuse to the parents’ two lines. And just as a triangle’s third side could arithmetically be derived from the two other sides using a strict mathematical formula, so was a child derived from the parents’ individual contributions: nature from father and nurture from mother. A ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
947:I don't in any way underestimate the difficulties, because it's only gotten harder. But I do think you just have to go into politics with the attitude that you're going to speak clearly and authentically about what you see the country needs...and seek out whatever possible partners you can, even in the other party. I've looked at successful presidents going back. Some of our most successful governed through periods when their party was in charge, and when the other party was in charge. There's no magic formula. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
948:I started to recognize other kids from the auditions. River Phoenix was one of the regulars at that time. He was one of Iris Burton’s big hits. We would often audition for the same parts. Sadly, he later died of a drug overdose outside the Viper Room in Hollywood. I did commercials for Count Chocula, Polaroid, McDonald’s, Formula 409, He-Man, Kool-Aid, Pepsi, Fruit Roll-Ups, All laundry detergent, Hawaiian Punch, Northwest Orient Airlines—and so many more that none of us can remember all the products I represented. ~ Kirk Cameron, #NFDB
949:Scriveremo: «Noi mangiamo molte noci», e non: «Amiamo le noci», perché il verbo amare non è un verbo sicuro, manca di precisione e di obiettività. «Amare le noci» e «amare nostra Madre», non può voler dire la stessa cosa. La prima formula designa un gusto gradevole in bocca, e la seconda un sentimento. Le parole che definiscono i sentimenti sono molto vaghe, è meglio evitare il loro impiego e attenersi alla descrizione degli oggetti, degli esseri umani e di se stessi, vale a dire alla descrizione fedele dei fatti. ~ gota Krist f, #NFDB
950:Travel in a rocket at 99 percent the speed of light and you’ll enjoy the consequential sevenfold time dilation: from your perspective nothing has changed; you have aged a decade in ten years’ worth of travel. But upon returning to Earth you’d find that seventy years have passed and none of your old friends are still alive to greet you. (For the famous formula that lets you calculate the slowdown of time at any speed you care to consider, see the Lorentz transformation in Appendix 1.) Then the truth rather than the theory ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
951:I learned that you can’t predict your future, there’s no crystal ball or formula for happiness. You can’t control the weather just like you can’t control the way others behave, but what you can control is how much love you give. Surrendering to this crazy thing called life is hard, but we don’t have to be the soulless sheets of paper tarrying along in the wind. We can find our people, love, respect them, and then hang on for dear life because it’s not where you go on this journey but who you’re with that matters the most. ~ Renee Carlino, #NFDB
952:The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. ~ Jessica Bruder, #NFDB
953:The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It's a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. ~ Jessica Bruder, #NFDB
954:Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!"
"Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused.
"Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries. ~ Catherynne M Valente,#NFDB
955:I was not interested at all in Formula One when I left; I was very busy with my airline. But slowly I started missing the adrenaline rush and the driving of such fantastic cars at the limit. In reality this urge never disappears when you're a top driver, because I think we're a different breed of people, we need to take chances, we need to push ourselves to the limit all the time, that sort of thing. It stays with you, although you can kill it by losing motivation or other things in your life, but it never leaves you forever. ~ Niki Lauda, #NFDB
956:One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’s life. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
957:[W]hen habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a "fish in water": it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted could, to make sure that I am well understood, explicate Pascal's formula: the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident. ~ Pierre Bourdieu, #NFDB
958:Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. ~ William Styron, #NFDB
959:I feel like a lot of the stuff coming out right now just feels really inauthentic to me. But apparently, people don't seem to see through it. And this makes me sound bitter, but it's just my perspective. I'm not bitter. I just feel like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of any sort of integrity. It just doesn't feel like it's coming from the heart, basically. It just feels like it's being produced because people know it's a formula that will work, or it's easily digestible and fun to look at. ~ Ed Droste, #NFDB
960:Of course, you can express this in all sorts of different ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarrelling with other people because they use a different formula from yours. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
961:What’s different here is the focus on the proxy when far more relevant data is available. I cannot imagine a more meaningful piece of data for auto insurers than a drunk driving record. It is evidence of risk in precisely the domain they’re attempting to predict. It’s far better than other proxies they consider, such as a high school student’s grade point average. Yet it can count far less in their formula than a score drawn from financial data thrown together on a credit report (which, as we’ve seen, is sometimes erroneous). ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
962:In common with other artists the photographer wants his finished print to convey to others his own response to his subject. In the fulfillment of this aim, his greatest asset is the directness of the process he employs. But this advantage can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technic to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach from from all formula, art-dogma, rules and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in. ~ Edward Weston, #NFDB
963:A new product, Coca-Cola, was introduced in 1885 by a former Confederate officer, John Pemberton, who had been slashed by a saber in the final fighting of the war, after Appomattox, then wrestled with an addiction to morphine, to dull the pain. A pharmacist, Pemberton experimented with a mysterious formula that derived from the coca leaf and the kola nut, to ease his suffering. The early marketing for the elixir suggested that it could reduce the symptoms that veterans suffered from, including neurasthenia, headaches and impotence. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
964:Bezos refined the formula even further. Every time a new feature or product was proposed, he decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it. Steve ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
965:Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. Watching the world’s central bankers and finance officials grappling with the current situation—trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment—reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics. ~ Liaquat Ahamed, #NFDB
966:For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
967:For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
968:So the Deep Nutrition formula for weight loss is simple: Get rid of inflammation that blocks cellular communication, and eat foods that enable you to convert fat cells into healthier tissues. Of course, there’s more to health than a healthy diet. Sleep and physical activity generate other chemicals that help your body know what you are expecting of it. So in order to reshape your body and achieve maximum health, your regimen must include eating real food, resting properly, reducing stress, and doing the right kinds of exercise. ~ Catherine Shanahan, #NFDB
969:When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature's evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren't sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
970:So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes. ~ Thom Hartmann, #NFDB
971:There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
972:Saint-Just, the contemporary of Sade, finally arrives at the justification of crime, though he starts from
very different principles. Saint-Just is, of course, the anti-Sade. If Sade's formula were "Open the prisons
or prove your virtue," then Saint-Just's would be: "Prove your virtue or go to prison." Both, however,
justify terrorism—the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism.
Absolute good and absolute evil, if the necessary logic is applied, both demand the same degree of
passion ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
973:…there is, presumably, something in the very nature of shit that makes it so looooooved. And however much the theoreticians of popular culture try to explain why shit ought to be loved, the most attractive aspect of shit is nevertheless its availability. Shit is accessible to everyone, shit is what unites us, we can stumble across shit at every moment, step in it, slip on it, shit followed us wherever we go, shit waits patiently on our doorstep. So who wouldn’t love it! And love alone is the magic formula that can transform shit into gold. ~ Dubravka Ugre i, #NFDB
974:I hurried to the fridge, got a bottle, and put it into a sink of hot water. While the formula was warming, Jack went to the bed and picked up Luke.
Holding him in a secure and competent grip, Jack murmured softly to the baby. It made no difference. Luke started squalling, his mouth wide open and his eyes screwed shut.
“There’s no use in trying to quiet him.” I rummaged in the diaper bag for a burp cloth. “He just screams louder and louder until he gets what he wants.”
“Always works for me,” Jack said.
-Luke, Ella, & Jack ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
975:People who are just starting out are always sort of coming to me for advice as the example of "independent girl," and lots of people ask, well, how did you get the booking agent or the national distribution or the tours? And I look at them like, "Good lord! Relax!" I mean, how I did it was to not care about it and to not even think about it for years and years. All I thought about was getting the next little gig in the little bar, and I get this sense that people want me to give them the secret formula or the magic trick to make it all happen. ~ Ani DiFranco, #NFDB
976:Goddamn it, he’d missed his cue. He should have set up a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. He should have manufactured some victims for the majority to persecute. Hell, that was the simplest formula in the book. The stupidest mayor of a stinking country town knew that one. Some blacks here, some Jews there, Catholics here, Protestants there, Irishmen, Swedes, Polacks, commies and homosexuals everywhere. Hell, with just a little twist of words, any and all of these could be made to look responsible for the Black Fleet. It always worked. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
977:when you allow that man. to walk through your children. plant his feet. in their veins. hold their voices. necks. bodies. inside his violence. you are no longer a mother. when you give him the key to that door. because you need to be loved by someone. you have seasoned them for the wolf. burned their childhood into a fantasy. it’s going to take a third of their lives. all the courage. from their cells to their hair. to learn the alchemetic formula that turns that kind of betrayal. a demothering. soft. liveable. – before you get that key made ~ Nayyirah Waheed, #NFDB
978:THERE HAVE BEEN five great kisses since 1642 B.C., when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks. ~ William Goldman, #NFDB
979:The amazing thing about working on new platforms is that there is a great deal of excitement. You know, these things - they're brand new. They're trying to figure it out. And so if you're a show that they're supporting, they're going to put a tremendous amount of energy behind you. They're open to new ideas, new ways of promoting a show, and I think that feels really exciting, because network TV sort of feels like a formula. They give you a couple of weeks, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, you're most likely going to get cancelled. ~ Gillian Jacobs, #NFDB
980:Do you know what intelligence is? It is the capacity, surely, to think freely, without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true; but if you are frightened you will never be intelligent.
Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death. Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where there is fear there is no intelligence. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
981:She’d flown in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced he could get the formula right. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
982:One of the things that's happening to a lot of us is that there's this vision of the beauty of God that transports us and that takes us to a new depth and a new height. It's one of those things about beauty. You can't capture it in a word or a formula. When you get to that humble place where the beauty of God has overwhelmed you, I think it changes everything. You can say the same creed that you said before, but now it's not a creed that grasps God in the fist of the words, but it's a creed that points up to a beauty that's beyond anybody's grasp. ~ Brian D McLaren, #NFDB
983:Where it is strongest, it must still contend ceaselessly with macho, paranoiac, homogenizing, and other traditional forces that continue battling over the minds and actions of women and men – forces that may indeed be far more “natural” to us human animals, who are so innately egotistical and afraid. Add to this a plague of self-righteousness, in which both individuals and political factions seem more interested in the sweet mantras of their slogans than in finding pragmatic solutions to modern problems, and you have a formula for troubled times ahead. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
984:If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
985:If you set your bar at ‘amazing’ it’s awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn’t going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you’ve created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that’s where you are. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
986:Simon told me I should take you home and start making kits. What do you think?” Max looked down at her, love and lust glowing equally in his brilliant smile. “Max?” “What?” His tone was wary; he’d come to expect the unexpected when she used that particular tone of voice. “Will I give birth to a baby or a litter?” “Emma,” he groaned. “I mean, will we be feeding them baby formula or Kitten Chow?” “Emma!” “If they get stuck in a tree, who do we call? Does the fire department do kitten rescues anymore? This is important stuff to know, Lion-O!” “God save me. ~ Dana Marie Bell, #NFDB
987:There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are. ~ Janet Mock, #NFDB
988:Were it not for Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” formula, Christians and Jews would certainly have had much less to do with each other throughout the many centuries before exterminationist anti-Semitism entered the West’s historical consciousness and conscience. Moreover, many Westerners today see Christianity as the beginning of Western proselytizing and do not realize that Judaism itself, in its historical infancy, was a proselytizing religion using tactics, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, that could sometimes be summed up as “harass and destroy. ~ Susan Jacoby, #NFDB
989:When people hold on to a fixed mindset, it's often for a reason. At some point in their lives it served a good purpose for them. It told them who they were or who they wanted to be (a smart, talented child) and it told them how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others.
The idea that they are worth and will be loved is crucial for children, and -- if a child is unsure about being valued or loved -- the fixed mindset appears to offer a simple, straightforward route on this. ~ Carol S Dweck,#NFDB
990:Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, "the face you had before you were born," as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identify, which can never be gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
991:learned that knowledge is power. If you want to control people's lives, limit their knowledge. That is why, throughout history, despots have burned books and exiled (and even killed) those with knowledge who threatened their power. Before the Civil War in America, it was against the law in many states to teach slaves to read and write. Knowledge is the most powerful force on earth. That is why the control of knowledge is essential to the control of power. The formula is: Information x Education = Knowledge Knowledge is power—and lack of knowledge is weakness. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
992:[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
993:Race to the Top was only marginally different from No Child Left Behind. In fact, it was worse, because it gave full-throated Democratic endorsement to the long-standing Republican agenda of testing, accountability, and choice. Race to the Top abandoned equity as the driving principle of federal aid. From the initiation of federal aid to local school districts in 1965, Democratic administrations had insisted on formula grants, which distributed federal money to schools and districts based on the proportion of students who were poor, not on a competition among states. ~ Diane Ravitch, #NFDB
994:For example, one time we were putting some numbers into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator, and he says, “That’s 2,300.” I begin to push the buttons, and he says, “If you want it exactly, it’s 2,304.” The machine says 2,304. “Gee! That’s pretty remarkable!” I say. “Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50—that’s 2,500—and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2,300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2,304. ~ Steven H Strogatz, #NFDB
995:We have seen that integration is a duality pairing between manifolds and forms. Since manifolds push forward under Φ from X to Y, we expect forms to pull back from y to X. Indeed, given any k-form ω on Y, we can define the pullback Φ* ω as the unique k-form on X such that we have the change-of-variables formula ∫ Φ(s) ω = ∫s Φ*(ω). In the case of 0-forms (i.e., scalar functions), the pullback Φ* f : x → of a scalar function f: y → is given explicitly by Φ* f (x) = f (Φ(x)), while the pullback of a 1-form ω is given explicitly by the formula (Φ* ω) x(v) = ωΦ(x) (Φ*v). ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
996:Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas,—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
997:Perhaps the finest--and certainly the most eloquent--discussion of the dilemma of victimism is Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character, in which he describes the central tragedy of relations between blacks and whites. While one's victim status confers a sense of moral innocence and entitlement, Steele writes, "it is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim". As potent as victim politics has proved to be, "It is primarily a victim's power, grounded too deeply in the entitlement derived from past injustice . . .". ~ Charles J Sykes, #NFDB
998:I see numerous patients whose physicians have advised them to have angioplasty or bypass surgery but who have decided to try my aggressive nutritional management first. Those who follow the formula described in this book invariably find that their health improves and their chest pains gradually disappear. Of hundreds of cardiac patients treated in this manner, all but a few have done exceptionally well, with chest pain resolving in almost every case (only one went to repeat angioplasty because of a recurrence of chest symptoms), and I have had no patient die from cardiac arrest. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
999:Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clean air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery. ~ John W Gardner, #NFDB
1000:There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C. when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks. Well, this one left them all behind. ~ William Goldman, #NFDB
1001:I can't give a formula for how to spread joy, but I know that the source of the joy is one's own joy, and that that is not distinct from pleasure and fulfillment of desires. So I ask: What makes me feel alive? What is the expression of my inner wild? What would really feel good? What if what makes me feel alive leads me toward the deeper joys, which are found in generosity and service, in creating things that are beautiful to me? Maybe the world needs more of that. How many petroleum company executives are doing their work because it's beautiful to them? Not very many, I bet. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1002:Hitler/Himler research into genetics and mutigenerational families led them to believe that they could control the future by controlling society. Operating on the philosophy that secret knowledge equals power, they would keep pertinent facts from the people and alter their natural evolutionary process. They knew that traumas like incest and torture left people highly suggestible and easily led. After three generations of incest, abuse, and ignorance it becomes genetically encoded and people are born more compliant. It was believed that this could be a formula for mass mind control. ~ Cathy O Brien, #NFDB
1003:Every immunoreaction is a reaction to Otherness. Now, however, Otherness is being replaced with difference, which does not entail immunoreaction. Postimmunological—indeed, postmodern—difference does not make anyone sick. In terms of immunology, it represents the Same.2 Such difference lacks the sting of foreignness, as it were, which would provoke a strong immunoreaction. Foreignness itself is being deactivated into a formula of consumption. The alien is giving way to the exotic. The tourist travels through it. The tourist—that is, the consumer—is no longer an immunological subject. ~ Byung Chul Han, #NFDB
1004:The master and the student on the journey to mastery, knows that the illusions are the illusions, decides why they are there, and then consciously creates what will be experienced next within the self through the illusions. When facing any life experience, there is a formula, a process, through which you may choose to move through mastery. Simply make the following statements: One, nothing in my world is real. Two, The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it. Three, I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is. This is how to work with the illusions of life. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1005:We must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected" and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1006:The big picture is: the main thing you should be concerned about in the future are incremental returns on capital going forward. As it turns out, past history of a good return on capital is a good proxy for this but obviously not foolproof. I think this is an area where thoughtful analysis can add value to any simple ranking/screening strategy such as the magic formula. When doing in depth analysis of companies, I care very much about long term earnings power, not necessarily so much about the volatility of that earnings power but about my certainty of "normal" earnings power over time. ~ Joel Greenblatt, #NFDB
1007:The best advice I have that is worth anything, is to do your research. Research everything—your book, marketing, promo, your genre—and think about the long-term goals, not just instant career gratification. That’s what separates career authors from hobbyists. Writing as a hobby is fine, if that’s what you want to do. If you want to be a professional, you just have to spend the time and study up. There is no magic formula or secret handshake. I so wish there was. (Well, there is coffee. That’s kind of magical.) You just have to put in the hours and do the work. Knowledge really is power. ~ Michelle M Pillow, #NFDB
1008:Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take—To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes up, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy…it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, and I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
1009:There is a relation between persons and role. But the relationship answers to the interactive system—to the frame—in which the role is performed and the self of the performer is glimpsed. Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them. Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides where and how we will show through, the culture itself prescribing what sort of entity we must believe ourselves to be in order to have something to show through in this manner. ~ Erving Goffman, #NFDB
1010:So a)To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self- evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes. division. But these signs are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically insoluble? ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1011:A Light Exists In Spring
A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here
A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human naturefeels.
It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.
Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:
A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1012:Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1013:The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious.’ ”6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.8 ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1014:Apart from murder and rape, the most horrendous crimes punished by civilized authority stem back to the 'unpardonable sin'of kingship: disobedience to the sovereign. Murderous coercion was the royal formula for establishing authority, securing obedience, and collecting booty, tribute, and taxes. At bottom, every royal reign was a reign of terror. With the extension of kingship, this underlying terror formed an integral part of the new technology and the new economy of abundance. In short, the hidden face of that beautiful dream was a nightmare, which civilization has so far not been able to throw off. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1015:When a person with curiosity and interest has discipline available to him, he has the right formula for creativity. The philosopher Nietzsche spoke of the creative act as involving both Dionysian and Apollonian elements. The Dionysian represents the passionate interest and desire to learn. The Apollonian represents the form and structure that must guide any truly creative act. Music is limited by the diatonic scale, and poetry is limited by words and the forms of poetic cadence. The world is full of people with good ideas and fantasies that never come to fruition because they don’t have disciplined limits. ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
1016:...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1017:Peasants brought up on a tradition of superstitious magic could hardly be expected to distinguish between such ostensibly Christian rituals and the mumbled incantations of the local wizard. And so, to the discomfort of the priests, many came to regard elements of Christian devotion as simple magical spells. The Latin Mass was, after all, incomprehensible to the common people, so it already had the aspect of an occult formula. It came to be seen, like magic, as an essentially mechanical rite through which absolution was achieved by observing the correct procedures. In that case, there was no real need for faith. ~ Philip Ball, #NFDB
1018:What on earth is to become of me? What have I done?” I exclaimed as I paced the soft carpet. “Well,” I went on with sudden determination, “what MUST come, MUST — that’s all;” and, taking up the bonbons and the cigars, I ran back to the other part of the house. The fatalistic formula with which I had concluded (and which was one that I often heard Nicola utter during my childhood) always produced in me, at the more difficult crises of my life, a momentarily soothing, beneficial effect. Consequently, when I re-entered the drawing-room, I was in a rather excited, unnatural mood, yet one that was perfectly cheerful. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1019:I don’t even know how to say it.” “You just say it. That’s how you say something that’s hard. You put one foot in front of the other. You take it step by step. You say the words. There is no magic formula. There is no secret sauce. But there are words,” she says emphatically, as if she’s delivering an impassioned speech. As if she’s saying something that matters deeply to her. “And words are all we have. That’s all there really is between people. At the end of the day, we have our actions, and we have our words. And you simply say them.” I try them on for size, as if I’m talking about what I did today. Casual, ~ Lauren Blakely, #NFDB
1020:Now, I’m not a fan of fad diets. They simply don’t work long term because they’re either too restrictive or they don’t emphasize a lifestyle that can be maintained. The truth is that the people who follow fad diets do so in a “yo-yo” fashion. They lose weight and then put it back on. Sometimes they’ll even gain more weight. In my opinion, fad diets are usually one step forward, two steps back. Really, the only way to maintain an optimal weight is to focus on lifestyle modification. Weight loss is a simple equation, but is hard to do in the real world. The “magical” formula is to expend more energy than you take in. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
1021:Q: How do you take off your suit of armor? How do you open yourself? A: It is not a question of how you do it. There is no ritual or ceremony or formula for opening. The first obstacle is the question itself: “How?” If you don’t question yourself, don’t watch yourself, then you just do it. We do not consider how we are going to vomit; we just vomit. There is no time to think about it; it just happens. If we are very tense, then we will have tremendous pain and will not really be able to vomit properly. We will try to swallow it back, try to struggle with our illness. We have to learn to relax when we are sick. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa, #NFDB
1022:Also in 1923, a French Ph.D. student named Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie* made a radical suggestion: he argued that there ought to be symmetry between light and matter, and so a material particle such as an electron ought to have a wavelength. After all, if light waves behave like particles, shouldn’t particles behave like waves? De Broglie suggested that just as a photon has a momentum determined by its wavelength, a material object like an electron should have a wavelength determined by its momentum: γ = h/p which is just the formula for the momentum of a photon (page 24) turned around to give the wavelength. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
1023:First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things. Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things. Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment. ~ Arthur C Brooks, #NFDB
1024:It is slow, gradual pressure that is the formula for both genius and earthquakes. Life tells us our secrets in these cracks, the way events conspire with each other in hidden grottos. This movement is at times very subtle, over a long time, like plate tectonics. If you don't have the right eyes, you might miss these patterns altogether. Although our lives do not occur in geological scales of time, it is still the gradual pressure and our minute reactions, our habits, that actually speak of our true natures. Our true will and intent is contained in potential within each of us, though in many it is buried very, very deep. ~ James Curcio, #NFDB
1025:I don’t believe it can be taught as if it were a recipe. There aren’t ingredients and techniques that will guarantee success. Parameters exist that, if followed, will ensure a business can continue, but you cannot clearly define our business success and then bottle it as you would a perfume. It’s not that simple: to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running; and, if you have a good team round you and more than your fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can’t guarantee it just by following someone else’s formula. Business is a fluid, changing substance. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
1026:Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1027:Listening to the signals talking isn’t enough—we need to understand what they’re actually saying. We must identify the likely impact and determine what the trend could mean to our businesses, our communities, and our individual daily lives. The “if this, then that” formula creates that necessary narrative to help our brains recognize what would otherwise be disparate data points and place them into cohesive scenarios for our probable, plausible, and probable futures. Scoring those scenarios by our degree of certainty and the level of importance to an organization, industry, or society informs how and when action should be taken. ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
1028:Hope is the doorway to belief, belief is the doorway to knowing, knowing is the doorway to creation, and creation is the doorway to experience. Experience is the doorway to expression, expression is the doorway to becoming, becoming is the activity of all Life and the only function of God. What you hope, you will eventually believe, what you believe, you will eventually know, what you know, you will eventually create, what you create, you will eventually experience, what you experience, you will eventually express, what you express, you will eventually become. This is the formula for all of life. It is as simple as that. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1029:In a RECESSION or slow-down, this makes economic conditions worse. If governments, businesses and households all have too much debt, and all set about repaying their debts at the same time, it’s an economic disaster. That’s why David Cameron had to backtrack on a speech he was planning to make to the Tory party conference in 2011: ‘The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit-card and store-card bills.’ It was pointed out that this was a genius formula for making the recession worse, so he had, very embarrassingly, to withdraw the lines from his speech. ~ John Lanchester, #NFDB
1030:what caused a law review article to be cited more or less. Fred and I collected citation information on all the articles published for fifteen years in the top three law reviews. Our central statistical formula had more than fifty variables. Like Epagogix, Fred and I found that seemingly incongruous things mattered a lot. Articles with shorter titles and fewer footnotes were cited significantly more, whereas articles that included an equation or an appendix were cited a lot less. Longer articles were cited more, but the regression formula predicted that citations per page peak for articles that were a whopping fifty-three pages long. ~ Ian Ayres, #NFDB
1031:SMaC recipe is a set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula. The word “SMaC” stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. You can use the term “SMaC” as a descriptor in any number of ways: as an adjective (“Let’s build a SMaC system”), as a noun (“SMaC lowers risk”), and as a verb (“Let’s SMaC this project”). A solid SMaC recipe is the operating code for turning strategic concepts into reality, a set of practices more enduring than mere tactics. Tactics change from situation to situation, whereas SMaC practices can last for decades and apply across a wide range of circumstances. ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
1032:Your team had to crunch for at least a month before each major milestone (E3, alpha, beta, etc.) and even though you bought them all dinners to make up for it, you still can’t stop thinking about the missed anniversaries, the lost birthday parties, and the evenings they didn’t get to spend with their kids because they were stuck in meetings about the best color schemes for your plumber’s overalls. Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice? Is it possible to develop a game without putting in endless hours? Will there ever be a reliable formula for making games that allows for more predictable schedules? ~ Jason Schreier, #NFDB
1033:Just how do you grow a smart baby? We’re thinking in terms of soil, so it makes sense to formulate a fertilizer. What you put in is as important as what you leave out. There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
1034:Se vorbește mult în momentul acesta despre demnitatea muncii, despre necesitatea ei. Dar asta-i o înșelătorie. Nu există demnitatea muncii decât când munca e liber acceptată. Doar trândăvia este o valoare morală pentru că poate servi la judecarea oamenilor. Nu le e fatală decât celor mediocri. Iată lecția și grandoarea ei. Munca, dimpotrivă, strivește în mod egal oamenii. Nu întemeiază o judecată. Pune în acțiune o metafizică a umilirii. Cei mai buni nu-i supraviețuiesc sub forma de sclavie pe care i-o dă actualmente societatea celor ce gândesc corect...
Propun sa răsturnăm formula clasică și să facem din muncă un rod al trândăviei. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
1035:There is a definite set of biomorphs, each permanently sitting in its own unique place in a mathematical space. It is permanently sitting there in the sense that, if only you knew its genetic formula, you could instantly find it; moreover, its neighbours in this special kind of space are the biomorphs that differ from it by only one gene. [W]hen you first evolve a new creature by artificial selection in [a] computer model, it feels like a creative process. So it is, indeed. But what you are really doing is finding the creature, for it is, in a mathematical sense, already sitting in its own place in the genetic space of Biomorph Land. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1036:In the end, Martin Luther’s old formula still sums things up nicely: “We are saved by faith alone [not our works], but not by faith that remains alone.” Nothing we do can merit God’s grace and favor, we can only believe that he has given it to us in Jesus Christ and receive it by faith. But if we truly believe and trust in the one who sacrificially served us, it changes us into people who sacrificially serve God and our neighbors. If we say “I believe in Jesus” but it doesn’t affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven’t truly understood or believed in Jesus at all. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1037:Now it's time to reveal the secret ingredient to be included in our second type of bread. This can be made of any type of dough, but must prominently feature whatever is in this basket."
The crowd hushes and he opens the lid, removes two containers, and holds them in the air so all can see. "Chèvre," he declares. "Goat cheese."
Jude looks at me. "What a joke. I thought you would get something good, like sour gummy worms or turkey feet or something."
Jonathan speaks to the camera as he works a new lump of dough, explaining how he's using the same base formula as his baguettes, but adding the sweet twist of maple syrup and apples. ~ Christa Parrish,#NFDB
1038:If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement. In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1039:There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula. ~ George Boole, #NFDB
1040:until the archives of the Masonic lodges became accessible, researchers were heavily reliant on memoirs and documents confiscated and published by the Order’s foes. Amongst the materials said to have been in Franz Xaver Zwackh’s possession were impressions of government seals to be used for counterfeiting, dissertations in defence of suicide, instructions for making poisonous gas and secret ink, a description of a special safe for the safeguarding of secret papers, and receipts for procuring abortions, along with a formula for making a tea that would induce an abortion. We now know that these were hardly representative of the Order’s activities ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1041:Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying: “And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised”: [23] this was the formula; in hoc signo the décadence triumphed.—God on the cross—is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine.... We all hang on the cross, consequently we are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it—Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.— ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1042:Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts, nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, damned out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of chatterbox or of slanderer. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
1043:If we want to reach them, our articulation of the problem has to avoid ascribing personal evil to them, while also being uncompromising in describing the dynamics of the problem. I cannot offer a formula for how to do this. The right words and strategies arise naturally from compassion: from the understanding that the bankers or whoever do as I would do, were I in their shoes. In other words, compassionate—and effective—words arise from a deeply felt realization of our common humanity. And this is possible only to the extent to which we have applied the same to ourselves. Truly, to be an effective activist requires an equivalent inner activism. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1044:Here is a simple formula for successful fishing. First decide what it is you want to express or possess. This is essential. You must definitely know what you want of life before you can fish for it. After your decision is made, turn from the world of sense, remove your attention from the problem and place it on just being by repeating quietly but with feeling, “I AM.” As your attention is removed from the world round about you and placed upon the I AM so that you are lost in the feeling of simply being, you will find yourself slipping the anchor that tied you to the shallows of your problem; and effortlessly you will find yourself moving out into the deep. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
1045:do. In 1814 the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace took this dream to its logical extreme: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
1046:The final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our knowledge of the phenomenon is complete. We go beyond the mathematical formula at our own risk; we may find a model or a picture which helps us understand it, but we have no right to expect this, and our failure to find such a model or picture need not indicate that either our reasoning or our knowledge is at fault. The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulas and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from reality; it is like making a graven image of a spirit. ~ Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1930)., #NFDB
1047:A man approached J. P. Morgan, held up an envelope, and said, “Sir, in my hand I hold a guaranteed formula for success, which I will gladly sell you for $25,000.” “Sir,” J. P. Morgan replied, “I do not know what is in the envelope; however, if you show me, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask.” The man agreed to the terms and handed over the envelope. J. P. Morgan opened it and extracted a single sheet of paper. He gave it one look, a mere glance, then handed the piece of paper back to the gent. And paid him the agreed-upon $25,000. On the paper… 1. Every morning, write a list of the things that need to be done that day. 2. Do them. ~ Tom Peters, #NFDB
1048:The purpose of Shamrock’s formula is simple: to get real and continuous feedback about what they know and what they don’t know from every angle. It purges out the ego that puffs us up, the fear that makes us doubt ourselves, and any laziness that might make us want to coast. As Shamrock observed, “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust.” This begins by accepting that others know more than you and that you can benefit from their knowledge, and then seeking them out and knocking down the illusions you have about yourself. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1049:What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up? It could happen if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you.
Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn’t. Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so
vast, too vast. It was just her and Kioni together, their burden excessive, even for two. The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now. ~ Lesley Nneka Arimah,#NFDB
1050:If you say that everything—chaos, darkness, anathema— can be reduced to mathematical formulae—then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgement, and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man’s whole business is to prove that he is a man and not a cog-wheel... And perhaps, who knows, the striving of man on earth may consist in this uninterrupted striving for something ahead, that is, in life itself rather than some real end which obviously must be a static formula of the same kind as two and two make four—I am sure that man will never renounce the genuine suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
1051:Light came and went and came again, the great plume of the fountain pulsed and winds of April sheeted it across the Square in a rainbow gossamer of spray. The fire department horses drummed on the floors with wooden stomp, most casually, and with dry whiskings of their clean, coarse tails. The street cars ground into the Square from every portion of the compass and halted briefly like wound toys in their familiar quarter-hourly formula. A dray, hauled by a boneyard nag, rattled across the cobbles on the other side before his father's shop. The courthouse bell boomed out its solemn warning of immediate three, and everything was just the same as it had always been. ~ Thomas Wolfe, The Lost Boy, #NFDB
1052:The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1053:We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
1054:In una sua Défence à l'homme révolté, Camus, che poteva contare i suoi sostenitori sulle dita di una mano, sviluppa da solo la propria difesa. A differenza di quanto la stampa comunista, assieme a Sartre e ai sartriani, gli ha rimproverato con estrema rabbia, non ha voluto criticare la rivoluzione e il socialismo, ma il nichilismo storico che porta a giustificare il crimine legalizzato in nome di un ideale rivoluzionario, ideale sfortunatamente deviato. Camus non è un controrivoluzionario, ma un rivoluzionario contro; contro i campi, contro il filo spinato, contro la formula bolscevica del marxismo, contro l'uso che Lenin fa di Marx, contro il totalitarismo marxista-leninista. ~ Michel Onfray, #NFDB
1055:The next step is to create a three- to four-word mantra that explains the meaning that your startup is seeking to make. For startups, the definition of “mantra” from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is perfect: A sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation, such as an invocation of a god, a magic spell, or a syllable or portion of scripture containing mystical potentialities. Here are five examples (some hypothetical) that illustrate the power of a good mantra to communicate the meaning of organizations: Authentic athletic performance (Nike)* Fun family entertainment (Disney)* Rewarding everyday moments (Starbucks)* Democratize commerce (eBay) ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
1056:A blind date is when well-meaning friends select two people from opposite ends of the earth, with as little in common as humanly possible, and lie to each of them about just how fabulous, interesting, normal, well adjusted, intelligent, and attractive the other half of the blind date is. Reality hits as they come through the door. You then pursue the same formula as on a regular date, hopefully in less time, and you pray that they wrote down your phone number wrong. After that you go home and cry, eventually laugh, and never speak to the friends who set you up again. And after you forget just how bad it was, you let the same friends, or others, do it to you again. With love and empathy. d.s. ~ Danielle Steel, #NFDB
1057:Earlier that day I had found a sheet of paper on which Min’s grandmother had written her definition of the “superior woman.” At the top of the page is said, “Formula for Woman, According to Dignity.” The formula was “Has excellent posture, which is two-thirds contentment and one-third desire."
At first I thought this a bit arbitrary. But all day the idea had been passing through my mind like a mantra. I began to think, in this strange place—half kingdom, half city—that the grandmother’s formula caught the entire world in its tiny palm. Two-thirds contentment, one-third desire. Of course, I thought, as I spiraled my way through the trees to Asia Foodstore, that is the composition of the world. ~ Rebecca Lee,#NFDB
1058:Obsolescent
Bending over like this to get my hands empty
Rummaging through the white trashcans out back
Of the Patent Office I find a kind of peace
Here in this warm-lit alley where no one comes.
Even the rats too they know that nothing new
Is going to get pitched out now--no formula,
Not one blueprint will ever be found in these
Bright bins whose futures are huge, pristine.
Old alleymouth grabbags my attention at times
I see the world flash by out there, glow-glow as
The floors of decontamination chambersI go back to my dull, boring search, foraging
For the feel it gives me of the thing which has
Invented me: that void whose sole idea I was.
~ Bill Knott,#NFDB
1059:You can write great books," the great man continued. "Or you can have kids. It's up to you."
[...]
Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coefficient of both. Children, the great man said, were notorious thieves of time.
[...]
Writers need to be irresponsible, ultimately, to everything but the writing, free of commitments to everything but the daily word count. Children, by contrast, needed stability, consistency, routine, and above all, commitment. In short, he was saying, children are the opposite of writing. ~ Michael Chabon,#NFDB
1060:[A corporation is] a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual.41 This legal fiction, recognizing “a collection of many individuals” as a new kind of individual, turned out to be a winning formula. It let people place themselves into a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential for gigantic rewards. Corporations and corporate law helped England pull out ahead of the rest of the world in the early days of the industrial revolution. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1061:Men in western governments who were themselves are often modern men, did not understand that freedom without chaos is not a magic formula which can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being modern men, it was their view that, because human race had evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1950, democracy could be planted anywhere from the outside. They had carefully closed their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could not be separated from its roots. (…) Many countries where democracy has been imposed from the outside or from top downward, authoritarianism has increasingly become the rule of the day ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
1062:Le battaglie intorno all'Uomo in rivolta riattivano quella che era stata la posta in gioco durante la Prima Internazionale, in cui, fin dal Settembre 1866 a Ginevra, si erano trovati opposti da una parte Marx e dall'altra Bakunin e Proudhon, vale a dire due forme di socialismo: la formula autoritaria dell'intellettuale tedesco e l'opzione libertaria dell'orco russo e dell'anarchico francese. Marx non si è tirato indietro di fronte a nulla pur di raggiungere il proprio scopo, e cioè l'egemonia del movimento operaio internazionale: intrighi, colpi bassi, disinformazione, calunnie, maldicenze, insinuazioni sulle persona di Bakunin. Una tecnica che ricorda quella della coppia Jeanson-Sartre contro Camus. ~ Michel Onfray, #NFDB
1063:Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there' the next summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be brown and only have a single aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda. would be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and Zelda. and their daughter were going to go there that summer. I was trying to get him to write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1064:But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1065:We want America in the twenty-first century to be the launching pad where everyone in the world comes to launch his or her moon shot. We want it to be the place where innovators and entrepreneurs the world over come to locate all or part of their operations because our workforce is so productive; our infrastructure and Internet bandwidth are so advanced; our openness to talent from anywhere is second to none; our funding for basic research is so generous; our rule of law, patent protection, and investment- and manufacturing-friendly tax code is superior to what can be found in any other country; and our openness to collaboration is unparalleled—all because we have updated and expanded our formula for success. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
1066:Los datos del Instituto Internacional de Estudios Estratégicos indican que los mayores vendedores de armas son los Estados Unidos, el Reino Unido, Francia y Rusia. En la lista, algunos lugares más atrás, también figura China. Y estos son, casualmente, los cinco países que tienen derecho de veto en el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas. En buen romance, el derecho de veto significa poder de decisión. La Asamblea General del máximo organismo internacional, donde están todos los países, formula recomendaciones; pero quien decide es el Consejo de Seguridad. La Asamblea habla o calla; el Consejo hace o deshace. O sea: la paz mundial está en manos de las cinco potencias que explotan el gran negocio de la guerra. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
1067:Quraysh, who had shown throughout the day that they were still in thrall to the overbearing haughtiness and intransigence of the jahiliyyah, a stubborn resistance to anything that might injure their sense of honor or their traditional way of life. They had even been ready to massacre the innocent unarmed pilgrims rather than accept the “humiliation” of admitting them to the Haram. When in the hearts of those who persist in unbelief arose the characteristic arrogance, the arrogance of jahiliyyah, then God sent down his peace of soul (sakinah) upon His Messenger and upon the believers, and imposed upon them the formula of self-restraint (hilm), for that was most befitting to them and they were most suited for that.31 ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1068:Prayer The fact that we can pray is not something to be taken for granted. It is true that prayer is a natural need of the human heart, but that does not give us any right before God…. We pray to the God in whom we believe through Christ. Therefore our prayer can never be a conjuring up of God; we do not need to present ourselves before him. We can know that God knows what we need before we ask for it. That gives our prayer the greatest confidence and a happy certainty. It is neither the formula nor the number of words but faith that reaches God in his fatherly heart, which has long known us. The proper prayer is not a deed, not an exercise, not a pious attitude, but the petition of a child to the heart of the Father. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1069:The Magic Formula: Deliberately think and say the magic words, thank you. The more you deliberately think and say the magic words, thank you, the more gratitude you feel. The more gratitude you deliberately think and feel, the more abundance you receive. Gratitude is a feeling. So the ultimate aim in practicing gratitude is to deliberately feel it as much as you can, because it’s the force of your feeling that accelerates the magic in your life. Newton’s law is one for one – what you give you receive, equally. That means that if you increase your feeling of gratitude, the results in your life will expand to be equal to your feeling! The truer the feeling, the more sincerely grateful you are, the faster your life will change. ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
1070:I was at John Potter’s farm, and he was about to cull the piglet because it was undersized.”
“A common practice, as I understand it,” she said curtly.
“The creature looked at me,” West protested. “It seemed to be smiling.”
“All pigs seem to be smiling. Their mouths are curved upwards.”
“I couldn’t help it; I had to bring him home.”
Kathleen shook her head disapprovingly as she looked at him. The twins had already bottle-fed the creature with a formula of cow’s milk whisked with raw egg, while Helen had lined a basket with soft cloth for it to sleep in. Now there was no getting rid of it.
“What do you intend for us to do with the pig once it’s full-grown?” she demanded.
West considered that. “Eat it? ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1071:It behooves us ... to consider the fateful formula E = mc2, which almost everyone in the world attributes to Albert Einstein's theory [of relativity]. Despite the fact, however, that Einstein did derive this formula from his special theory of relativity, it stems actually from [the] classical part [of the theory]: i.e., from the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic fields, which goes back to 1865. The famous formula has consequently no bearing whatsoever on relativistic physics, a fact Einstein himself admitted in 1950. Obviously, however, in the interim that fateful formula came to be viewed worldwide as the consummate vindication of Einstein's theory: what indeed could be more convincing than the explosion of an atom bomb? ~ Wolfgang Smith, #NFDB
1072:I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have done. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1073:26:61 rebuild it in three days. Some Jewish people expected God to provide a new temple. It is clear, however, that the testimony here rests on a misinterpretation of Jesus (see Jn 2:19). 26:63 I charge you under oath. This was a regular formula requiring people to testify. the Messiah. He would also be the king of the Jews; hence, Jesus’ response to the high priest’s question would prove useful in a charge of treason (27:11). Son of God. A Messianic title. 26:64 the Son of Man . . . coming on the clouds of heaven. Recalls Da 7:13. sitting at the right hand. Recalls Ps 110:1. Jesus used both of these passages earlier (22:44; 24:30). Mighty One. Here is literally “power,” sometimes used in Jewish sources as a circumlocution for God. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1074:People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world. That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1075:Freedom creates fear. People talk about freedom, but they are afraid. And a man is not yet a man if he is afraid of freedom. I give you freedom; I don’t give you security. I give you understanding; I don’t give you knowledge. Knowledge will make you certain. If I can give you a formula, a set formula, that there is a God and there is a Holy Ghost and there is an only begotten son, Jesus; there is hell and heaven, and these are the good acts and these are the bad acts; do the sin and you will be in hell, do what I call the virtuous acts and you will be in heaven—finished!—then you are certain. That’s why so many people have chosen to be Christians, to be Hindus, to be Mohammedans, to be Jainas—they don’t want freedom, they want fixed formulas. ~ Osho, #NFDB
1076:Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on [our Heavenly Father's] ground... It is His invention... He made the pleasures... All [Satan and his devils] can do is to encourage... humans to take the pleasures which our [God] has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence [they] always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for and ever diminishing pleasure is the formula... To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens [the heart of Satan and his devils]. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1077:Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles—that is, by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, "Today I want to become this or that person," and then proceeding to be that person.
One day she decided she would like to be an elegant representative of a well-known Parisian modiste and go to Peru. All she had to do was to act the role. So she dressed with care, presented herself with extraordinary assurance at the house of the modiste, was engaged to be her representative and given a boat ticket to Lima.
Aboard ship, she behaved like a French missionary of elegance. Her innate talent for recognizing good wines, good perfumes, good dressmaking, marked her as a lady of refinement. ~ Ana s Nin,#NFDB
1078:The older theories, which started from an erroneous conception of the social demand for money, could never arrive at a solution of this problem. Their sole contribution is limited to paraphrases of the proposition that an increase in the stock of money at the disposal of the community while the demand for it rClnains the same decreases the objective exchange-value of money, and that an increase of the demand with a constant available stock has the contrary effect, and so on. By a flash of genius, the formulators of the Quantity Theory had already recognized this. We cannot by any means call it an advance when the formula giving the amount of the demand for money (Volume of Transactions + Velocity of Circulation) was reduced to its elements. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
1079:The defence of the principle of true justice will entail denouncing what is today continually promoted as ‘social justice’, a justice that serves only the lowest classes of society (the so-called ‘working classes’) and works to the detriment of other classes, effectively leading to injustice. The true state will also be hierarchical, especially because it will be able to acknowledge and create respect for the hierarchy of true values, giving primacy to values of a higher order, not material or utilitarian ones, and admitting relevant, legitimate inequalities or differences of social positions, opportunities and dignity. The true state will reject as aberrant the formula of the state of labour, whether or not this state is presented as ‘national’. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
1080:No one shines more luridly on this faux-real stage than a woman. Whether it’s a modeling competition, a chance to compete for love, a weight-loss challenge, or a look into the lives of an aging magazine publisher’s harem, women are often the brightly polished trophies in the display case of reality television. The genre has developed a very successful formula for reducing women to an awkward series of stereotypes about low self-esteem, marital desperation, the inability to develop meaningful relationships with other women, and an obsession with an almost pornographic standard of beauty. When it comes to reality television, women, more often than not, work very hard at performing the part of woman, though their scripts are shamefully, shamefully warped. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1081:Next was learning that 4,000 calories equals about a pound of fat. I know that’s an oversimplification, but that’s okay. Oversimplifying is one of the next things I’ll mention as a tool. But if 4,000 is roughly a pound of fat, and my BMR makes it pretty easy to shave off some huge number of calories per day, it suddenly becomes very clear how to lose lots of weight without even doing any exercise. Add in some calculations on how many calories you burn doing, say, 30 minutes of exercise and you can pretty quickly come up with a formula that looks something like: BMR = 2,900 Actual intake = 1,800 Deficit from diet = BMR – actual intake = 1,100 Burned from 30 minutes cardio = 500 Total deficit = deficit from diet – burned from 30 minutes cardio = 1,600 ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1082:He focuses then, then, only on the odds for a crash-sharp, catastrophic price drops. After all, it is not small declines that wipe an investor out, it is the crashes. So their scaling formula minimizes the odds of too many of the assets in a portfolio crashing at the same time. They used that to draw a "generalized efficiency frontier"-analogous to Markowitz's original portfolio technique-to help pick a portfolio that maximizes returns for a given amount of crash-protection. As the paper put it, "the frequency of very large, unpleasant losses is minimized for a certain level of return."
Thus, it is not just the stock-picking that is important, but also the risk-protection. For the latter, Bouchaud says, multifractal thinking is most useful. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot,#NFDB
1083:There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not. ~ Karl Pearson, #NFDB
1084:Every now and then the breeze carries a distinct hint of eau de sheep."
"Really?" Annabelle sniffed experimentally. "I don't smell a thing."
"That's because you don't have a nose," Lillian replied.
"I beg your pardon?" Annabelle asked with a quizzical grin.
"Oh, you have a regular sort of nose," Lillian explained, "but I have 'a nose.' I'm unusually sensitive to smell. Give me any perfume, and I can separate it into all its parts. Rather like listening to a musical chord and dividing all its notes. Before we left New York, I even helped to develop a formula for scented soap, for my father's factory."
"Could you create a perfume, do you think?" Annabelle asked in fascination.
"I daresay I could create an excellent perfume," Lillian said confidently. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1085:The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number.
Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. ~ Mark Haddon,#NFDB
1086:If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, then one needn’t be overwhelmed by it. The appropriate action is to seek its solution. It is more sensible to spend the energy focusing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no Possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can’t do anything about it anyway. In that case, the sooner you accept this fact, the easier it will be on you. This formula, of course, implies directly confronting the problem. Otherwise you won’t be able to find out whether or not there is a resolution to the problem. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1087:Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.
It's simple arithmetic.
It's a story problem.
If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
1088:I will never be able to reduce life with God to a formula for the same reason I cannot reduce my marriage to a formula. It is a living, growing relationship with another free being, very different from me and yet sharing much in common. No relationship has proved more challenging than marriage. I am tempted sometimes to wish for an "old-fashioned" marriage, in which roles and expectations are more clearly spelled out and need not always be negotiated. I sometimes yearn for an intervention from outside which would decisively change one of the characteristics that bring my wife and me pain. So far, that has not happened. We wake up each day and continue the journey on ground that grows incrementally more solid with each step. Love works that way, with partners visible or invisible. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
1089:To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. Politics merely furnishes one arena which imposes special tests of courage. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follow his conscience - the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men - each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient - they can teach, they can offer hope, they provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1090:Declan, fortunately, was a forgiving guy and proved pretty accommodating as we figured things out together. He was patient as Sydney and I painstakingly read the instructions on the can of formula Lana sent. He made little complaint when I initially put his diaper on backward. When he grew tired again and started crying, I had no instructions to follow. Sydney gave a helpless shrug when I looked at her. So I just walked him around the living room, crooning classic rock songs until he dozed off and could be set down.
Rose, who’d stayed with us off and on but looked more terrified of the baby than a Strigoi, watched me with amazement. “You’re kind of good at that,” she remarked. “Adrian Ivashkov, baby whisperer.”
I looked down at the sleeping baby. “I’m making it up as I go along. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
1091:Had the truth been known, there was not one of the 'faithful' who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of reserve on Swann's part, undraped in any such conventional formula as 'Of course, I don't want to say anything--' to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least 'freedom of speech' is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1092:Well, take the equation of quantum mechanics that determines the form of the orbitals of an electron. This equation has a certain number of solutions, and these solutions correspond exactly to: hydrogen, helium, oxygen...and the other elements! Mendeleev's periodic table is structured exactly like the set of these solutions. The properties of the elements, with everything else, follows from the solution of this equation. Quantum mechanics deciphers perfectly the secret of the structure of the periodic table of elements.
Pythagoras and Plato's ancient dream is realized: to describe all of the world's substances with a single formula. The infinite complexity of chemistry, captured by the solutions of a single equation! And this is just one of the applications of quantum mechanics. ~ Carlo Rovelli,#NFDB
1093:If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary encironments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble” – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1094:Now, I’ve been eating the pretzels with my wife since we met in 1962 and I don’t think they are especially good. I certainly don’t think they are “thicker,” but she had been eating them far longer than I, and she insisted the formula had changed, or perhaps the machinery, and that as a result they were very slightly “thicker,” and she would no longer eat them and complained about them for months. She tried to call the manufacturer but got only recorded voice greetings. She wrote emails and even letters but nobody answered. My wife is not one to give up on a thing and I’d be hearing about it until I died. So one day I was looking at the package, while she complained behind me, and I said, “By God, we should drive to the factory and tell them in person.” We are retired now and have an RV. ~ Deb Olin Unferth, #NFDB
1095:Fiecare om are nevoie de sclavi aşa cum are nevoie de aer. Să porunceşti e ca şi cum ai respira, nu credeţi? Până şi cei mai nenorociţi ajung să respire. Chiar şi cel din urmă om din societate îşi are măcar perechea sau copilul său. Dacă e burlac, un câine. Esenţial e să te poţi înfuria fără ca celălalt să aibă dreptul să-ţi răspundă. ,,Un copil nu răspunde tatălui său!''-cunoaşteţi formula. Într-un sens, e o formulă ciudată. Cui i-ai putea răspunde în lumea asta dacă nu celui pe care-l iubeşti? Într-alt sens, e convingătoare. Trebuie totuşi ca cineva să aibă ultimul cuvânt. Altminteri, oricărui argument i se poate opune un altul şi discuţia nu s-ar mai termina niciodată. Puterea, dimpotrivă, le rezolvă pe toate. Ne-a trebuit multă vreme, dar până la urmă am izbutit să înţelegem atâta lucru. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1096:I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.
But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars. ~ Flannery O Connor,#NFDB
1097:The devil’s grand strategy against pleasure is to twist it, to get us to misuse it. “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [God’s] ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.”2 I ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1098:WOMEN ARE SEGREGATED INTO THE WORST JOBS, AREN’T THEY? While we have seen that twenty-four out of the twenty-five worst jobs are male jobs36 and that many men also have low-pay jobs (busboy, doorman, dishwasher, gas station attendant, etc.), many of the lowest-paid jobs are predominantly occupied by women. Why the distinction between the “worst” and “low-paid” jobs? Because many of the low-paid jobs are low-paid because they are safer, have higher fulfillment, more flexible hours, and other desirable characteristics that make them more in demand and therefore lower in pay. When either sex chooses jobs with these desirable characteristics, they can expect low pay. Women are much more likely to choose jobs with seven of these eight characteristics—what might be called the “Female Occupations Formula. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
1099:An easy direct calculation shows that d dt exp[!g(t)][$(t) ! a] = 0, so, indeed, exp[!g(t)][$(t) ! a] = $(0) ! a. Taking t = 1, exp[!2"in($; a)][$(1) ! a] = $(0) ! a, or, exp[!2"in($; a)] = 1, which implies that n($; a) is indeed integral. The function is obviously continuous, and being integer, it is constant on connected components. Clearly also, it tends to 0 as a tends to +, so it is identically 0 on the unbounded component. ! The next result is an immediate corollary of the invariance of path integrals of analytic functions under homotopy.Proposition. If $0 and $1 are paths which are homotopic in C \ {a} for some point a, then n($0; a) = n($1; a). Cauchy’s Integral Formula. Let $ a piecewise smooth curve in a region G which is null homotopic there, and let f be an analytic function on G. Then n($; a) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1100:She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean? ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
1101:Years ago a friend gave me what he called his 'Formula: How to Know Right from Wrong.' The formula asks four questions based on three verses in 1 Corinthians:
1. '"Everything is permissible for me"--but not everything is beneficial' (1 Corinthians 6:12).
Question 1: Is it helpful--physically, spiritually, and mentally?
2. '"Everything is permissible for me"--but I will not be mastered by anything' (1 Corinthians 6:12). Question 2: Does it bring me under its power?
3. 'Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall' (1 Corinthians 8:13).
Question 3: Does it hurt others?
4. 'So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God' (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Question 4: Does it glorify God? ~ Jerry Bridges,#NFDB
1102:Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life, ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1103:You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined,that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. ~ Paul Murray, #NFDB
1104:I’ve written about the giving of trust as though it were a simple formula for building loyalty. But it isn’t simple at all. The talent that is an essential ingredient of leadership tells the leader whom to trust and how much to trust and when to trust. The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure. ~ Tom DeMarco, #NFDB
1105:To find out if there is actually such freedom one must be aware of one's own conditioning, of the problems, of the monotonous shallowness, emptiness, insufficiency of one's daily life, and above all one must be aware of fear. One must be aware of oneself neither introspectively nor analytically, but actually be aware of oneself as one is and see if it is at all possible to be entirely free of all those issues that seem to clog the mind.
To explore, there must be freedom, not at the end, but right at the beginning. Unless one is free one cannot explore, investigate or examine.
Two things are essential: freedom and the act of learning. One cannot learn about oneself unless one is free, free so that one can observe, not according to any pattern, formula or concept, but actually observe oneself as one is. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
1106:An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices. ~ Alex Shakar, #NFDB
1107:The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their downfall: in the labyrinth, in hardness towards oneself and others, in experiment; their delight lies in self-mastery: asceticism is with them nature, need, instinct. The difficult task they consider a privilege; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation... Knowledge - a form of asceticism. - They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not exclude their being the cheerfullest, the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second. - The second type: they are the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security; they are the noble warriors, with the king above all as the highest formula of warrior, judge, and upholder of the law. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, #NFDB
1108:In the last twenty years, we have endeavoured to deal with the "problem of peace and security", and whether we do not still secretly hug the delusion that it is possible to deal with it as a "problem". We really persuaded ourselves that peace was something that could be achieved by a device, by a set of regulations, by a League of Nations or some other form of constitution, that would solve the matter once and for all. We continue to delude ourselves into the belief that "when the war is over" we shall "this time" discover the trick, the magical formula, that will stop the course of events, make further exertion unnecessary. Last time we failed to achieve this end, and why? Chiefly because we supposed it to be achievable. Because we looked at peace and security as a problem to be solved and not as a work to be made. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1109:tn The expression ῾Ωσαννά (hōsanna, literally in Hebrew, “O Lord, save”) in the quotation from Ps 118:25-26 was probably by this time a familiar liturgical expression of praise, on the order of “Hail to the king,” although both the underlying Aramaic and Hebrew expressions meant “O Lord, save us.” In words familiar to every Jew, the author is indicating that at this point every messianic expectation is now at the point of realization. It is clear from the words of the psalm shouted by the crowd that Jesus is being proclaimed as messianic king. See E. Lohse, TDNT 9:682-84. sn Hosanna is an Aramaic expression that literally means, “help, I pray,” or “save, I pray.” By Jesus’ time it had become a strictly liturgical formula of praise, however, and was used as an exclamation of praise to God. 16 sn A quotation from Ps 118:25-26. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1110:There are many ways to generate numerical falsehoods from data, many ways to create proofiness from even valid meaurements. Causuistry distorts the relationships between two sets of numbers. Randumbness creates patterns where none are to be found. Regression to the moon disguises nonsense in mathematical-looking lines or equations or formulae, making even the silliest ideas seem respectable. Such as the one described by this formula:
Callipygianness=(S+C)x(B+F)/T-V)
Where S is shape, C is circularity, B is bounciness, F ir firmness, T is texture, and V is waist-to-hip ratio. This formula was devised by a team of academic psychologists after many hours of serious research into the female derriere. Yes, indeed. This is supposed to be the formula for the perfect butt.
It fact, it's merely a formula for a perfect ass ~ Charles Seife,#NFDB
1111:When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake--a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady--of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula, 'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.' For ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1112:In Qutb’s passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied. He predicted that once the average worker lost his dreamy expectations of becoming rich, America would inevitably turn toward communism. Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit—“like a vision in a pure ideal world.” Islam, on the other hand, is “a complete system” with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus the real struggle would eventually show itself: It was not a battle between capitalism and communism; it was between Islam and materialism. And inevitably Islam would prevail. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1113:Indeed, in Scripture, no two people encounter Jesus in exactly the same way. Not once does anyone pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” or ask Jesus into their heart. The good news is good for the whole world, certainly, but what makes it good varies from person to person and community to community. Liberation from sin looks different for the rich young ruler than it does for the woman caught in adultery. The good news that Jesus is the Messiah has a different impact on John the Baptist, a Jewish prophet, than it does the Ethiopian eunuch, a Gentile and outsider. Salvation means one thing for Mary Magdalene, first to witness the resurrection, and another to the thief who died next to Jesus on a cross. The gospel is like a mosaic of stories, each one part of a larger story, yet beautiful and truthful on its own. There’s no formula, no blueprint. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
1114:Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory could be found a parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the 1970s – Pinochet is the exemplary case – would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tamper with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world. ~ Perry Anderson, #NFDB
1115:According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80 percent.50 Do not be misled by the apparent precision of this estimate: no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that. What is certain, however, is that our estimates pertain to extremely high levels of income, those observed in the top 1 percent or 0.5 percent of the income hierarchy. The evidence suggests that a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1116:In retrospect, the fact that Toy Story was the beginning of Steve’s professional resurrection seems preposterously appropriate. Its plot established the Pixar formula: a likable character is the cause of his own downfall, often as a result of hubris; but he (or she, once Pixar finally made Brave) overcomes weakness through kindness, bravery, quick wits, invention, or some combination thereof, and thereby earns a redemption that makes him—or her—an even better and more complete toy (or bug, car, fish, princess, monster, robot, mouse, or superhero!). The hero’s downfall, incidentally, often involves some kind of exile, as in Toy Story, where Woody “accidentally” sends Buzz careening into Sid’s backyard, and then must join him to engineer a hair-raising escape from that evil child. The parallels to Steve’s own exile from Apple are obvious. ~ Brent Schlender, #NFDB
1117:As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. ~ David Lodge, #NFDB
1118:Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” the apostle Paul wrote the Romans. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Romans 6:3–4). Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptized that “by this action, you died and you were born, and for you the saving water was at once a grave and the womb of a mother.” Luther described baptism as the drowning of the old, sinful self which he notes “is a mighty good swimmer,” and Argentinian preacher Juan Carlos Ortiz has been known to use a startling baptismal formula: “I kill you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve him and to please him.”13 ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
1119:It is as if, in today's permissive society, transgressive violations are allowed only in a "privatized" form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular, or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: "I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless . . . (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules)." In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: "I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless . . . (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality). ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
1120:The transformation of the community into an administrative state responsible for total social welfare leads to a paternal totality without a house-father when it fails to find any archy or cracy that is more than a mere nomos of distribution and production.
I consider it to be a utopia when Friedrich Engels promises that one day all power of men over men will cease, that there will be only production and consumption with no problems, and that "things will govern themselves." This things-governing-themselves will make every archy and cracy superfluous , and demonstrate that mankind at last has found its formula, just as, according to Dostoyevsky, the bees found their formula in the beehive, because animal s, too, have their nomos. Most of those who swarm around a nomos basileus fail to notice that, in reality, they propagate just such a formula. ~ Carl Schmitt,#NFDB
1121:sophisticated reader that he is simply referring to magical aspects of sexual activity that were bound to be misunderstood by the general public anyway. His attitude being: if only a handful of individuals will ever understand what is being written, write it in such a way that it will never go out of print. The modern reader must also bear in mind that the transcendent nature of spiritual subject matter often can only be represented by images terrible and strange. Language is not representative of reality. That Crowley was a master of metaphor is unarguable. But what is more significant is his ability to utilize words and images in the same manner as the Zen Master's Koan; expressing what appears technically to be a logical formula of language in such a way as to force the mind of the reader to deal with realities that transcend logic. The Hindu Goddess ~ Christopher S Hyatt, #NFDB
1122:Bayes’ theorem is useful because what we usually know is the probability of the effects given the causes, but what we want to know is the probability of the causes given the effects. For example, we know what percentage of flu patients have a fever, but what we really want to know is how likely a patient with a fever is to have the flu. Bayes’ theorem lets us go from one to the other. Its significance extends far beyond that, however. For Bayesians, this innocent-looking formula is the F = ma of machine learning, the foundation from which a vast number of results and applications flow. And whatever the Master Algorithm is, it must be “just” a computational implementation of Bayes’ theorem. I put just in quotes because implementing Bayes’ theorem on a computer turns out to be fiendishly hard for all but the simplest problems, for reasons that we’re about to see. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
1123:the Three-Fifths Compromise was a mere mathematical formula, advanced by Northern delegates, and was never intended as a statement that the Founders thought slaves to be less than fully human. After all, they referred to slaves as persons. Who, after all, wanted slaves counted fully for purposes of representation? Slaveholders. This would artificially increase their representation in the House of Representatives and as well in the electoral college. Also, and this cannot be stressed enough, the Three-Fifths Compromise provided an incentive for states to continue the emancipation process. When a state freed its slaves, it would get increased representation in the House of Representatives. And, because each state’s electoral vote was based on its number of representatives, the state that abolished slavery would also be rewarded in the selection of the president. ~ William J Bennett, #NFDB
1124:The cumulative results of the brain’s chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: “D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0.” The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else—you’re doing it wrong. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
1125:Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men … in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that t he best team does not necessarily win. And there’s the athleticism …, and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
1126:employment attorney review your severance letter of agreement before you sign it. “Even if you decide not to negotiate your financial package, you may want to negotiate other things, like health insurance and references for your next job,” she explains. Go in with the expectation that you won’t get everything you ask for, but you will get more than what they originally offered. Weinberg recommends an often-used formula to calculate severance: number of years at the company multiplied by two weeks’ pay = severance total. Request back pay for unused vacation days, plus a portion of the bonus you were expected to receive at the end of the year. Request a written letter of recommendation and assurance that it will be upheld if a prospective employer calls for references, and ask for a written agreement that any noncompete clause in your original offer is at this point null and void. ~ Ivanka Trump, #NFDB
1127:See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes,
experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an order
to art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Always
searching for a formula. Yes, a formula to create an expected norm for
unexplainable greatness. A cook book you might say. Yes, a recipe
book for life, love, and art. However, my dear, let me tell you. Yes,
there is no such thing. Every individual is unique in their own design,
as intended by God himself. We classify, yes, always must we classify,
for if not, then we would be lost, yes lost now wouldn't we?
Classification, order, expectations, but alas, we forget. For what is art,
if not the out word expression of an artist. It is the soul of the artisan
and if his expectations are met, than who are we to judge whether his
work be art or not? ~ Kent Marrero,#NFDB
1128:I think bourgeois fathers – wing-collar workers in pencil-striped pants, dignified, office-tied fathers, so different from young American veterans of today or from a happy, jobless Russian-born expatriate of fifteen years ago – will not understand my attitude toward our child. Whenever you held him up, replete with his warm formula and grave as an idol, and waited for the postlactic all-clear signal before making a horizontal baby of the vertical one, I used to take part both in your wait and in the tightness of his surfeit, which I exaggerated, therefore rather resenting your cheerful faith in the speedy dissipation of what I felt to be a painful oppression; and when, at last, the blunt little bubble did rise and burst in his solemn mouth, I used to experience a lovely relief as you, with a congratulatory murmur, bent low to deposit him in the white-rimmed twilight of his crib. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1129:It floats!” These two words threatened to sink Woodrow Wilson. Soap had been part of civilization for at least four thousand years, going as far back as the Babylonians, who had discovered a formula for water, alkali, and oils that could dissolve dirt and grease. In the 1830s, a man named Alexander Norris suggested that his two sons-in-law—one of whom made candles, the other soap—merge their companies. William Procter and James Gamble did just that, making a small fortune together as purveyors to the Union army during the Civil War. A decade later, Gamble’s son created a phenomenon, combining a strong laundry detergent and a gentle cleaner and whipping in enough air to keep the white cake of soap from sinking. Its two-word advertising campaign helped turn Ivory soap into an American household staple for another century and Procter & Gamble into one of America’s leading manufacturers. ~ A Scott Berg, #NFDB
1130:Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewing of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life in the way they must absolutely lead it. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1131:I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.
By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.
Just as I'd hoped. ~ Michael J Fox,#NFDB
1132:Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend—either directly or indirectly—on the exploitation of the LDCs for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back. The loans of foreign aid ensure that today's children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back. The fact that our own companies already received most of this money to build the power plants, airports, and industrial parks does not factor into this formula. Does the excuse that most Americans are unaware of this constitute innocence? Uninformed and intentionally misinformed, yes—but innocent? ~ John Perkins, #NFDB
1133:The older Puritans had trampled down all fleshly impulses; these newer Puritans trampled no less self-righteously upon the spiritual cravings. But in the increasingly spiritistic inclination of physics itself, Behaviorism and Fundamentalism had found a meeting place. Since the ultimate stuff of the physical universe was now said to be multitudinous and arbitrary “quanta” of the activity “spirits”, how easy was it for the materialistic and the spiritistic to agree? At heart, indeed, they were never very far apart in mood, though opposed in doctrine. The real cleavage was between the truly spiritual view on the one hand, and the spiritistic and materialistic on the other. Thus the most materialistic of Christian sects and the most doctrinaire of scientific sects were not long in finding a formula to express their unity, their denial of all those finer capacities which had emerged to be the spirit of man. ~ Olaf Stapledon, #NFDB
1134:That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, nuns I liked, *What am I going to do when it's gone?* And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in great works of Christian theology. St. Augustine called it "the sweetness." Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like "the prophetic light." But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God's presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back.
But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God. ~ Kate Bowler,#NFDB
1135:The second part of the motto of the left-hand path, “Love is the law׳, love under will,” became for the Nazis: “Hatred is the law, hatred under will”—a powerful formula indeed.
The inescapable historical parallel to all of this is to be seen in the innumerable cruelties committed by Christians against Jews, pagans, witches, heretics, and each other: a disgrace to the Solar tradition, as the Nazis are to the Polar. Yet many of the worst offenders were pious, and believed themselves to be sincere Christians; some of them were even "mystics". All this goes to show that any religious tradition can do more harm than good, unless it is tempered by the simple humanity and compassion that come more readily to women than to men. When the Dalai Lama says with his characteristic smile, “My religion is Kindness,” he is pointing the way to the Golden Age more surely than any priest, shaykh, or esoteric pundit. ~ Joscelyn Godwin,#NFDB
1136:And I commend to you the simple practice of extending unconditional love to another person at least once a day, every day, for the rest of your life. You’ll heal your world in delightful and surprising ways. Yet it is important to understand that love’s power can be trivialized. “Love heals” has been a popular notion for centuries. It has enjoyed a recent resurgence that has had an unfortunate side effect. Many people who do not get well, in the sense of a clinical cure, are made to feel guilty that they were not able to care enough or demonstrate ample enough compassion to effect healing. For them, love does not heal. Love is a cruel master. This “guilt-tripping,” this illusion that we have total control, misses the point entirely. It damages the individual and it relegates unconditional loving to a technique, a modality in health and healing. Love is much more than a prescription. There is no formula that ~ Greg Anderson, #NFDB
1137:The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don't..." Every morality, every religion, is based on this imperative; I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite — the first example of my "revaluation of all values." An admirable human being, a "happy one," instinctively must perform certain actions and avoid other actions; he carries these impulses in his body, and they determine his
relations with the world and other human beings. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A long life, many descendants — these are not the rewards of virtue: instead, virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other things, to a long life, many descendants — in short, to Cornaro's virtue. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
1138:Martians have a win/lose philosophy—I want to win, and I don’t care if you lose. As long as each Martian took care of himself this formula worked fine. It worked for centuries, but now it needed to be changed. Giving primarily to themselves was no longer as satisfying. Being in love, they wanted the Venusians to win as much as themselves. In most sports today we can see an extension of this Martian competitive code. For example, in tennis I not only want to win but also try to make my friend lose by making it difficult for him to return my shots. I enjoy winning even though my friend loses. Most of these Martian attitudes have a place in life, but this win/lose attitude becomes harmful in our adult relationships. If I seek to fulfill my own needs at the expense of my partner, we are sure to experience unhappiness, resentment, and conflict. The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both partners to win. ~ John Gray, #NFDB
1139:On what may be the last page he wrote in his notebooks, Leonardo drew four right triangles with bases of differing lengths (fig. 143). Inside of each he fit a rectangle, and then he shaded the remaining areas of the triangle. In the center of the page he made a chart with boxes labeled with the letter of each rectangle, and below it he described what he was trying to accomplish. As he had done obsessively over the years, he was using the visualization of geometry to help him understand the transformation of shapes. Specifically, he was trying to understand the formula for keeping the area of a right triangle the same while varying the lengths of its two legs. He had fussed with this problem, explored by Euclid, repeatedly over the years. It was a puzzle that, by this point in his life, as he turned sixty-seven and his health faded, might seem unnecessary to solve. To anyone other than Leonardo, it may have been. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1140:The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature.
The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666.
These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation. ~ John Michell,#NFDB
1141:Paul’s version of this guidance from Jesus is found in his deeply Trinitarian formula for prayer found in Ephesians 2:18: “Through him [Christ] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” The word access was commonly used when an ancient king granted someone an audience. No one could simply walk into the presence of a powerful monarch. The consequences could be imprisonment or even death (cf. Esther 4:9–16). That, however, describes the power differential only between an ancient oriental king and a commoner. The gulf between a holy God and sinful human beings is infinitely greater (1 Sam 6:20; Ps 130:3; Na 1:6). No human being can look upon God and live (Ex 33:20). Paul’s claim that we now have access to God’s very presence “through him” is therefore quite astounding. We always have an audience because of what Jesus Christ has done. His death on the cross reconciled us to God (Eph 2:16) and made him our Father. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1142:For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt. As a worst-case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or human-made cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree of ingenuity from an optimist, but it could be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no possible formula can be established to measure proportions and types of hurt and happiness in the world. If such a formula could be established, then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in to their adversaries. ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
1143:to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in. At the heart of every episode—and also across each season’s narrative arc—is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Challenges prevent resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the story line ends. In this particular episode White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead. Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
1144:However, the ready-made formula about the bourgeoisie rising as a result of an inner necessity of social development in the second half of the eighteenth century, defeating a feudal nobility undermined by economic change in the French Revolution, tends to be applied in such a routine, mechanical way today that one loses sight of the complex course of actual events. The observable problems of human beings are categorized by class concepts debased to clichés, such as "nobility" and "bourgeoisie", "feudalism" and "capitalism". Categories like these block access to a better understanding of the development of music and art in general. Such understanding is only possible if the discussion is not restricted either to economic processes or to developments in music, and if an attempt is made at the same time to illuminate the changing fate of the people who produce music and other works of art within the developing structure of society. ~ Norbert Elias, #NFDB
1145:Let me hasten to assure the reader that I am not developing an apologia for traditional religion but only describing the impoverishment of the modern neurotic and some of the reasons for it. I want to give some background for understanding how centrally Rank himself stands in the tradition of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Chesterton on the problem of faith and illusion or creative play. As we have learned from Huizinga and more recent writers like Josef Pieper and Harvey Cox, the only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life. The upshot of this whole tradition of thought is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men. Just this way Rank prescribed the cure for neurosis: as the “need for legitimate foolishness.”47 The problem of the union of religion, psychiatry, and social science is contained in this one formula. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1146:The general economic growth of the quarter of a century that followed World War II not surprisingly created many illusions. In the West, people thought that they had found in Keynesianism the definitive solution to the problem of crises and unemployment. It was thus thought that the world had entered into an era of perpetual prosperity and definitive mastery of the business cycle. In the socialist world, it was also thought that the model formula for even higher growth had been discovered which enabled Khruschev to announce victoriously that by 1980 the USSR would have overtaken the united States "in every domain." In the third world of Africa and Asia, the national liberation movements which had seized political independence, also had a battery of prescriptions which, in a mix of capitalist and socialist recipes, in doses that varied from case to case, would enable these movements to overcome "underdevelopment" in "interdependence. ~ Samir Amin, #NFDB
1147:what we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1148:This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor. And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Obama invoked in his speeches were unrecognizable. I had seen those people too. But I’d also seen the same among white people. If black men were overrepresented among drug dealers and absentee dads of the world, it was directly related to their being underrepresented among the Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world. Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1149:To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarization is the doctrine that the individual “has a duty” to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of revulsion being directed at the world-order engendering of the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths. (“Fragments of an Interview,” Aftenposten, 1959) ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
1150:I am fully aware that the things I do are construed as absolute craziness. But in actuality, we are just having fun in God’s presence. We enjoy the happy presence of God and people get free from religion, so they stop taking themselves so seriously. Freedom from pride is liberating and empowering. The Lord loves to mock religion through us, because religion grieves Him tremendously. What we are never doing is trying to make a formula out of these crazy antics. In fact, most of these antics are gloriously deriding religious formula! Our antics are so crazy in fact that you would have to be a complete nutjob to think smoking a baby Jesus doll is the latest tool to get you to a new level with God. These silly acts don’t get us filled with the Spirit, nor are we trying to start a new denomination with this stuff. We do lots of fun, goofy things because we are already in the Spirit by His grace, and we’ve been set free from the performance-oriented version of Christianity. ~ John Crowder, #NFDB
1151:The second trait of narcissism in which asceticism plays a role is blankness. “If only I could feel”—in this formula the self-denial and self-absorption reach a perverse fulfillment. Nothing is real if I cannot feel it, but I can feel nothing. The defense against there being something real outside the self is perfected, because, since I am blank, nothing outside me is alive. In therapy the patient reproaches himself for an inability to care, and yet this reproach, seemingly so laden with self-disgust, is really an accusation against the outside. For the real formula is, nothing suffices to make me feel. Under cover of blankness, there is the more childish plaint that nothing can make me feel if I don’t want to, and hidden in the characters of those who truly suffer because they go blank faced with a person or activity they always thought they had desired, there is the secret, unrecognized conviction that other people, or other things as they are, will never be good enough. ~ Richard Sennett, #NFDB
1152:...power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen. In this raw sense, power has always been very much the same everywhere; what varies is primarily the quality of the reality it seeks to create: is it based more on truth than in falsehood, which is to say, is it more or less abusive to its subjects? The answer is often a function of how broadly or narrowly the power is based: is it centered in one person, or is it spread out among many different centers that excercise checks on one another? And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens? In principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and is more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse. This rule was famously articulated by the British historian Lord Acton in his formula "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ~ Philip Gourevitch, #NFDB
1153:Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.
This is Kierkegaard's message, the culmination of his whole argument about the dead-ends of character, the ideal of health, the school of anxiety, the nature of real possibility and freedom. One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one's very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one's true insignificance, weakness, death, one's existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force. Again and again throughout his writings Kierkegaard repeats the basic formula of faith: one is a creature who can do nothing, but one exists over against a living God for whom "everything is possible. ~ Ernest Becker,#NFDB
1154:Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child. Toddlers cannot appreciate, as an adult can, that when they’re told to put their blocks away, they’ll be able to resume playing with them at some later date. They do not care, when told they can’t have another bag of potato chips, that life is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them now, because now is where they live. Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the logic of their decisions, their young children would understand it. That’s what their adult brains thrived on for all those years before their children came along: rational chitchat, in which motives were elucidated and careful analyses dutifully dispatched. But young children lead intensely emotional lives. Reasoned discussion does not have the same effect on them, and their brains are not yet optimized for it. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
1155:I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
1156:The way of even the most justifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent -- that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procurred for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige, that was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind -- the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1157:But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible dates—unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea.
At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch. ~ Helen Keller,#NFDB
1158:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #NFDB
1159:How long, Klara wondered now, how long after the mortar set did the joy remain? When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction. The features of an absent loved one's face are erased one by one, the timbre of the voice drowned by the noise of the world. Fondly recalled landscapes are savagely altered; we lose them tree by tree. Even the chestnut tree outside Klara's window would die a slow, rotting death until it would fall one night in a summer storm when everything in Klara wanted it to remain standing, blossoming in spring, leafy in summer, the only access, she secretly believed, to the window of her former self. ~ Jane Urquhart, #NFDB
1160:The general exhaustion of the cerebral functions has been pointed out by many authors. " Hystericals," said M. Fere, " are in a permanent state of psychical fatigue, which is shown by a weakening of sensibility, of motion, of the will." ' " The fundamental factor of hysteria," says M. Oppenheim, *' is irritable feebleness, an abnormal excitability accompanied with exhaustion. These characteristics are especially established in the sphere of the affective phenomena." ' M. Jolly, taking up again M. Oppenheim's conception, speaks also of an extreme nervous feebleness, which allows the exaggeration of the affective phenomena, but he adds that this formula lacks precision and does not sum up particular facts.' We think, as does this author, that it is necessary to define this cerebral weakness with more precision and explain what is meant by it. As the essential functions of the brain are psychological functions, we must show, by the analysis of the moral phenomena, wherein this psychological insufficiency consists. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1161:KEYS TO WARFARE The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow. They are attracted to the idea of strategy for that very reason. In their minds strategy is a series of steps to be followed toward a goal. They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before. Their maneuvers in life are as mechanical as their thinking. To separate yourself from such a crowd, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. Instead of grasping at Option A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B, or C depending on the circumstances. That is strategic depth of thinking, as opposed to formulaic thinking. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1162:Don't try to fight depression and fear with violent physical or mental exercise. But don't give into them either. Just think. Oh, here they are again, and look past them, as if you were looking over someone's shoulder at something beyond. Fix your mind on what's beyond.'
'But how do you do that?' Louise stared at her in perplexity, longing for some kind of formula, but confused and pessimistic. 'How can you see past something so . . . so huge?'
'You have to practise it. You mustn't let them be important, you see, or you simply feed their power. Don't pretend they're not there by flinging yourself into some manic busyness, they'll simply reappear when you're exhausted, but just look past them as you might look past a tall person sitting in front of you at the theatre. You know he's there but he doesn't prevent you from watching the action. Have something positive to look at—your next possible achievement, for instance, or something as simple as a cup of coffee. Something cheerful but attainable. ~ Marcia Willett,#NFDB
1163:I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular.
If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!"
That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions.
Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,#NFDB
1164:I Got So I Could Take His Name
293
I got so I could take his name—
Without—Tremendous gain—
That Stop-sensation—on my Soul—
And Thunder—in the Room—
I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned—how—
And all our Sinew tore—
I got so I could stir the Box—
In which his letters grew
Without that forcing, in my breath—
As Staples—driven through—
Could dimly recollect a Grace—
I think, they call it "God"—
Renowned to ease Extremity—
When Formula, had failed—
And shape my Hands—
Petition's way,
Tho' ignorant of a word
That Ordination—utters—
My Business, with the Cloud,
If any Power behind it, be,
Not subject to Despair—
It care, in some remoter way,
For so minute affair
As Misery—
Itself, too vast, for interrupting—more—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1165:My belief is that, morally, God and Satan are vaguely on the same page. According to the common understanding of Satan's origins, 'holiness' is, metaphorically, frozen stiff in his veins: and at that a corrupted formula - i.e. legalism. The vital difference is that God is willing to offer grace for our sins; he delights in grace. God is the one and only holy and just punisher of sin, yes, but that is partly so because punishment for the sake of punishment is not something he loves. Whereas Satan, as the accuser, and as it is written, actually seeks God's permission to punish; he, being a seasoned legalist, delights in finding wrongs and will defy his own morality just to expose immorality. This is why both the anti-religious soul and the violently religious soul are, whether consciously or unconsciously, and sadly enough, glorifying their biggest hater: Satan is not only a lawless lover of punishing lawlessness, but also the sharpest theologian of us all. He loves wickedness, but only because he loves punishing wickedness. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1166:One winter she grew obsessed with a fashionable puzzle known as Solitaire, the Rubik’s Cube of its day. Thirty-two pegs were arranged on a board with thirty-three holes, and the rules were simple: Any peg may jump over another immediately adjacent, and the peg jumped over is removed, until no more jumps are possible. The object is to finish with only one peg remaining. “People may try thousands of times, and not succeed in this,” she wrote Babbage excitedly. I have done it by trying & observation & can now do it at any time, but I want to know if the problem admits of being put into a mathematical Formula, & solved in this manner.… There must be a definite principle, a compound I imagine of numerical & geometrical properties, on which the solution depends, & which can be put into symbolic language. A formal solution to a game—the very idea of such a thing was original. The desire to create a language of symbols, in which the solution could be encoded—this way of thinking was Babbage’s, as she well knew. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1167:Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. ~ Edna St Vincent Millay,#NFDB
1168:One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1169:Clubs, fraternities, nations—these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world, these will have to surrender some of their rights and some of their ribs. A ‘fraternity’ is the antithesis of fraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality. Anyone who remembers back to his fraternity days at college recalls the enthusiasts in his group, the rabid members, both young and old, who were obsessed with the mystical charm of membership in their particular order. They were usually men who were incapable of genuine brotherhood, or at least unaware of its implications. Fraternity begins when the exclusion formula is found to be distasteful. The effect of any organization of a social and brotherly nature is to strengthen rather than diminish the lines which divide people into classes; the effects of states and nations is the same, and eventually these lines will have to be softened, these powers will have to be generalized. ~ E B White, #NFDB
1170:Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay,#NFDB
1171:When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person's ideas and then another's depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1172:Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important than water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes? And that ‘In God We Trust’ is on every U.S. dollar in circulation? Or that ‘One nation under God’ is recited every day in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids? ~ Zoltan Istvan, #NFDB
1173:Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids? ~ Zoltan Istvan, #NFDB
1174:When, very late in the history of our planet, the incredible accident of life occurred, a balance of chemical factors, combined with temperature, in quantities and in kinds so delicate as to be unlikely, all came together in the retort of time and a new thing emerged, soft and helpless and unprotected in the savage world of unlife. Then processes of change and variation took place in the organisms, so that one kind became different from all others. But one ingredient, perhaps the most important of all, is planted in every life form— the factor of survival. No living thing is without it, nor could life exist without this magic formula. Of course, each form developed its own machinery for survival, and some failed and disappeared while others peopled the earth. The first life might easily have been snuffed out and the accident may never have happened again—but, once it existed, its first quality, its duty, preoccupation, direction, and end, shared by every living thing, is to go on living. And so it does and so it will until some other accident cancels it. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1175:— The opening argument was one of Devlin-Brown’s favorite parts of a trial. In a case like this, it was sometimes all that mattered. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had a formula for it, a system that was passed down through generations of prosecutors. It started with what they called “the grab”—a quick, two-minute summary of the case, meant to capture the jury’s attention. The grab could begin in one of two ways. The first was with a big thematic idea, as in, “This is a case about greed.” Devlin-Brown preferred what he called the “It was a dark and stormy night” beginning, which dropped the jurors right into a dramatic scene. Just like in a movie. On this day, his version began with, “It was July of 2008.” He spoke in a gentle, even voice. “Mathew Martoma, the defendant, was one of about a thousand people packed into a crowded Chicago convention hall waiting for an expert on Alzheimer’s disease to take the stage.” Sidney Gilman, he explained, was at an international Alzheimer’s conference to unveil the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The results of ~ Sheelah Kolhatkar, #NFDB
1176:As long as the ego overcomes the heart of a man, evil will always exist, and the enemies of God will continue to multiply and thrive. If a tree is bearing bad fruit, you do not destroy the tree by cutting off its branches or eliminating its fruit, but by destroying its roots. I want you to look at the world as this poisoned tree. Even if we eliminate our enemies today, we will create new ones tomorrow. The solution is very simple and this formula is written in all your holy books. LOVE IS THY ANSWER. The strongest weapon to destroy the snakes of hate and evil is LOVE. PURE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. However, to be able to emit the right frequency of love, you must succeed daily in your own personal battle of good versus evil: heart (conscience) vs. mind (ego). Once you learn how to use your heart to embrace all living things as you do your own reflection, and use your heart to detect truths and dictate your actions, your heart will not be fully activated to LOVE. Where there is LOVE, there will remain Truth and LIGHT. Take away the LOVE, and you will always remain in the dark. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1177:These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.
You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive. ~ Lionel Shriver,#NFDB
1178:De la o vreme, Ivan Ilici isi petrecea mai tot timpul incercand sa retraiasca clipele de odinioara, cand vechile sentimente il tinusera departe de ideea mortii. Bunaoara isi spunea: "Am sa ma ocup de slujba, doar in ea mi-am gasit rostul vietii." Si se ducea la Curte, indepartand de el toate indoielile; intra in vorba cu colegii, se aseza cum ii era altadata obiceiul, imbratisand ganditor publicul cu o privire distrata, si se rezema cu amandoua mainile slabite de bratele fotoliului de stejar, se apleca, cum facea si inainte spre colegul sau, isi lua dosarul mai aproape, schimba cateva cuvinte in soapta si-apoi deodata, ridicand ochii si indreptandu-se in jilt, rostea formula de rigoare si incepea procesul. Dar brusc, in toiul sedintei, fara a se sinchisi de desfasurarea procesului, durerea dintr-o parte isi incepea actiunea distrugatoare. Ivan Ilici isi pleca mai intai urechile la ea , apoi isi alunga gandul de la ea , dar ea isi continua actiunea si ii aparea in fata ochilor, se uita la el, iar el sta impietrit, cu ochii stinsi si se intreba: "Oare numai ea sa fie realitatea ? ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1179:Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . .
In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'
But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only act Lilian and Diana; we could not be them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life. ~ Rosemary Sutcliff,#NFDB
1180:With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and staidness. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like the chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (on cannot swear to it), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which of course must always be two times two makes four, that is a formula, and after all, two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been somehow afraid of this two times two makes four, and I am afraid of it even now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that two times two makes four, that he sails the oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it -- he is somehow afraid, I assure you. He feels that as soon as he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1181:A 2008 Wall Street Journal article entitled “America’s Universities are Living a Diversity Lie” summed up findings in this area:
'To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side. In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.'
The New York Times agrees, noting that decades of promoting diversity have not succeeded in getting students to mix. The article concludes:
'No one has a formula for success; there is not even a consensus about what success would look like. Experts say that diversity programs on college campuses amount to a constantly evolving experiment, which in some cases in the past may have done more harm than good. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1182:I Watched The Moon Around The House (629)
I watched the Moon around the House
Until upon a Pane -She stopped -- a Traveller's privilege -- for Rest -And there upon
I gazed -- as at a stranger -The Lady in the Town
Doth think no incivility
To lift her Glass -- upon -But never Stranger justified
The Curiosity
Like Mine -- for not a Foot -- nor Hand -Nor Formula -- had she -But like a Head -- a Guillotine
Slid carelessly away -Did independent, Amber -Sustain her in the sky -Or like a Stemless Flower -Upheld in rolling Air
By finer Gravitations -Than bind Philosopher -No Hunger -- had she -- nor an Inn -Her Toilette -- to suffice -Nor Avocation nor Concern
for little Mysteries
As harass us -- like Life -- and Death -And Afterwards -- or Nay -But seemed engrossed to Absolute -With shining -- and the Sky -The privilege to scrutinize
Was scarce upon my Eyes
When, with a Silver practise -She vaulted out of Gaze --
511
And next -- I met her on a Cloud -Myself too far below
To follow her superior Road -Or its advantage -- Blue -~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1183:Abrahadabra is a word that first publicly appeared in The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema . Its author, Aleister Crowley, described it as the Word of the Aeon, which signifieth The Great Work accomplished. This is in reference to his belief that the writing of Liber Legis (another name for The Book of the Law) heralded a new Aeon for mankind that was ruled by the godRa-Hoor-Khuit (a form of Horus). Abrahadabra is, therefore, the magical formula of this new age. It is not to be confused with the Word of the Law of the Aeon, which is Thelema, meaning Will. ... Abrahadabra is also referred to as the Word of Double Power. More specifically, it represents the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm
represented by the pentagram and the hexagram, the rose and the cross, the circle and the square, the 5 and the 6 (etc.), as also called the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of ones Holy Guardian Angel. In Commentaries (1996), Crowley says that the word is a symbol of the establishment of the pillar or phallus of the Macrocosm...in the void of the Microcosm.
~ Wikipedia,#NFDB
1184:And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the LORD Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. COLOSSIANS 3:17 SEPTEMBER 7 You can’t be a commander of life unless you learn the great art of keeping your head in any crisis. And how is that done? “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Colossians 3:15). The secret of attaining self-control is the application of practical spiritual principles. The Bible is filled with techniques that are so simple that anyone can understand them. And these, when believed in and applied, will in due course give victory over any lack of self-control or lack of calmness. Here are the steps: When confronted with a big problem, think. Apply all of your mental powers to it. Second, pray for God’s guidance, because you will never come out right as long as you think wrong. Third, do all you can do about it. Fourth, put it in the hands of God. Let Him take over and trust Him for guidance and for the outcome. These four principles constitute a basic scientific spiritual formula that will work for the great or the simple. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
1185:Have you given any thought to the formula you would like me to run?"
Alex nearly lost his grip on the decanter. "I beg your pardon?"
"At least a few of your patrons will need to achieve moderate success, and the occasional player will need to achieve considerable success at the vingt-et-un table if you hope to attract those individuals whose pocket books match their greed and belief that the next hand will change their fortune. I will require instruction as to how you wish me to deal in order to maximize both prophets and popularity." She withdrew a small square of paper from a hidden pocket somewhere in the folds of her skirts and held it out to him.
"I've run some scenarios, allowing for a margin of error that I will not be able to avoid. It's all basic accounting worked into a matrix of probabilities, but I thought you might want to review it."
Alex very carefully replaced the heavy crystal on the surface of his desk struggling to draw a breath. This was not good at all. Forget his alarming charge into the fray on a white horse, he was rather afraid he had just fallen in love. ~ Kelly Bowen,#NFDB
1186:laws of dynamic motion seem to contradict the randomness generally attributed to collisions between atoms. The ancient philosophers had already pointed out that any natural process can be interpreted in many different ways in terms of the motion of and collisions between atoms. This was not a problem for the atomists, since their main aim was to describe a godless, law less world in which man is free and can expect to receive neither punishment nor reward from any divine or natural order. But classical science was a science of engineers and astronomers, a science of action and prediction. Speculations based on hypothetical atoms could not satisfy its needs. In contrast, Newton’s law provided a means of predicting and manipulating. Nature thus becomes law-abiding, docile, and predictable, instead of being chaotic, unruly, and stochastic. But what is the connection between the mortal, unstable world in which atoms unceasingly combine and separate, and the immutable world of dynamics governed by Newton’s law, a single mathematical formula corresponding to an eternal truth unfolding toward a tautological future? ~ Ilya Prigogine, #NFDB
1187:Devereaux is going with our pitch.”
“Hey, that’s just great,” I said superperkily. “Wendell’s or mine?”
“Yours.”
“But you want to fire me. So fire me.”
“We can’t fire you. They loved you. The head guy, Leonard Daly, thought you were, I quote, ‘a
great kid, very courageous’ and a natural to do a whispering campaign. He said you had
believability.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why? You’re not quitting!”
I thought about it. “Not if you don’t want me to. Do you?”
Go on, say it.
298 ♥elavanilla♥
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, we don’t want you to quit.”
“Ten grand more, two assistants, and charcoal suits. Take it or leave it.”
Ariella swallowed. “Okay to the money, okay to the assistants, but I can’t green-light charcoal
suits. Formula Twelve is Brazilian, we need carnival colors.”
“Charcoal suits or I’m gone.”
“Orange.”
“Charcoal.”
“Orange.”
“Charcoal.”
“Okay, charcoal.”
It was an interesting lesson in power. The only time you truly have it is when you genuinely
don’t care whether you have it or not.
“Right,” I said. “I’m giving myself the rest of the day off. ~ Marian Keyes,#NFDB
1188: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
1189:First, when you try to restrict calories and exercise more, your body is hardwired to perceive a starvation situation. That makes you tired (so you move less and conserve energy) and hungry (so you eat more), and it slows down your metabolism (so you don’t die!). This “eat less, exercise more” formula is not too successful for most people. It can work for a short time, certainly, but less than 10 percent of people lose weight and keep it off for a year;4 you will almost always rebound and gain back the weight. Second, when you eat carbs and sugar, insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops. The insulin drives most of the available fuel in your bloodstream into fat cells, especially the fat cells around your middle, otherwise known as belly fat. So your body is starved of fuel, and this stimulates your brain5 to make you eat more.6 You could have a year’s worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving. The only thing that can stop this vicious cycle is eating a lot of fat and cutting out the refined carbs and sugar. A high-fat, low-carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss. ~ Mark Hyman, #NFDB
1190:Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses. ~ Sheldon S Wolin, #NFDB
1191:Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world'.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. ~ Erwin Schr dinger,#NFDB
1192:Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed
“civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses. ~ Sheldon S Wolin,#NFDB
1193:In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1194:Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo. ~ Robert Higgs, #NFDB
1195:How could the vacuum, which has nothing in it, have any energy at all? The answer comes from another equation: Einstein's famous E=mc^2. This simple formula relates mass and energy: the mass of an object is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. (In fact, particle physics don't measure the mass of the electron, say, in kilograms or pounds or any of the usual units of mass or weight. They say that the electron's rest mass is .511 MeV [million electron volts]- a lump of energy.) The fluctuation in the energy in the vacuum is the same thing as a fluctuation in the amount of mass. Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats. The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing. This is the zero-point energy, an infinity in the formulas of quantum theory. Interpreted strictly, the zero-point energy is limitless. According to the equations of quantum mechanics, more power than is stored in all the coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear weapons in the world is sitting in the space inside your toaster. ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
1196:Brigham, the greatest and certainly the most able economist and administrator and businessman this nation has ever seen, didn't give a hoot for earthly things: 'I have never walked across the streets to make a trade.' He didn't mean that literally. You always do have to handle things. But in what spirit do we do it? Not the Krishna way, by renunciation, for example... If you refuse to be concerned with these things at all, and say, "I'm above all that," that's as great a fault. The things of the world have got to be administered; they must be taken care of, they are to be considered. We have to keep things clean, and in order. That's required of us. This is a test by which we are being proven. This is the way by which we prepare, always showing that these things will never captivate our hearts, that they will never become our principle concern. That takes a bit of doing, and that is why we have the formula 'with an eye single to his glory.' Keep first your eye on the star, then on all the other considerations of the ship. You will have all sorts of problems on the ship, but unless you steer by the star, forget the ship. Sink it. You won't go anywhere. ~ Hugh Nibley, #NFDB
1197:This “Hawking temperature” of a black hole and its “Hawking radiation” (as they came to be called) were truly radical—perhaps the most radical theoretical physics discovery in the second half of the twentieth century. They opened our eyes to profound connections between general relativity (black holes), thermodynamics (the physics of heat) and quantum physics (the creation of particles where before there were none). For example, they led Stephen to prove that a black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness. He deduced that the amount of entropy (the logarithm of the hole’s amount of randomness) is proportional to the hole’s surface area. His formula for the entropy is engraved on Stephen’s memorial stone at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where he worked.
For the past forty-five years, Stephen and hundreds of other physicists have struggled to understand the precise nature of a black hole’s randomness. It is a question that keeps on generating new insights about the marriage of quantum theory with general relativity—that is, about the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity. ~ Stephen Hawking,#NFDB
1198:Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. 'Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans'—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,' sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. … Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—abundance, tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, 'resignation.' In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1199:Perhaps the most striking illustration of Bayes’s theorem comes from a riddle that a mathematics teacher that I knew would pose to his students on the first day of their class. Suppose, he would ask, you go to a roadside fair and meet a man tossing coins. The first toss lands “heads.” So does the second. And the third, fourth . . . and so forth, for twelve straight tosses. What are the chances that the next toss will land “heads” ? Most of the students in the class, trained in standard statistics and probability, would nod knowingly and say: 50 percent. But even a child knows the real answer: it’s the coin that is rigged. Pure statistical reasoning cannot tell you the answer to the question—but common sense does. The fact that the coin has landed “heads” twelve times tells you more about its future chances of landing “heads” than any abstract formula. If you fail to use prior information, you will inevitably make foolish judgments about the future. This is the way we intuit the world, Bayes argued. There is no absolute knowledge; there is only conditional knowledge. History repeats itself—and so do statistical patterns. The past is the best guide to the future. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1200:When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ~ Charles Wheelan, #NFDB
1201:At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.
The matter had to be tested — on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ...
-- Eric McLuhan, introduction ~ Marshall McLuhan,#NFDB
1202:Dionysus versus 'Christ'; here you have the contrast. It is not a difference in regard to the martyrdom, — but the latter has a different meaning. Life itself — Life’s eternal fruitfulness and recurrence caused anguish, destruction, and the will to annihilation. In the other case, the suffering of the 'Christ as the Innocent One' stands as an objection against Life, it is the formula of Life’s condemnation. — Readers will guess that the problem concerns the meaning of suffering; whether a Christian or a tragic meaning is given to it. In the first case it is the road to a holy type of existence; in the second case existence itself is regarded as sufficiently holy to justify an enormous amount of suffering. The tragic man says yes even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor, and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it; — Dionysus cut into pieces is a promise of Life: it will be forever born anew and rise afresh from destruction. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1203:This unusual situation is due to the fact that the tablet omits all outbreaks of the conventional literary structure – Anu opened his mouth to speak, saying to the lady Ishtar … followed by Ishtar opened her mouth to speak, saying to her father, Anu … Gilgamesh VI: 87–88; 92–93 – with which Babylonian narrative literature is, not to put too fine a point on it, slightly tiresomely littered. In fact, I cannot come up with another example of Babylonian mythological or epic literature that is devoid of this characteristic speech-linking device. Its repetitive nature at first sight looks like a remnant of oral literature, where things are repeated more than we would repeat them today, which the modern connoisseur of cuneiform literature just has to accept, or appreciate as atmospheric and authentic. On reflection, however, it is just the opposite. The characteristic dependence on this formula originates in the very transition from oral to written literature, for who is speaking at any one time will always be clear in a storyteller’s presentation, but the process of writing down what has previously been spoken aloud creates ambiguity for the reader unless each speaker is clearly identified. ~ Irving Finkel, #NFDB
1204: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
1205:Whenever I hurt myself, my mother says
it is the universe’s way of telling me to
slow down. She also tells me to put some
coconut oil on it. It doesn’t matter what it
is. She often hides stones underneath my
pillow when I come home for the weekend.
The stones are a formula for sweet dreams
and clarity. I dig them out from the streets,
she tells me what each one is for. My throat
hurts, so she grinds black pepper into a
spoonful of honey, makes me eat the entire
thing. My mother knows how to tie knots
like a ship captain, but doesn’t know how
I got that sailor mouth. She falls asleep
in front of the TV only until I turn it off,
shouts, I was watching that! The sourdough
she bakes on Friday is older than I am.
She sneaks it back and forth across the country
when she flies by putting the starter in small
containers next to a bag of carrots.
They think it’s ranch dressing, she giggles.
She makes tea by hand. Nettles, slippery elm,
turmeric, cinnamon- my mother is a recipe
for warm throats and belly laughs. Once
she fell off of a ladder when I was three.
She says all she was worried about was
my face as I watched her fall. ~ Sarah Kay,#NFDB
1206:dam·i·an·a n. a small shrub native to Mexico whose leaves are used in herbal medicine and in the production of a liqueur. It is reputed to possess aphrodisiac qualities. Turnera diffusa, family Turneraceae. American Spanish. Dam·i·et·ta the eastern branch of the Nile delta. Arabic name DUMYAT. a port at the mouth of this delta; pop. 113,000. Linked entries: DUMYAT da·min·o·zide n. a growth retardant sprayed on vegetables and fruit, esp. apples, to enhance the quality of the crop. In the U.S., the application of daminozide is now restricted to ornamental plants due to the potential health risks of consuming the chemical. Chem. formula: C6H12N2O3. dam·mar (also dam·ar) n. resin obtained from any of a number of tropical and mainly Indo-Malaysian trees, used to make varnish. The resin is obtained from trees in the families Araucariaceae (genus Agathis), Dipterocarpaceae (genera Hopea, Shorea, and Vatica), and Burseraceae (genus Canarium). late 17th cent.: from Malay damar 'resin'. dam·mit exclam. used to express anger and frustration. mid 19th cent.: alteration of damn it. damn v. [trans.] (in Christian belief) (of God) condemn (a person) to suffer eternal punishment in hell: ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
1207:You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg — that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors — GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE — keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed. ~ Paul Murray, #NFDB
1208:What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world`
With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)??
And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering.
Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
Get my point? ~ Chris Colfer,#NFDB
1209:Halt," said Will eventually, "can I ask you a question?"
"I think you just did," Halt replied, with the faintest hint of a smile in his voice. It was
an old formula between the two of them. Will grinned, then sighed and became serious.
"Does life always get harder when you get older?"
Page | 142
"You're not exactly ancient," Halt said gently. "But things have a way of turning out,
you know. Just give them time."
Will made a frustrated little gesture with his hands. "I know... it's just, I mean... oh, I
don't know what I mean!" he finished.
Halt eyed him carefully. "Pauline said to thank you for rescuing her assistant," he said.
This time, he was sure he saw a reaction. So that was it.
"I was glad to do it," Will replied eventually, his voice neutral. "I think I'll turn in. Good
night, Halt."
"Good night, son," Halt said. He chose the last word intentionally. He watched as the
dim figure strode away toward the fire, seeing the shoulders straighten as he went.
Sometimes, life threw up problems that even the wisest, most trusted mentor couldn't
solve for you. It was part of the pain of growing up.
And having to stand by and watch was part of the pain of being a mentor. ~ John Flanagan,#NFDB
1210:In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge [and] after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. This was a reference to a piece of mathematics known as the inverse square law, which Halley was convinced lay at the heart of the explanation, though he wasn’t sure exactly how. Sr Isaac replied immediately that it would be an [ellipse]. The Doctor, struck with joy & amazement, asked him how he knew it. ‘Why,’ saith he, ‘I have calculated it,’ whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without farther delay. Sr Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it. This was astounding – like someone saying he had found a cure for cancer but couldn’t remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1211:For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. I follow her formula for the dough—an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. ~ Bill Buford, #NFDB
1212:The transmission of the meaning of an institution is based on the social recognition of that institution as a “permanent” solution to a “permanent” problem of the given collectivity. Therefore, potential actors of institutionalized actions must be systematically acquainted with these meanings. This necessitates some form of “educational” process. The institutional meanings must be impressed powerfully and unforgettably upon the consciousness of the individual. Since human beings are frequently sluggish and forgetful, there must also be procedures by which these meanings can be reimpressed? and rememorized, if necessary by coercive and generally unpleasant means. Furthermore, since human beings are frequently stupid, institutional meanings tend to become simplified in the process of transmission, so that the given collection of institutional “formulae” can be readily learned and memorized by successive generations. The “formula” character of institutional meanings ensures their memorability. We have here on the level of sedimented meanings the same processes of routinization and trivialization that we have already noted in the discussion of institutionalization. Again, the stylized form in which heroic feats enter a tradition is a useful illustration. ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
1213:Low-end disruption has occurred several times in retailing.16 For example, full-service department stores had a business model that enabled them to turn inventories three times per year. They needed to earn 40 percent gross margins to make money within their cost structure. They therefore earned 40 percent three times each year, for a 120 percent annual return on capital invested in inventory (ROCII). In the 1960s, discount retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart attacked the low end of the department stores’ market—nationally branded hard goods such as paint, hardware, kitchen utensils, toys, and sporting goods—that were so familiar in use that they could sell themselves. Customers in this tier of the market were overserved by department stores, in that they did not need well-trained floor sales-people to help them get what they needed. The discounters’ business model enabled them to make money at gross margins of about 23 percent, on average. Their stocking policies and operating processes enabled them to turn inventories more than five times annually, so that they also earned about 120 percent annual ROCII. The discounters did not accept lower levels of profitability—their business model simply earned acceptable profit through a different formula.17 ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
1214:Although Breaking Bad owes a great deal of its success to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in. At the heart of every episode — and also across each season’s narrative arc — is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Challenges prevent resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the storyline ends. In this particular episode, White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead. Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode. The cycle of conflict, mystery and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability. The unknown is fascinating and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next. In a phenomenon called “experience-taking, ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
1215:But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power—or, more accurately, an energy—which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered—or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims—the barbarians—are revolting against all established civilized values—which is both true and not true—and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction. This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1216:Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.
I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.
You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive. ~ Lionel Shriver,#NFDB
1217:I was talking to a homeless man at a laundromat recently, and he said when we reduce Christian spirituality to math, we defile the holy. I thought that was very beautiful and comforting. Because I have never been good at math. Many of our attempts to understand christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than a pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas, such as “God is good”, “God feels”, “God knows all”, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on his majesty and otherness forever.
This past summer I made the point to catch sunsets...fire in the clouds. I never really wanted to make the trip...but once I got up there, I always loved it...all that beauty happens right above the heads of more than a million people who never notice it. Here is what I’ve started thinking. All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I climb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view; the more my heart enters into worship.
When we worship God, we worship a being our experience does not give us the tools to understand. If we could, God would not inspire awe.”
—Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller ~ Donald Miller,#NFDB
1218:L'iniziazione comporta che si faccia il vuoto, mentre la tensione cresce. Alla fine anche un granello si sabbia provoca dolore: cade come sulla pelle tesa di un tamburo. La casa viene imbiancata. Là dove il nuovo sopraggiunge deve esserci il vuoto.
Anche il sepolcro viene imbiancato. Morire fa parte dell'iniziazione. È la crisi che precede la trasformazione. Un'approfondita analisi di essa da un punto di vista spirituale e morale conduce soltanto fino all'antisala: bisogna viverla. La morte deve essere attraversata, deve aver consacrato la casa.
Il ciclone che si annuncia attraverso una crescente depressione non può essere evitato, né di fatto, né su un piano morale e intellettuale - non importa se si tratti di disgrazia personale o cosmica, ovvero della fine del mondo. Solo così è possibile superare entrambe. La strada da percorrere conduce al di là del punto zero, conduce oltre la linea, oltre il muro del tempo, e attraverso di esso.
Nella crisi scompaiono le dimensioni; un'altra illusione ottica. La prossimità della morte modifica spazio e tempo. Anche nella cella spoglia della Tebaide, nella capanna nordica, refugium per la meditazione, nella tenda, circondata dalla gelida tormenta che ulula nella tundra, può prendere voce la formula dell'estremo svuotamento: «Dio è morto». ~ Ernst J nger,#NFDB
1219:But before entering into the details of I. A. O. as a magical formula it should be remarked that it is essentially the formula of Yoga or meditation; in fact, of elementary mysticism in all its branches. In beginning a meditation practice, there is always a quiet pleasure, a gentle natural growth; one takes a lively interest in the work; it seems easy; one is quite pleased to have started. This stage represents Isis. Sooner or later it is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work. The simplest and easiest acts become almost impossible to perform. Such impotence fills the mind with apprehension and despair. The intensity of this loathing can hardly be understood by any person who has not experienced it. This is the period of Apophis.
It is followed by the arising not of Isis, but of Osiris. The ancient condition is not restored, but a new and superior condition is created, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death. The Alchemists themselves taught this same truth. The first matter of the work was base and primitive, though 'natural.' After passing through various stages the 'black dragon' appeared; but from this arose the pure and perfect gold
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formula of I. A. O. [158-159],#NFDB
1220:We all want love. From God, and from the creation. We are all running towards something. Ironically, the more we run after the creation, the more the creation runs away from us! As soon as we stop running after the creation, and reorient, as soon as we start running towards God, the creation runs after us. It’s a simple, simple formula: Run towards the creation, you lose God and the creation. Run towards God, you gain God *and* the creation. Allah is “Al Wadood” (The Source of Love). Therefore, love comes from God—not people. “To acquire love…fill yourself up with it until you become a magnet.” When you fill yourself with the Source of love (Al Wadood), you become a magnet for love. Allah teaches us this in the beautiful hadith Qudsi: “If Allah has loved a servant [of His], He calls Gabriel and says: “I love so-and-so, therefore love him.’” He (the Prophet pbuh) said: “So Gabriel then loves him. Then he (Gabriel) calls out in Heaven, saying: ‘Allah loves so-and-so, therefore love him.’ And the inhabitants of Heaven love him. Then acceptance is established for him on earth.” [Bukhari, Malik, & Tirmidhi] We’re all running. But so few of us are running in the right direction. We have the same goal. But to get there, we need to stop. And examine if we are running towards the Source–or just a reflection. ~ Yasmin Mogahed, #NFDB
1221:Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BRO2B he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D's. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too. All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson's. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door. And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination. One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, "Certainly, honey." And he said, "I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here." "What's that?" she said, strapping him in. "What in hell are people for? ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1222:"Ha! ha! ha! But after all, if you like, in reality there is not such thing as choice," you will interrupt with a laugh. "Science has even now succeeded in analysing man to such an extent that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will are nothing other than--"
Wait, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself. I admit I was even frightened. I was just going to shout that after all the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that is a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science-- and pulled myself up. And here you have begun to speak. After all, really, well, if someday they truly discover a formula for all our desires and caprices-- that is, an explanations of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, just how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case or another and so on, and so on, that is, a real mathematical formula-- then, after all, man would most likely at once stop to feel desire, indeed, he will be most certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desire, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us consider the probability-- can such a thing happen or not? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
1223:Why is society crumbling, collapsing, as it surely is?
One of the fundamental reasons is that the individual – you – has ceased to be creative.
I will explain what I mean. You & I have become imitative, we are copying, outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, when learning a technique, when communicating with each other on the verbal level, naturally there must be some imitation, copy. I copy words. To become an engineer, I must first learn the technique, then use the technique to build a bridge.
There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation, surely we cease to be creative.
Our education, our social structure, our so-called religious life, are all based on imitation; that is, I fit into a particular social or religious formula. I have ceased to be a real individual; psychologically, I have become a mere repetitive machine with certain conditioned responses, whether of the Hindu, the Christian, the Buddhist, the German, or the Englishman.
Our responses are conditioned according to the pattern of society, whether it is Eastern or Western, religious or materialistic. So one of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is imitation, and one of the disintegrating factors is the leader, whose very essence is imitation. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
1224:Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!" Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess—which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required. Therein, in this refusal-to-know, resides the properly fetishistic dimension of populism. That is to say, although at a purely formal level fetishism involves a gesture of transference (onto the object-fetish), it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference (with the "subject supposed to know"): what fetishism gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. That is why, to put it in Nietzschean terms which are here highly appropriate, the ultimate difference between a truly radical emancipatory politics and a populist politics is that the former is active, it imposes and enforces its vision, while populism is fundamentally re-active, the result of a reaction to a disturbing intruder. In other words, populism remains a version of the politics of fear: it mobilizes the crowd by stoking up fear of the corrupt external agent. ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
1225:The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life ; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full posession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.
Thus phrased, in the extremest of terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal humans. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with life situations must be laid to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general patter for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. therefore, it is formulated in the broadest terms. the individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. who and where are his ogres? those are the reflcetions of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. what are his ideals? those are the symptoms of his grasp of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,#NFDB
1226:THAT WOULD NEVER work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea. This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed and inefficient. Scratch the surface and you’ll find these “real world” inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail. They assume society isn’t ready for or capable of change. Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you’re hopeful and ambitious, they’ll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They’ll say you’re wasting your time. Don’t believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it. We know because our company fails the real-world test in all kinds of ways. In the real world, you can’t have more than a dozen employees spread out in eight different cities on two continents. In the real world, you can’t attract millions of customers without any salespeople or advertising. In the real world, you can’t reveal your formula for success to the rest of the world. But we’ve done all those things and prospered. The real world isn’t a place, it’s an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
1227:And I commend to you the simple practice of extending unconditional love to another person at least once a day, every day, for the rest of your life. You’ll heal your world in delightful and surprising ways. Yet it is important to understand that love’s power can be trivialized. “Love heals” has been a popular notion for centuries. It has enjoyed a recent resurgence that has had an unfortunate side effect. Many people who do not get well, in the sense of a clinical cure, are made to feel guilty that they were not able to care enough or demonstrate ample enough compassion to effect healing. For them, love does not heal. Love is a cruel master. This “guilt-tripping,” this illusion that we have total control, misses the point entirely. It damages the individual and it relegates unconditional loving to a technique, a modality in health and healing. Love is much more than a prescription. There is no formula that universally links spiritual perfection and clinical cures. Those who make such claims are misguided. Rather, love transforms suffering — a crucial distinction. That transformation may include a clinical cure; it may not. Cure is not the standard for judging. For even the process of death is transformed by unconditional loving. We can leave the world filled with joyful memories, an example of how to love. That’s healing of the highest order. Arid death cannot be counted, then, as failure. ~ Greg Anderson, #NFDB
1228:The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial.
The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea. ~ Marshall McLuhan,#NFDB
1229:Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how much out of the way we live. 'Neither by land nor sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans': Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill—from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which 'forgives' everything because it 'Understands' everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ...We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality—was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'.... There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark—for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1230:Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of thought into a science. According to classical economic theory, homo oeconomicus, or “economic man”—that is, the model human being that lies behind every prediction made by the discipline—is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations by which economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that makes the equations possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated motivations, there would be too many factors to take into account, it would be impossible to properly weight them, and predictions could not be made. Therefore, while an economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that human beings are not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are makes it possible to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this proportion—and only this—is the subject matter of economic science. ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
1231:Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted.
This means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event—whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is—and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit—there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined. ~ Jean Baudrillard,#NFDB
1232:But young children, whose prefrontal cortexes have barely begun to ripen, can’t conceive of a future, which means they spend their lives in the permanent present, a forever feeling of right now. At times, this is a desirable state of consciousness; indeed, for meditators, it’s the ultimate aspiration. But living in the permanent present is not a practical parenting strategy. “Everybody would like to be in the present,” says Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist at Harvard and author of the 2006 best-seller Stumbling on Happiness. “Certainly it’s true that there is an important role for being present in our lives. All the data say that. My own research says that.” The difference is that children, by definition, only live in the present, which means that you, as a parent, don’t get much of a chance. “Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future,” he says. “But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you’re the ones who’ve got to steer.” He thinks about this for a moment. “You know, back in the early seventies, I hung out with a lot of people who wanted to live in the present. And it meant that no one paid the rent.” In effect, parents and small children have two completely different temporal outlooks. Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
1233:What is the mystery of your opening lines? The first time I read the start of one of your books, it took my breath away. Is it a special element in your writing, something you pay particular attention to? Or do those first sentences write themselves?
Ferrante: I generally need a beginning that gives me the impression of being on the right path. It rarely comes right away, but it happens. Mostly I work and rework for a long time. Sometimes, after several attempts, I may seem to have found the beginning that's useful to me, and I go on. But then I realize that it has led me astray, that I'm struggling. What decides if a beginning is good or not is the energy with which the story starts to flow.
Joos: The Irish writer Anne Enright once told me that the first page is of primary importance. "Read all the classics," she said, "it's all there, right from the start." Do you agree with her? In what sense (or not)? Can the importance of that first sentence be paralyzing for you?
Ferrante: I don't know if everything is in the beginning. Of course, I look for first words as a magic formula that can open the only true door to the story. Often the first sentences are found at the end of a long journey of writing. Then I have to have the strength to throw away everything except those few words, and start again from there. Otherwise readers will have the impression that the truth and the power of the story are coming in too late. ~ Elena Ferrante,#NFDB
1234:Stariji oficir, koji ne voli rodomontade svog mlađeg druga pita, ima li nešto, osim violin, da se vidi u Kremoni ? Ima nešto da se čuje, kažem, u Kremoni. Tamo se rodio jedan veliki Talijan, koji se zvao Monteverdi. Prvi put sam ga slušao, u mladosti, u Parizu. Zatim, sa svojom mladom ženom, u Fiorenci. Vanredno su ga svirali, iako ne meni, nego svima – u Štokholmu. A sa gospođom Martom, sa domaćicom, išli smo, da ga slušamo, i u Rimu, u Svetoj Ceciliji.
Domaćica na to kaže tužno : Nećemo više slušati Monteverdija u Rimu. Rat je. Gleda nas. Pita se gde ćemo kroz godinu dve biti ?
Ljudska reč, čovečji glas, katkad, i pri običnom razgovoru, može da unese u razgovor neku jezu. Duboku. Tako i ta fraza domaćice, sa tim imenom, unosi među nas “nikad više”, jezivo. Došao je kraj jednoj Evropi. Došao je kraj i našem krugu u Rimu. Ona zatim, valjda i sama uplašena, uzvikuje : Dosta s tim – basta ! Uplašili su se smrti buržuji. A smrt je prirodna pojava, kao i rat. Umire bilje, umiru laste, zašto bi ljudi trebalo da budu besmrtni ? Za nama će ostati, lešina, smrad, kaljuga, hemijska formula. Milioni će, međutim, opet živeti. Večno živeti. Nijedna violina u Kremoni ne zvuči lepše, nego detinji plač – prvi. Pošto se zna, među nama, da ta žena nema dece, taj zvuk nam je tim tužniji i neshvatljiviji.
Njen muž, ušeprtljavši, predlaže, da prekinemo te lude razgovore id a se to ostavi, i reši sutra, a da se sad čita, malo, Vergilije. ~ Milo Crnjanski,#NFDB
1235:Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had always been fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system, and a half-eaten apple by his side. Was that something a machine would have done? I. Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number. II. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers. III. Von Neumann was successful in this. The plutonium implosion design would result in the first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima. With his hatred of both the Nazis and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic weaponry. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1236:Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help; we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation, fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty, or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not. The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
1237:If Germany hadn't had the good fortune to let me take power in 1933, Europe to-day would no longer exist. The fact is that since I've been in power, I've had only a single idea: to re-arm. That's how I was able, last summer, to decide to attack Russia.
Confronted with the innumerable populations of the East, we cannot exist except on condition that all Germanics are united. They must compose the nucleus around which Europe will federate. On the day when we've solidly organised Europe, we shall be able to look towards Africa. And, who knows? perhaps one day we shall be able to entertain other ambitions.
There are three ways of settling the social question. The privileged class rules the people. The insurgent proletariat exterminates the possessing class. Or else a third formula gives each man the opportunity to develop himself according to his talents. When a man is competent, it matters little to me if he's the son of a caretaker. And, by the way, I'm not stopping the descendants of our military heroes from going once more through the same tests.
I wouldn't feel I had the right to demand of each man the supreme sacrifice, if I hadn't myself gone through the whole 1914-18 war in the front line.
Turning towards the Danish guest, the Fuehrer commented:
For you, things are easier than they were for us. Our past helps you. Our beginnings were wretched. And if I'd disappeared before we were successful, everything would at once have returned into oblivion. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
1238:Cousin West,” Kathleen said a month later, fiercely pursuing him down the grand staircase, “stop running away. I want a word with you.”
West didn’t slow his pace. “Not while you’re chasing me like Attila the Hun.”
“Tell me why you did it.” She reached the bottom step at the same time he did and swung around to block his escape. “Kindly explain what deranged mode of thinking caused you to bring a pig into the house!”
Cornered, he resorted to honesty. “I wasn’t thinking. I was at John Potter’s farm, and he was about to cull the piglet because it was undersized.”
“A common practice, as I understand it,” she said curtly.
“The creature looked at me,” West protested. “It seemed to be smiling.”
“All pigs seem to be smiling. Their mouths are curved upwards.”
“I couldn’t help it; I had to bring him home.”
Kathleen shook her head disapprovingly as she looked at him. The twins had already bottle-fed the creature with a formula of cow’s milk whisked with raw egg, while Helen had lined a basket with soft cloth for it to sleep in. Now there was no getting rid of it.
“What do you intend for us to do with the pig once it’s full-grown?” she demanded.
West considered that. “Eat it?”
She let out an exasperated huff. “The girls have already named it Hamlet. Would you have us eat a family pet, Mr. Ravenel?”
“I would if it turned into bacon.” West smiled at her expression. “I’ll return the pig to the farmer when it’s weaned,” he offered. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1239:Emphatically rejecting ali traditional religions and claiming for their teachings the epithet "scientific," various writers tried to substitute a new faith for the old ones. They claimed to know precisely what the mysterious power that directs ali cosmic becoming has in store for mankind. They proclaimed an absolute standard of values. Good is what works along the lines that this power wants mankind to follow; everything else is bad. In their vocabulary "progressive" is a synonym of good and "reactionary" a synonym of bad. Inevitably progress will triumph over reaction because it is impossible for men to divert the course of history from the direction prescribed by the plan of the mysterious prime mover. Such is the metaphysics of Karl Marx, the faith of contemporary selfstyled progressivism.
Marxism is a revolutionary doctrine. It expressly declares that the design of the prime mover will be accomplished by civil war. It implies that ultimately in the battles of these campaigns the just cause, that is, the cause of progress, must conquer. Then ali conflicts concerning judgments of value will disappear. The liquidation of ali dissenters will establish the undisputed supremacy of the absolute eternal values.
This formula for the solution of conflicts of value judgments is certainly not new. It is a device known and practiced from time immemorial. Kill the infidels! Burn the heretics! What is new is merely the fact that today it is sold to the public under the label of "science. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
1240:(2) Substance is plainly divisible into other substances, if we consider the mere nature of a definition. For instance, if ‘man’ is a substance, (15) ‘animal’ and ‘biped’ must also be substances. For if not substances, they must be attributes—and if attributes, attributes either of (a) man or of (b) some other subject. But neither is possible. (a) An attribute is either that which may or may not belong to the subject or that in whose definition the subject of which it is an attribute is involved. (20) Thus ‘sitting’ is an example of a separable attribute, while ‘snubness’ contains the definition of ‘nose’, to which we attribute snubness. Further, the definition of the whole is not contained in the definitions of the contents or elements of the definitory formula; that of ‘man’ for instance in ‘biped’, or that of ‘white man’ in ‘white’. If then this is so, and if ‘biped’ is supposed to be an attribute of ‘man’, (25) it must be either separable, so that ‘man’ might possibly not be ‘biped’, or the definition of ‘man’ must come into the definition of ‘biped’—which is impossible, as the converse is the case. (30) (b) If, on the other hand, we suppose that ‘biped’ and ‘animal’ are attributes not of man but of something else, and are not each of them a substance, then ‘man’ too will be an attribute of something else. But we must assume that substance is not the attribute of anything, and that the subject of which both ‘biped’ and ‘animal’ and each separately are predicated is the subject also of the complex ‘biped animal’. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1241:If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two? In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity, ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
1242:The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world…' She shook her head. 'Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, that the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Piali is beginning to agree with me. Clearly it is very full of the jinni, both yin and yang, in such a fashion that to me it is acting like a droplet of water held together by surface tension, but so big that the surface tension is just barely holding it, and it stretches out like a water drop in the air, deforming this way and that, but held together, just, except for sometimes, when it stretches too far for surface tension, the strong force in this case, and then the natural repulsion between the jinni makes a heartknot split in two, becoming atoms of lead, but releasing some of its bound power as well, in the form of rays of invisible energy. That's what we are seeing on the photographic plates you help with. It's quite a bit of energy, and that's just one heartknot breaking. What we have been wondering what we have been forced to consider, given the nature of the phenomenon – is, if we gathered enough of these atoms together, and broke even one heartknot apart, would the released qi break a lot more of them at the same time, more and more again all at the speed of light, in a space this big,' holding her hands apart. 'If that might not set off a short chain reaction,' she said. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1243:BOOK I 1 [184a] When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, (10) conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, (15) as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not ‘knowable relatively to us’ and ‘knowable’ without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, (20) but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, (25) and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. [184b] Much the same thing happens in the relation of the name to the formula. (10) A name, e. g. ‘round’, means vaguely a sort of whole: its definition analyses this into its particular senses. Similarly a child begins by calling all men ‘father’, and all women ‘mother’, but later on distinguishes each of them. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1244:These autonomous, self-regulating properties of holons within the growing embryo are a vital safeguard; they ensure that whatever accidental hazards arise during development, the end-product will be according to norm. In view of the millions and millions of cells which divide, differentiate, and move about in the constantly changing environment of fluids and neighbouring tissues-Waddington called it 'the epigenetic landscape'-it must be assumed that no two embryos, not even identical twins, are formed in exactly the same way. The self-regulating mechanisms which correct deviations from the norm and guarantee, so to speak, the end-result, have been compared to the homeostatic feedback devices in the adult organism-so biologists speak of 'developmental homeostasis'. The future individual is potentially predetermined in the chromosomes of the fertilised egg; but to translate this blueprint into the finished product, billions of specialized cells have to be fabricated and moulded into an integrated structure. The mind boggles at the idea that the genes of that one fertilised egg should contain built-in provisions for each and every particular contingency which every single one of its fifty-six generations of daughter cells might encounter in the process. However, the problem becomes a little less baffling if we replace the concept of the 'genetic blueprint', which implies a plan to be rigidly copied, by the concept of a genetic canon of rules which are fixed, but leave room for alternative choices, i.e., flexible strategies guided by feedbacks and pointers from the environment. But how can this formula be applied to the development of the embryo? ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1245:A Farewell
Good-bye, old year, good-bye!
Gentle you were to many as to me,
And so we, meditating, sigh,
Since what hath been will be,
That you must die.
Hark! In the crumbling grey church tower,
Tolls the recording bell
The deeply-sounding solemnising knell
For your last hour.
How quietly you die!
No canonisëd Saint
E'er put life by
With less of struggle or complaint.
You seem to feel nor grief nor pain,
No retrospection vain,
As if, departing, you would have us know
It is not hard to go,
Since pang is none, but only peace, in Death,
And Life it is that suffereth.
Closer and clearer comes the last slow knell,
And on my lip for you awaits
That final formula of Fate's,
The low, lamenting, lingering word, Farewell!
For you the curved-backed sexton need not stir
The mould, for there is nothing to inter,
No worn integument to doff,
No bodily corruption to put off;
Begotten of the earth and sun,
And ending spirit-wise as you begun,
You pass, a mere memento of the mind,
Leaving no lees behind.
Hark! What is that we hear?
A quick-jerked, jocund peal,
Making the fretted church tower reel,
Telling the wakeful of a young New Year,
Young, but of lusty birth,
43
To face the masked vicissitudes of earth.
Let us, then, look not back,
Though smooth and partial was the track
Of the receding Past,
But through the vista vast
Of unknown Future wend intrepid way,
Framed to contend and cope
With perils new by vanished yesterday,
Whose last bequests to Man are Love, and
Faith, and Hope.
~ Alfred Austin,#NFDB
1246:Unlike sound waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, light waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical properties of space render the theory of ether unnecessary. Under either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, the freest from material dependence, of any natural manifestation. In the gigantic conceptions of Einstein, the velocity of light—186,000 miles per second—dominates the whole Theory of Relativity. He proves mathematically that the velocity of light is, so far as man’s finite mind is concerned, the only constant in a universe of unstayable flux. On the sole absolute of light-velocity depend all human standards of time and space. Not abstractly eternal as hitherto considered, time and space are relative and finite factors, deriving their measurement validity only in reference to the yardstick of light-velocity. In joining space as a dimensional relativity, time has surrendered age-old claims to a changeless value. Time is now stripped to its rightful nature—a simple essence of ambiguity! With a few equational strokes of his pen, Einstein has banished from the cosmos every fixed reality except that of light. In a later development, his Unified Field Theory, the great physicist embodies in one mathematical formula the laws of gravitation and of electromagnetism. Reducing the cosmical structure to variations on a single law, Einstein reaches across the ages to the rishis who proclaimed a sole texture of creation—that of a protean maya. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1247:In my two memos to Bojia I explained that there is no set formula for writing a column, no class you attend, and that everyone does it differently to some degree. But there were some general guidelines I could offer. When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. But how do you go about generating heat or light? Where do opinions come from? I am sure every opinion writer would offer a different answer. My short one is that a column idea can spring from anywhere: a newspaper headline that strikes you as odd, a simple gesture by a stranger, the moving speech of a leader, the naïve question of a child, the cruelty of a school shooter, the wrenching tale of a refugee. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
1248:have a growth spurt and require additional feedings. This may last from one to three days. For a breastfed baby, feeding could be as often as every two hours (possibly extending through the night) for one to three days. For a formula-fed infant, parents will notice that their baby appears hungry after consuming the normally-prepared number of ounces; or he is showing signs of hunger sooner than the next scheduled feeding. There are a couple of options to consider: Add 1-2 ounces to his bottle at each feeding, allowing baby to take as much as he wants. If baby was taking 2½ oz. per feeding, make a full 4 oz. bottle and allow him to eat until full; or Offer the extra feeding as Baby shows signs of hunger. When the growth spurt is over Baby will return to his normal feed-wake-sleep routine. However, on the day following a growth spurt most babies take longer than normal naps. By week three, alertness should be increasing at feeding times. Between weeks three and four, your baby’s waketime will begin to emerge as a separate activity apart from eating. His schedule should look something like this: feeding, burping and diaper change takes about 30+ minutes. A little bit of waketime adds another 20+ minutes. Naptime is 1½ to 2 hours. Not all feed-wake-sleep cycles during the day will be exactly the same length of time. That is why a range of times is provided and not fixed times. If breastfeeding, do not allow your baby to go longer than 3 hours between feedings during the first three weeks. The feed-sleep cycle should not exceed 3 to 3½ hours during the first three weeks. At night, do not allow your newborn to go more than 4 hours between feedings. (Normal feeding times usually fall between 2½ to 3 hours.) ~ Gary Ezzo, #NFDB
1249:But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station–and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1250:The call in Psalms to seek the peace and prosperity of Jerusalem is turned on its head with the command in Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile,” that is, Babylon. The familiar formula and the anticipated call to seek the peace of Jerusalem would have been a sign of hope that the exiles could turn their attention back to the Promised Land. Instead, they are commanded (very unexpectedly) to seek the shalom of Babylon. YHWH implores his people to continue to live life, even in the midst of shattered dreams and expectations. They are to conduct life in all its fullness, including building homes, planting gardens, getting married and increasing in number. Even in the midst of a foreign land, they are not to hide from the world, but instead seek ways to engage and even contribute. Life continues even as a community struggles with its place and identity. Escape from the reality of a fallen world is not an option. Jeremiah confronts the desire by a defeated people to give up and run away. The reality of Lamentations 1:1-3 should not result in the impulse to escape, but instead should result in engagement. The exiles were disheartened by how far they had fallen as evidenced by Lamentations 1:1-3. God’s people were tempted to flee and disengage from the world around them in response to their reality, but Jeremiah 29:4-7 challenges God’s people to not take that option. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles does not allow for that option. The people of God are to seek the peace of Babylon and not to disengage with the ready-made excuse that Babylon is a wicked city. They are not to give in to the temptation to withdraw from the world when things are not going as they had planned. ~ Soong Chan Rah, #NFDB
1251:Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will" -- "unfree will" for that matter), and purely imaginary effects ("sin," "salvation," "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings -- for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash -- , "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life"). -- This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on the meaning of "abominable" -- the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (-- the real! --), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for lying his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1252:Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires. Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1253:Direct control problems are solved by working on our habits. They are obviously within our Circle of Influence. These are the “Private Victories” of Habits 1, 2, and 3. Indirect control problems are solved by changing our methods of influence. These are the “Public Victories” of Habits 4, 5, and 6. I have personally identified over 30 separate methods of human influence—as separate as empathy is from confrontation, as separate as example is from persuasion. Most people have only three or four of these methods in their repertoire, starting usually with reasoning, and, if that doesn’t work, moving to flight or fight. How liberating it is to accept the idea that I can learn new methods of human influence instead of constantly trying to use old ineffective methods to “shape up” someone else! No control problems involve taking the responsibility to change the line on the bottom on our face—to smile, to genuinely and peacefully accept these problems and learn to live with them, even though we don’t like them. In this way, we do not empower these problems to control us. We share in the spirit embodied in the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, “Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Whether a problem is direct, indirect, or no control, we have in our hands the first step to the solution. Changing our habits, changing our methods of influence and changing the way we see our no control problems are all within our Circle of Influence. EXPANDING THE CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE It is inspiring to realize that in choosing our response to circumstance, we powerfully affect our circumstance. When we change one part of the chemical formula, we change the nature of the results. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
1254:The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character -- or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power -- the stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable.
To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us -- whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try.
Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity. ~ Ben Bova,#NFDB
1255:The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power. The effect in the latter is that the fish rots from the head down — lawlessness permeates the state, as in a mafia family, because contending leaders must build informal coalitions. Since another name for a monarchist is a legitimist, we can contrast the legitimist and demotist theories of government. […] Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see legitimism as a sort of proto-formalism. The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary.
The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies. However, the trouble with corporate monarchism is that it presents no obvious political formula. “Because it does” cuts no ice with a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. […] So the legitimist system went down another path, which led eventually to its destruction: the path of divine-right monarchy. When everyone believes in God, “because God says so” is a much more impressive formula.
Perhaps the best way to look at demotism is to see it as the Protestant version of rule by divine right — based on the theory of vox populi, vox dei. If you add divine-right monarchy to a religious system that is shifting from the worship of God to the worship of Man, demotism is pretty much what you’d expect to precipitate in the beaker. ~ Mencius Moldbug,#NFDB
1256:the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment, ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1257:George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), who began his writing career in the 1860s. Henty – educated at Westminster and Caius, Cambridge, the son of a wealthy stockbroker – had been commissioned in the Purveyor’s Department of the army, and gone to the Crimea during the war. There he had drifted into journalism, sending back reports for the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post before catching fever and being invalided home. He continued to work in the Purveyor’s Department until the mid-Sixties, when the life of the war correspondent and the writer of boys’ adventure stories seemed overwhelmingly more interesting and better paid. Four generations of British children grew up with Henry’s irresistible stories, beautifully produced, bound and edited, on their shelves. The Henty phenomenon – over seventy titles celebrating imperialistic derring-do – really belongs to the 1880s, but deserves a mention here not only because of his radical and political views, but because of the direction taken by his career as a writer. The Henty story, by the time he had got into his stride, followed the formula that a young English lad in his early teens, freed from the shackles of public school or home upbringing by the convenient accident of orphanhood, finds himself caught up in some thrilling historical episode. The temporal sweep is impressive, ranging from Beric at Agincourt to The Briton: a story of the Roman Invasion; but the huge majority are exercises in British imperialist myth-building: By Conduct and Courage, A Story of the Days of Nelson, By Pike and Dyke, By Sheer Pluck, A Tale of the Ashanti War, Condemned as a Nihilist, The Dash for Khartoum, For Name and Fame: or through the Afghan Passes, Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea, Through the Sikh War. A Tale of the Punjaub (sic); The Tiger of Mysore, With Buller in Natal, With Kitchener in the Soudan, and so on. ~ A N Wilson, #NFDB
1258:This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
1259:5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one.
5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble?
5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v?
B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first)
Or
a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b
5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility?
5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor?
5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend?
6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn ~ Julian Barnes,#NFDB
1260:Fear of the Lord The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise. —PSALM 111:10 The motto of the wisdom teachers is that the fear of the LORD (showing holy respect and reverence for God and shunning evil) is the starting point and essence of wisdom. When you have a fear of the LORD, you express that respect by submission to His will. • “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”—Job 28:28 NASB • “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”—Proverbs 9:10 NASB • “The fear of the LORD is the instruction for wisdom, and before honor comes humility.”—Proverbs 15:33 NASB • “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.” —Ecclesiastes 12:13 NASB Wisdom is not acquired by a mechanical formula, but through a right relationship with God. It seems that following God’s principles and commandments should be the obvious conclusion of our thankfulness for all He has done for us. In today’s church world, many people have lost the concept of fearing God. The soft side of Christianity has preached only the “love of God.” We haven’t balanced the scale by teaching the other side, His justice and judgment—fear, anger, wrath, obedience, and punishment. Just because some pastors don’t teach it from their pulpits doesn’t make it less a reality. As with involvement with drugs, alcohol, lust, and envy, we must respect the consequences of our actions, or we will be destroyed by them. Our safeguard to resist these life destroyers is to have a proper respect for God. Then we will be obedient to His precepts and stay away from the fire of temptation. God lights the way for our paths, but we must be willing to follow His lighted path. ~ Emilie Barnes, #NFDB
1261:Ahora es ella quien lo mira divertida, o tierna, o nerviosa, y finalmente le pregunta: —¿Vas a decirme qué te pasa, Benjamín? Chaparro se siente morir, porque acaba de advertir que esa mujer pregunta una cosa con los labios y otra con los ojos: con los labios le está preguntando por qué se ha puesto colorado, por qué se revuelve nervioso en el asiento o por qué mira cada doce segundos el alto reloj de péndulo que decora la pared próxima a la biblioteca; pero, además de todo eso, con los ojos le pregunta otra cosa: le está preguntando ni más ni menos qué le pasa, qué le pasa a él, a él con ella, a él con ellos dos; y la respuesta parece interesarle, parece ansiosa por saber, tal vez angustiada y probablemente indecisa sobre si lo que le pasa es lo que ella supone que le pasa. Ahora bien —barrunta Chaparro—, el asunto es si lo supone, lo teme o lo desea, porque esa es la cuestión, la gran cuestión de la pregunta que le formula con la mirada, y Chaparro de pronto entra en pánico, se pone de pie como un maníaco y le dice que tiene que irse, que se le hizo tardísimo; ella se levanta sorprendida —pero el asunto es si sorprendida y punto o sorprendida y aliviada, o sorprendida y desencantada—, y Chaparro poco menos que huye por el pasillo al que dan las altas puertas de madera de los despachos, huye sobre el damero de baldosas negras y blancas dispuestas como rombos, y recién retoma el aliento cuando se trepa a un 115 milagrosamente vacío a esa hora pico del atardecer; se vuelve a su casa de Castelar, donde esperan ser escritos los últimos capítulos de su historia, sí o sí, porque ya no tolera más esta situación, no la de Ricardo Morales e Isidoro Gómez, sino la propia, la que lo une hasta destrozarlo con esa mujer del cielo o del infierno, esa mujer enterrada hasta el fondo de su corazón y su cabeza, esa mujer que a la distancia le sigue preguntando qué le pasa, con los ojos más hermosos del mundo. ~ Eduardo Sacheri, #NFDB
1262:You can’t just abduct me and hold me for hostage! And hostage for what? Who do you think you are? My brother is one of the most powerful men in England! When he catches up to you, he’ll slit your belly and strangle you with your own entrails! Do you know what you’ve done?” The Irishman just shrugged, unconcerned, and shoved his other arm into his coat sleeve. “Does your sister Mrs. Lord know that I’m here? Does your brother-in-law, Captain Lord? The admiral, Sir Elliott?” “Don’t be stupid, of course not.” “Does anyone know?” “Not yet.” “Who are you? In actuality?” “Ruaidri O’ Devir, ma’m, just as ye thought.” He picked up a tricorne hat and headed for the door. “I wish to know why I am here!” He stopped then, his patience exhausted, and looked her straight in the eye. “Your brother developed an explosive which he’s about to sell to your country. My country needs it so we can win this miserable struggle with yours. Since I doubt England or your brother are going to just hand it over to us, ye’re my payment for it. A ransom, if ye will. Understand?” “What do you mean your country? Ireland is not at war with England… you are mad.” “No, Sunshine. I’m not mad. I’m a commissioned captain in America’s Continental Navy if ye must know, and because John Adams decided there’s nobody in the Navy as audacious, reckless or downright foolish as I am, he chose me to come and get that explosive. Ye’re my ransom. If yer family wants ye back, they’ll hand it over as well as the formula on how t’ create it. Now are ye finished? I’ve a ship to see to.” She stared at him, aghast. “Your sister is married to a captain in the Royal Navy… her brother-in-law is a famous admiral… you would dare do this right under all their noses?” He smiled then, his long lashes throwing shadow against his cheekbones in the dim orange glow of the lantern and in that moment, he looked almost handsome. Almost. “Indeed, I would.” The smile spread. “Indeed, I have. ~ Danelle Harmon, #NFDB
1263:There was major u.s. imperialist support for Italian, Spanish and German fascism before and even during World War II, as opposed to support for fascism at home. Fascism was distinct from racism or white supremacy, which were only "as American as apple pie."
Neither the ruling class nor the white masses had any real need for fascism. What for? There was no class deadlock paralyzing society. There already was a longstanding, thinly disguised settler dictatorship over the colonial proletariat in North America. In the u.s. settlerism made fascism unnecessary. However good or bad the economic situation was, white settlers were getting the best of what was available. Which was why both the white Left and white Far Right alike back then in the 1930s were patriotic and pro-American. Now only the white Left is.
The white Left here is behind in understanding fascism. When they're not using the word loosely and rhetorically to mean any repression at all (like the frequent assertions that cutting welfare is "fascism"! I mean, give us a break!), they're still reciting their favorite formula that the fascists are only the "pawns of the ruling class". No, that was Nazism in Germany, maybe, though even there that's not a useful way of looking at it. But definitely not here, not in that old way.
The main problem hasn't been fascism in the old sense – it's been neocolonialism and bourgeois democracy! The bourgeoisie didn't need any fascism at all to put Leonard Peltier away in maximum security for life or Mumia on death row. They hunted down the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement like it was deer hunting season, while white America went shopping at the mall – all without needing fascism. And the steady waterfall of patriarchal violence against women, of rapes and torture and killings and very effective terrorism on a mass scale, should remind us that the multitude of reactionary men have "equal opportunity" under "democracy", too. ~ J Sakai,#NFDB
1264:The Princeton economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter has offered a compelling demonstration of the power of simple statistics to outdo world-renowned experts. Ashenfelter wanted to predict the future value of fine Bordeaux wines from information available in the year they are made. The question is important because fine wines take years to reach their peak quality, and the prices of mature wines from the same vineyard vary dramatically across different vintages; bottles filled only twelve months apart can differ in value by a factor of 10 or more. An ability to forecast future prices is of substantial value, because investors buy wine, like art, in the anticipation that its value will appreciate. It is generally agreed that the effect of vintage can be due only to variations in the weather during the grape-growing season. The best wines are produced when the summer is warm and dry, which makes the Bordeaux wine industry a likely beneficiary of global warming. The industry is also helped by wet springs, which increase quantity without much effect on quality. Ashenfelter converted that conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of a wine—for a particular property and at a particular age—by three features of the weather: the average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. His formula provides accurate price forecasts years and even decades into the future. Indeed, his formula forecasts future prices much more accurately than the current prices of young wines do. This new example of a “Meehl pattern” challenges the abilities of the experts whose opinions help shape the early price. It also challenges economic theory, according to which prices should reflect all the available information, including the weather. Ashenfelter’s formula is extremely accurate—the correlation between his predictions and actual prices is above .90. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1265:the rivalry between the big and little states almost tore the convention apart. Their dispute was over whether the legislative branch should be proportioned by population or by equal votes per state. Finally, Franklin arose to make a motion on behalf of a compromise that would have a House proportioned by population and a Senate with equal votes per state. “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,” he said. “In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands.” His point was crucial for understanding the art of true political leadership: Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. The toughest part of political leadership, however, is knowing when to compromise and when to stand firm on principle. There is no easy formula for figuring that out, and Franklin got it wrong at times. At the Constitutional Convention, he went along with a compromise that soon haunted him: permitting the continuation of slavery. But he was wise enough to try to rectify such mistakes. After the Constitutional Convention, he became the president of a society for the abolition of slavery. He realized that humility required tolerance for other people’s values, which at times required compromise; however, it was important to be uncompromising in opposing those who refused to show tolerance for others. During his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And at one point, when a new hall was being built to accommodate itinerate preachers, Franklin wrote the fund-raising document and urged citizens to be tolerant enough so “that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” And on his deathbed, he was the largest individual contributor to the building fund for Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue in Philadelphia. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1266:The vital condition of every true state is a well-defined climate: the climate of the highest possible tension, but not of forced agitation. It will be desirable that everyone stay at his post, that he takes pleasure in an activity in conformity with his own nature and vocation, which is therefore free and desired for itself before considering utilitarian purposes and the unhealthy desire to live above one’s proper condition. If it is not possible to ask everyone to follow an ‘ascetic and military vision of life’, it will be possible to aim at a climate of concentrated intensity, of personal life, that will encourage people to prefer a greater margin of liberty, as opposed to comfort and prosperity paid for with the consequent limitation of liberty through the evitable economic and social influences. Autarchy, in the terms we have emphasised, is a valid Fascist formula. A course of virile, measured austerity is also valid and, finally, an internal discipline through which one develops a taste and an anti-bourgeois orientation of life, but no schoolmarmish and impertinent intrusion by what is public into the field of private life. Here, too, the principle should be liberty connected with equal responsibility and, in general, giving prominence to the principles of ‘great morality’ as opposed to the principles of conformist ‘little morality’.
A doctrine of the state can only propose values to test the elective affinities and the dominant or latent vocations of a nation. If a people cannot or does not want to acknowledge the values that we have called ‘traditional’, and which define a true Right, it deserves to be left to itself. At most, we can point out to it the illusions and suggestions of which it has been or is the victim, which are due to a general action which has often been systematically organised, and to regressive processes. If not even this leads to a sensible result, this people will suffer the fate that it has created, by making use of its ‘liberty’. ~ Julius Evola,#NFDB
1267:The Minoan Civilization was the first link in the European chain (as Will Durant describes it) and its handcraft of the bull's-head rhyton suggests a prominent role of the bull for Minoan symbolism just as this animal was for ancient Egyptians. However, since the western biblical narrative started off with the heritage of the Pharaohs (and were passed down by the Jews who plagiarized and tampered the Semitic narrative from the Israelites with elements from ancient Egypt), we expect to find an adherence to the ancient Egyptian agrarian system of Theology that culminated the week with a resting day for JHWH (as I have demonstrated in my earlier slides) in Europe; and that is exactly what we witness in the coding of the Phaistos Disc!
This artifact of fired clay (were numerically investigated before this work of mine by Alan Butler in his great book 'The Bronze Age Computer Disc') consists of 61 groups of symbols in total on its two sides. But if we to inspect these groups linguistically (i.e. as words; as Gareth Owens insists to do so), we find that (through linking the disk's system with that of ancient Egypt's and based on the 366-circle-system interpretation which were devised by Alan Butler) these words on the disk were modulated annually on top of six decans (i.e. 61/6=10) exactly as is the case with the circular zodiac of Dendera (in the case of the latter they are equinoxes and solstices related decans as I have shown on earlier slides). We also know from Isaiah 58:13 that the Jew keeps his/her cow-glorifying mouth shut on the Sabbath restricting thereby the words' utterance (and the work in general) down to six days (i.e. 61 words *6 days=366 and 61 words/ 6 days=10 commandments) and to thirty six decans for the ancient Egyptian (i.e. 366/ 36 decans=10 days per decan and 61 words/ 6 decans = 10 days). The Minoan Libation Formula is after all comprised of ten repeated words according to Gareth Owens, which I find to be eminently resonating with the Jew formula! ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,#NFDB
1268:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?
Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?
Poets, when they write poems...
Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!
What does "inspired" mean?
It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.
Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.
Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.
Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#NFDB
1269:I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3:
ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever.
And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it:
BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves?
JEEVES: No, Sir.
BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling?
JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us.
BERTIE: Animal? What animal?
JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner.
BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?"
JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir.
BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile.
Who can say which method is superior?"
(As reproduced in ,#NFDB
1270:The educational environment of children should encourage them to continue to explore the open-ended connections between their experiences, and to be receptive to new interconnections and interpretations of theories and explanations that they have either learned or developed. An oft-repeated story illustrates the deadening effect of thinking in terms of narrowly defined fields.16 A high school physics student was given the following problem on an examination: “Suppose you were in a tall building, and had a sensitive barometer in your possession. How would you use it to find the height of the building?” As anyone who has studied introductory physics will instantly recognize, the instructor was looking for the answer he had prepared his students to give—namely, measure the barometric pressure at the bottom and the top of the building, and calculate the height of the building, using the formula that relates the drop in barometric pressure to the increase in elevation going from the ground to the top of the building. The student in question, a very bright and highly independent soul, found it demeaning to provide an answer that he thought was trivially easy. Instead, he answered, “You can do it several ways. One is to drop the barometer from the top of the building and measure how long it takes to hit the ground [thus illustrating that he knew the relationship between height, distance, and time in gravitational free fall, another piece of ‘physics’]. Another is to attach the barometer to a long string, lower it to the ground, and measure the length of the string [no longer ‘physics,’ but rather ‘carpentry’].” The answer, of course, was declared wrong. The student objected strenuously and brought a storm of protest to bear on the examiner—who then agreed to repeat the same question and give the student an opportunity to provide the “correct” answer. The student, no more inclined to be compliant than before, answered, “I would go to the superintendent of the building and offer to give him the barometer as a gift if he would tell me how high his building is [now we have entered ‘economics’].” Leaving ~ Russell L Ackoff, #NFDB
1271:This was a golden age, in which we solved most of the major problems in black hole theory even before there was any observational evidence for black holes. In fact, we were so successful with the classical general theory of relativity that I was at a bit of a loose end in 1973 after the publication with George Ellis of our book The Large Scale Structure of Space–Time. My work with Penrose had shown that general relativity broke down at singularities, so the obvious next step would be to combine general relativity—the theory of the very large—with quantum theory—the theory of the very small. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black hole, formed in the early universe? My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way—like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes.
To answer this, I studied how quantum fields or particles would scatter off a black hole. I was expecting that part of an incident wave would be absorbed, and the remainder scattered. But to my great surprise I found there seemed to be emission from the black hole itself. At first, I thought this must be a mistake in my calculation. But what persuaded me that it was real was that the emission was exactly what was required to identify the area of the horizon with the entropy of a black hole. This entropy, a measure of the disorder of a system, is summed up in this simple formula which expresses the entropy in terms of the area of the horizon, and the three fundamental constants of nature, c, the speed of light, G, Newton’s constant of gravitation, and ħ, Planck’s constant. The emission of this thermal radiation from the black hole is now called Hawking radiation and I’m proud to have discovered it. ~ Stephen Hawking,#NFDB
1272:I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wishing them to come. They might have wished and wished for an unnatural evil to fall upon them but, for a while at least, nothing happened. Then the wishing stopped, the old wishes were forgotten yet at the same time gathered in strength, distilling themselves into a potent formula (who can say!), until one day the terrible season began. Because had they really told the truth, this artistic crowd might also have expressed what a sense of meaning (although of a negative sort), not to mention the vigorous thrill (although of an excruciating type), this season of unnatural evil had brought to their lives.
("Gas Station Carnivals") ~ Thomas Ligotti,#NFDB
1273:Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness…
God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the horror at the bridge her last clear sight of earth?...I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm...
She said, “You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”
I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.
Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden- that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death.
And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marion Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?
Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth, I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow. ~ Wallace Stegner,#NFDB
1274:Most white Americans believe elections should be a choice of policies rather than expressions of racial identity. If Americans vote for a candidate because of his racial agenda, representative government is crippled. Democratic systems operate well only when politicians recognize that even if their opponents’ approaches may be different, all parties are trying to work for the good of the country as a whole. When politics fracture along racial lines, it becomes easy to assume that elected officials work for narrow, ethnic interests, and political contests become very bitter.
The ultimate logic of politics in a racially fractured electorate is a system of quotas in which seats in elective bodies are set aside in proportion to the racial composition of the population. This is the formula hopelessly divided countries such as Lebanon and immediate post-white-rule Zimbabwe and South Africa hit upon. It could be the solution for other divided countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Fiji, Malaysia, or Sri Lanka, where politics is a perpetual squabble over ethnic interests.
There is already implied support for proportional racial representation in the federal approach to voter districts. The US Department of Justice has long required that congressional districts be gerrymandered to create black and Hispanic majorities that are expected to vote along racial lines and send one of their own to Congress. The department also routinely sues cities that choose their governing bodies in at-large elections. If, for example, a city is 30 percent black but has no blacks on the city council because all candidates must appeal to the entire city, voting must be switched to a ward system, with wards drawn so that blacks—by voting for people like themselves have approximately 30 percent of the council seats. In 2006, the Justice Department used precisely this argument to threaten Euclid, Ohio, with litigation if it did not replace its at-large elections with a system of eight separate wards.
In 2010, Hispanics made the same argument when they sued the city of Compton: They claimed that an at-large voting system shut them out and kept the city council all black. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1275:Si indicava lo scanno dove sedevano gomito a gomito i sette rappresentanti dell'Haute Garonne, che invitati a pronunciarsi sul verdetto di condanna di Luigi XVI, avevano così proposto uno dopo l'altro: Mailhe, la morte. Delmas, la morte. Projean, la morte, Calès, la morte, Ayral, la morte, Julien, la morte. Desancy, la morte. Eco fatale che riempie in sé tutta la storia, dal giorno in cui fu instaurata la giustizia umana, eco sepolcrale tra le mura di tribunali. Si indicavano a dito gli uomini che avevano espresso il loro tragico giudizio, in tanta confusione; Paganel, che aveva detto: «Un re non può essere utile che con la sua morte. Dunque, a morte»; Millaud, il quale aveva gridato: «Se la morte non esistesse, oggi bisognerebbe inventarla»; il vecchio Raffron du Truillet, che aveva detto: «La morte, al più presto»; Goupilleau, il quale aveva urlato:«Subito al patibolo. Ogni lentezza aggrava la morte»; Sièyès, che aveva espresso con funerea concisione il suo voto: «La morte»; Thuriot, che si era opposto alla proposta di Buzot, tendente a proporre un appello al popolo: « È mai possibile?Le assemblee primarie? È mai credibile? Quarantamila tribunali, processo senza fine. La testa di Luigi XVI avrebbe tempo di incanutire, prima di cadere»; Augustin-Bon Robespierre, che, dopo il voto del fratello, aveva gridato: « Io non riconoscerei umanità che sgozzasse i popoli e perdonasse ai despoti. A morte! Chiedere un rinvio vuol dire appellarsi ai tiranni e non al popolo »; Foussedoire, sostituto di Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, il quale aveva sentenziato: «Sento tutto l'orrore di un'effusione di sangue, ma il sangue di un re non è sangue di creatura umana. A morte!»
Jean-Bon Saint-André che aveva detto: «La libertà dei popoli si identifica con la morte dei tiranni»;
Lavicomterie, assertore di questa formula: «Finchè un tiranno respira, la libertà soffoca. A morte!»; Chateauneuf-Randon, il quale aveva gridato: «Morte a Luigi l'ultimo!» Guyardin che vaeva espresso questo parere: «Deve essere giustiziato alla Barrière – Renversée!» volendo indicare la barriera del Trono; Tellier, il quale aveva detto: «Si deve fondere un cannone che abbia il calibro della testa di Luigi XVI, per combattere i nostri nemici». ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
1276:Like other living cre a t u res, plants' structural characteristics are encoded in the DNA in their cells. In other words, how a plant will re p roduce, how it will breathe, how it will come by its nutrients, its colour, smell, taste, the amount of sugar in it, and other such information, is without exception to be found in all of that plant's cells. The cells in the roots of the plant possess the knowledge of how the leaves will carry out photosynthesis, and the cells in the leaves possess the knowledge of how the roots will take water from the soil. In short, there exist a code and a blueprint for the formation of a complete new plant in every extension that leaves a plant. All the features of the mother plant, based on its inbuilt genetic information, are to be found, complete, down to the last
detail in every cell of every little part that splits off from it. So, in that case, how and by whom was the information that can form a complete new plant installed in every part of the plant? The probability of all the information being totally complete and the same inside every cell of a plant cannot be attributed to chance. Nor can it be attributed to the plant itself, or the minerals in the soil that carry out this process. These are all parts of the system which make up the plant. Just as it takes a factory engineer to program production line robots, since the robots cannot come by the instructions themselves, so there must be some being which gives to plants the necessary formula for growth and
re p roduction, since the plants, like the robots, cannot acquire these by themselves. It is, of course God who implanted the necessary information in the plants' cells, as in all other living things in the world. It is He who without any doubt created everything in complete form, and who is aware of all creation. God draws attention to this truth in several holy verses: He created the seven heavens one above the other. You will find no flaw in the creation of the All-Merciful. Look again-do you see any gaps? Then look again and again. Your eyes will become dazzled and exhausted. (Surat al-Mulk: 3-4) Do you not see that God sends down water from the sky and then in the morning the earth is covered in green? God is All-Subtle, AllAware. (Surat al-Hajj: 63) ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
1277:The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God.
Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in
the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story. ~ Eugene H Peterson,#NFDB
1278:Fennel Spell Hang fennel from doors and windows to ward off evil energy and entities. Fiery Wall of Protection Spells Fiery Wall of Protection is among the most famous classic condition formulas. Its name invokes the power of Archangel Michael’s protective flaming sword. The formula may be consecrated to the archangel. Fiery Wall’s basic ingredients include such powerful protective agents as salt, frankincense and myrrh. Its red color, the color of protection, derives from dragon’s blood powder. See the Formulary for specific instructions: the dried powder may be used as incense or magic powder. When the powder is added to oil, Fiery Wall of Protection Oil is created. Fiery Wall of Protection Spell (1) Candle Carve a red or white candle with your name, identifying information, hopes, and desires. Dress it with Fiery Wall of Protection Oil and burn. Consecrate the candle to the Archangel Michael if desired. Fiery Wall of Protection Spell (2) Extra-strength Mojo Place a handful of Fiery Wall of Protection Powder in a charm bag. Drizzle it with Fiery Wall of Protection Oil and Protection Oil. Add a medallion depicting Michael the Archangel and/or a tiny doll-sized sword: a fancy tooth pick works well. Carry it in your pocket. Replace the powder weekly, dressing with fresh oil. Cleanse, charge, and consecrate the charms as needed. Fiery Wall of Protection Spell (3) Incense Protect against a threatened curse by burning Fiery Wall of Protection Powder as incense. To intensify the protection, add powdered agrimony and/or vervain. Fiery Wall of Protection Spell (4) Powder Circle Cast a circle of Fiery Wall of Protection Powder around yourself, your home, or whatever needs protection. Envision a circle of enchanted flames magically surrounding and protecting you, something like the magic fire encircling The Ring of the Nibelung’s valkyrie swan-maiden Brunhilde: the flames are cool and won’t harm those whom they protect yet serve as a burning boundary preventing the entrance of all evil. Stay within the circle for as long as necessary. Carry the powder within a charm bag so that circles and boundary lines may be spontaneously cast as needed. Fiery Wall of Protection Spell (5) Quick Fix Soak a cotton ball in Fiery Wall of Protection Oil and carry it in your pocket or tucked into your bra. ~ Judika Illes, #NFDB
1279:One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beauty will save the world". What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?
There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.
Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition - and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.
In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.
But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?
In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world", was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.
And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,#NFDB
1280:In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later.
While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says.
Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.
Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1281:The general characteristics and attributions of these Grades are indicated by their correspondences on the Tree of Life, as may be studied in detail in the Book 777.
Student. -- His business is to acquire a general intellectual knowledge of all systems of attainment, as declared in the prescribed books. (See curriculum in Appendix I.) {231}
Probationer. -- His principal business is to begin such practices as he my prefer, and to write a careful record of the same for one year.
Neophyte. -- Has to acquire perfect control of the Astral Plane.
Zelator. -- His main work is to achieve complete success in Asana and Pranayama. He also begins to study the formula of the Rosy Cross.
Practicus. -- Is expected to complete his intellectual training, and in particular to study the Qabalah.
Philosophus. -- Is expected to complete his moral training. He is tested in Devotion to the Order.
Dominus Liminis. -- Is expected to show mastery of Pratyahara and Dharana.
Adeptus (without). -- is expected to perform the Great Work and to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
Adeptus (within). -- Is admitted to the practice of the formula of the Rosy Cross on entering the College of the Holy Ghost.
Adeptus (Major). -- Obtains a general mastery of practical Magick, though without comprehension.
Adeptus (Exemptus). -- Completes in perfection all these matters. He then either ("a") becomes a Brother of the Left Hand Path or, ("b") is stripped of all his attainments and of himself as well, even of his Holy Guardian Angel, and becomes a babe of the Abyss, who, having transcended the Reason, does nothing but grow in the womb of its mother. It then finds itself a
Magister Templi. -- (Master of the Temple): whose functions are fully described in Liber 418, as is this whole initiation from Adeptus Exemptus. See also "Aha!". His principal business is to tend his "garden" of disciples, and to obtain a perfect understanding of the Universe. He is a Master of Samadhi. {232}
Magus. -- Attains to wisdom, declares his law (See Liber I, vel Magi) and is a Master of all Magick in its greatest and highest sense.
Ipsissimus. -- Is beyond all this and beyond all comprehension of those of lower degrees. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#NFDB
1282:The Joachitic speculation comprises a complex of four symbols which have remained characteristic of the political mass movements of modern times.
The first of these symbols is that of the Third Realm—that is, the conception of a third world-historical phase that is at the same time the last, the age of fulfillment.
The second symbol Joachim developed is that of the leader, the dux, who appears at the beginning of a new era and through his appearance establishes that era.
God is understood by the secularist sectarians as a projection of the substance of the human soul into the illusionary spaciousness of the “beyond.” Through psychological analysis, this illusion can be dispelled and “God” brought back from his beyond into the human soul from which he sprung. By dispelling the illusion, the divine substance is reincorporated in man, and man becomes superman. The act of taking God back into man, just as among the older sectarians, has the result of creating a human type who experiences himself as existing outside of institutional bonds and obligations.
The third of Joachim’s symbols is that of the prophet.
With the creation of the symbol of the precursor, a new type emerges in Western history: the intellectual who knows the formula for salvation from the misfortunes of the world and can predict how world history will take its course in the future.
In the further course of Western history, the Christian tide recedes, and the prophet, the precursor of the leader, becomes the secularist intellectual who thinks he knows the meaning of history (understood as world-immanent) and can predict the future. In political practice, the figure of the intellectual who projects the image of future history and makes predictions cannot always be clearly separated from that of the leader.
The fourth of the Joachitic symbols is the community of spiritually autonomous persons.
In this free community of autonomous persons without institutional organization can be seen the same symbolism found in modern mass movements, which imagine the Final Realm as a free community of men after the extinction of the state and other institutions. The symbolism is most clearly recognizable in communism, but the idea of democracy also thrives not inconsiderably on the symbolism of a community of autonomous men. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
1283:I know my fate. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something frightful — a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences and the passing of a sentence upon all that has before been believed in, demanded and sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nothing of the founder of a religion in me. Religions belong to the rabble; after coming into contact with religious people I always feel that I must wash my hands. I do not want 'believers', I think that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never speak to masses. I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be considered 'holy'. You will understand why I publish this book beforehand — it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. I am nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more false has ever existed than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Revaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind’s greatest step towards coming to its senses — a step which in me has become flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millennia. I was the first to discover the truth and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious, to sense the lie as a lie. My genius lies in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted before and yet I am the very opposite to a negative spirit. I am the herald of joy the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such a height that has never been seen before my time. Mankind can only now begin to hope again, now that I have lived. Thus I am necessarily a man of Destiny. For when Truth battles against the lies of millennia there will be shock waves, earthquakes, the transposition of hills and valleys such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept 'politics' then becomes entirely absorbed into the realm of spiritual warfare. All the mighty worlds of the ancient order of society are blown into space — for they are all based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1284:The six characteristics that, taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.
1) It must first be pointed out that the gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.
2) Not quite so understandable is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to us men (wherever its origin is to be sought) is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. But gnostics are not inclined to discover that human beings in general and they themselves in particular are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.
3) The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.
4) From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered—namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man’s salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.
5) With this fifth point we come to the gnostic trait in the narrower sense—the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.
6) If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescription for such a change. Knowledge—gnosis—of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. As the sixth feature of the gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the gnostic’s readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.
These six characteristics, then, describe the essence of the gnostic attitude. In one variation or another they are to be found in each of the movements cited. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
1285:Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.'
Pastor Jón Prímus to himself: That's rather good.
With that he thrust the manual into his cassock pocket, turned towards the coffin, and said:
That was the formula, Mundi. I was trying to get you to understand it, but it didn't work out; actually it did not matter. We cannot get round this formula anyway. It's easy to prove that the formula is wrong, but it is at least so right that the world came into existence. But it is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words. The late pastor Jens of Setberg knew all this and more besides. But he also knew that the formula is kept in a locker. The rest comes by itself. The Creation, which includes you and me, we are in the formula, this very formula I have just been reading; and there is no way out of it. Because no one lives for himself and so on; and whether we live or die, we and so on.
You are annoyed that demons should govern the world and that consequently there is only one virtue that is taken seriously by the newspapers: killings.
You said they had discovered a machine to destroy everything that draws breath on earth; they were now trying to agree on a method of accomplishing this task quickly and cleanly; preferably while having a cocktail. They are trying to break out of the formula, poor wretches. Who can blame them for that? Who has never wanted to do that?
Many consider the human being to be the most useless animal on earth or even the lowest stage of evolution in all the universe put together, and that it is more than high time to wipe this creature out, like the mammoth in the tundras. We once knew a war maiden, you and I. There was only one word ever found for her: Úa. So wonderful was this creation that it's no exaggeration to say that she was completely unbearable; indeed I think that we two helped one another to destroy her, and yet perhaps she is still alive. There was never anything like her.
...
In conclusion I, as the local pastor, thank you for having participated in carrying the Creation on your shoulders alongside me. ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness,#NFDB
1286:Supliciul disperării constă tocmai în faptul că nu poţi muri. De aceea, ea se apropie mai mult de starea de agonie, când zaci, te chinuieşti de moarte şi nu poţi muri. Astfel, a fi bolnav de moarte înseamnă a nu putea muri, totuşi nu ca şi când ar persista speranţa de a supravieţui, nu, ci absenţa speranţei constă în faptul că nu mai există nici măcar ultima speranţă, moartea. Atunci când pericolul suprem este moartea, ea speră în viaţă; cine a cunoscut însă pericolul şi mai îngrozitor, speră în moarte. Dacă, aşadar, pericolul este atât de mare încât se pun speranţele în moarte, disperarea constă în absenţa speranţei de a putea măcar muri. Disperarea este aşadar boala de moarte, această contradicţie chinuitoare, această boală aflată în sine, de a muri veşnic, de a muri fără totuşi să mori şi de a muri moartea. Căci a muri înseamnă că totul se încheie, dar a muri moartea arăta că trăieşti faptul de a muri; şi dacă îl trăieşti o singură clipă, înseamnă că îl trăieşti pe veci. Dacă omul ar muri de disperare aşa cum se moare de o boală, atunci ar trebui că eternul din el, sinele, să poată muri în acelaşi sens în care trupul moare dintr-o boală. Or acest lucru este imposibil; faptul de a muri al disperării se converteşte permanent în viaţă. Disperatul nu poate muri: «pe cât de puţin poate un pumnal să ucidă gânduri», pe atât de puţin poate mistui disperarea veşnicia, sinele aflat la baza disperării, al căror vierme nu piere şi al căror foc nu se stinge. Totuşi disperarea înseamnă tocmai să te macini în interior, dar este o măcinare neputincioasă a unui sine care nu este în stare de ceea ce vrea. Disperarea vrea însă să se nimicească, ceea ce îi este peste puteri, iar această slăbiciune este o nouă formă de a se roade pe dinăuntru, în care totuşi disperarea din nou nu poate ce vrea, să se autodistrugă, ci avem de-a face cu o potenţare sau cu legea ridicării la putere. Această măcinare este ceea ce aţâţă sau e incendiul glacial din disperare, o măcinare întoarsă mereu spre interior şi care roade tot mai adânc şi tot mai neputincios din sine. Pentru cel ce disperă nu este o consolare nici măcar faptul că disperarea pe el nu-l distruge; dimpotrivă, tocmai această consolare este supliciul care ţine în viaţă disperarea mistuitoare şi viaţa în durere mistuitoare. Căci tocmai de aceea el nu a disperat, ci disperă: pentru că nu se poate distruge, nu se poate lepăda de sine, nu se poate nimici. Aceasta este formula potenţată a disperării, urcarea febrei în această boală a sinelui. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1287:It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. ~ William James,#NFDB
1288:One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives.
Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded.
Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ...
That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration. ~ Emil M Cioran,#NFDB
1289:Meanwhile, in a lecture at the Sverdlov University two years later, under the
pressure of outside events and interior realities, Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the
indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall
crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more
people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving,
when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither
State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single
oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in
strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the governments responsible for injustice, the
obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own interests. And when, on an earth that has
finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and
the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will
be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
Under the easily predictable pressure of adverse imperialism, the imperialism of justice was born, in reality, with
Lenin. But imperialism, even the imperialism of justice, has no other end but defeat or world empire. Until
then it has no other means but injustice. From now on, the doctrine is definitively identified with the
prophecy. For the sake of justice in the far-away future, it authorizes injustice throughout the entire course
of history and becomes the type of mystification which Lenin detested more than anything else in the
world. It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still
greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a
moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into
its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a
formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the
equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
1290:Music of the Grid:
A Poem in Two Equations
The masses of particles sound the frequencies with which space vibrates, when played. This Music of the Grid betters the old mystic mainstay, "Music of the Spheres," both in fantasy and in realism.
LET US COMBINE Einstein's second law
m=E/C^2 (1)
with another fundamental equation, the Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula
E = hv
The Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula relates the energy E of a quantum-mechanical state to the frequency v at which its wave function vibrates. Here h is Planck's constant. Planck introduced it in his revolutionary hypothesis (1899) that launched quantum theory: that atoms emit or absorb light of frequency v only in packets of energy E = hv. Einstein went a big step further with his photon hypothesis (1905): that light of frequency v is always organized into packets with energy E = hv. Finally Schrodinger made it the basis of his basic equation for wave functions-the Schrodinger equation (1926). This gave birth to the modern, universal interpretation: the wave function of any state with energy E vibrates at a frequency v given by v = E/h.
By combining Einstein with Schrodinger we arrive at a marvelous bit of poetry:
(*) v = mc^2/h (*)
The ancients had a concept called "Music of the Spheres" that inspired many scientists (notably Johannes Kepler) and even more mystics. Because periodic motion (vibration) of musical instruments causes their sustained tones, the idea goes, the periodic motions of the planets, as they fulfill their orbits, must be accompanied by a sort of music. Though picturesque and soundscape-esque, this inspiring anticipation of multimedia never became a very precise or fruitful scientific idea. It was never more than a vague metaphor, so it remains shrouded in equation marks: "Music of the Spheres."
Our equation (*) is a more fantastic yet more realistic embodiment of the same inspiration. Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,... (that is, the Bits that represent these Its) and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid. Neither planets nor any material constructions compromise the pure ideality of our instrument. It settles into one of its possible vibratory motions, with different frequencies v, depending on how we do the plunking, and with what. These vibrations represent particles of different mass m, according to (*). The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1291:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.
And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga,#NFDB
1292:It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality.[...]Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless. The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1293:the process of unification, the perfecting our one's instrumental being, the help one needs to reach the goal :::
If we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavor.
As you pursue this labor of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. ... It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us [the psychic being], to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perfection and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realize. This discovery and realization should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
~ The Mother, On Education, [T1],#NFDB
1294:There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge. This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#NFDB
1295:Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED.
THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions.
All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS. ~ William James,#NFDB
1296:Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole.
What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house?
I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want.
Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process.
These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust.
If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art.
... (6:06:57) ...
When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay.
If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process. ~ Amanda Palmer,#NFDB
1297:Education was still considered a privilege in England. At Oxford you took responsibility for your efforts and for your performance. No one coddled, and no one uproariously encouraged. British respect for the individual, both learner and teacher, reigned. If you wanted to learn, you applied yourself and did it. Grades were posted publicly by your name after exams. People failed regularly. These realities never ceased to bewilder those used to “democracy” without any of the responsibility. For me, however, my expectations were rattled in another way. I arrived anticipating to be snubbed by a culture of privilege, but when looked at from a British angle, I actually found North American students owned a far greater sense of entitlement when it came to a college education. I did not realize just how much expectations fetter—these “mind-forged manacles,”2 as Blake wrote. Oxford upholds something larger than self as a reference point, embedded in the deep respect for all that a community of learning entails. At my very first tutorial, for instance, an American student entered wearing a baseball cap on backward. The professor quietly asked him to remove it. The student froze, stunned. In the United States such a request would be fodder for a laundry list of wrongs done against the student, followed by threatening the teacher’s job and suing the university. But Oxford sits unruffled: if you don’t like it, you can simply leave. A handy formula since, of course, no one wants to leave. “No caps in my classroom,” the professor repeated, adding, “Men and women have died for your education.” Instead of being disgruntled, the student nodded thoughtfully as he removed his hat and joined us. With its expanses of beautiful architecture, quads (or walled lawns) spilling into lush gardens, mist rising from rivers, cows lowing in meadows, spires reaching high into skies, Oxford remained unapologetically absolute. And did I mention? Practically every college within the university has its own pub. Pubs, as I came to learn, represented far more for the Brits than merely a place where alcohol was served. They were important gathering places, overflowing with good conversation over comforting food: vital humming hubs of community in communication. So faced with a thousand-year-old institution, I learned to pick my battles. Rather than resist, for instance, the archaic book-ordering system in the Bodleian Library with technological mortification, I discovered the treasure in embracing its seeming quirkiness. Often, when the wrong book came up from the annals after my order, I found it to be right in some way after all. Oxford often works such. After one particularly serendipitous day of research, I asked Robert, the usual morning porter on duty at the Bodleian Library, about the lack of any kind of sophisticated security system, especially in one of the world’s most famous libraries. The Bodleian was not a loaning library, though you were allowed to work freely amid priceless artifacts. Individual college libraries entrusted you to simply sign a book out and then return it when you were done. “It’s funny; Americans ask me about that all the time,” Robert said as he stirred his tea. “But then again, they’re not used to having u in honour,” he said with a shrug. ~ Carolyn Weber, #NFDB
1298: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
1299:"Do I believe," sayest thou, "what the masters of wisdom would teach me,
And what their followers' band boldly and readily swear?
Cannot I ever attain to true peace, excepting through knowledge,
Or is the system upheld only by fortune and law?
Must I distrust the gently-warning impulse, the precept
That thou, Nature, thyself hast in my bosom impressed,
Till the schools have affixed to the writ eternal their signet,
Till a mere formula's chain binds down the fugitive soul?
Answer me, then! for thou hast down into these deeps e'en descended,
Out of the mouldering grave thou didst uninjured return.
Is't to thee known what within the tomb of obscure works is hidden,
Whether, yon mummies amid, life's consolations can dwell?
Must I travel the darksome road? The thought makes me tremble;
Yet I will travel that road, if 'tis to truth and to right."
Friend, hast thou heard of the golden age? Full many a story
Poets have sung in its praise, simply and touchingly sung
Of the time when the holy still wandered over life's pathways,
When with a maidenly shame every sensation was veiled,
When the mighty law that governs the sun in his orbit,
And that, concealed in the bud, teaches the point how to move,
When necessity's silent law, the steadfast, the changeless,
Stirred up billows more free, e'en in the bosom of man,
When the sense, unerring, and true as the hand of the dial,
Pointed only to truth, only to what was eternal?
Then no profane one was seen, then no initiate was met with,
And what as living was felt was not then sought 'mongst the dead;
Equally clear to every breast was the precept eternal,
Equally hidden the source whence it to gladden us sprang;
But that happy period has vanished! And self-willed presumption
Nature's godlike repose now has forever destroyed.
Feelings polluted the voice of the deities echo no longer,
In the dishonored breast now is the oracle dumb.
Save in the silenter self, the listening soul cannot find it,
There does the mystical word watch o'er the meaning divine;
There does the searcher conjure it, descending with bosom unsullied;
There does the nature long-lost give him back wisdom again.
If thou, happy one, never hast lost the angel that guards thee,
Forfeited never the kind warnings that instinct holds forth;
If in thy modest eye the truth is still purely depicted;
If in thine innocent breast clearly still echoes its call;
If in thy tranquil mind the struggles of doubt still are silent,
If they will surely remain silent forever as now;
If by the conflict of feelings a judge will ne'er be required;
If in its malice thy heart dims not the reason so clear,
Oh, then, go thy way in all thy innocence precious!
Knowledge can teach thee in naught; thou canst instruct her in much!
Yonder law, that with brazen staff is directing the struggling,
Naught is to thee. What thou dost, what thou mayest will is thy law,
And to every race a godlike authority issues.
What thou with holy hand formest, what thou with holy mouth speakest,
Will with omnipotent power impel the wondering senses;
Thou but observest not the god ruling within thine own breast,
Not the might of the signet that bows all spirits before thee;
Simple and silent thou goest through the wide world thou hast won.
~ Friedrich Schiller, Genius
,#NFDB
1300:In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, 'Forth now and push forward also in other fields.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#NFDB
1301:The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
1302:The Pearl Diver
Kanzo Makame, the diver, sturdy and small Japanee,
Seeker of pearls and of pearl-shell down in the depths of the sea,
Trudged o'er the bed of the ocean, searching industriously.
Over the pearl-grounds the lugger drifted -- a little white speck:
Joe Nagasaki, the "tender", holding the life-line on deck,
Talked through the rope to the diver, knew when to drift or to check.
Kanzo was king of his lugger, master and diver in one,
Diving wherever it pleased him, taking instructions from none;
Hither and thither he wandered, steering by stars and by sun.
Fearless he was beyond credence, looking at death eye to eye:
This was his formula always, "All man go dead by and by -S'posing time come no can help it -- s'pose time no come, then no die."
Dived in the depths of the Darnleys, down twenty fathom and five;
Down where by law, and by reason, men are forbidden to dive;
Down in a pressure so awful that only the strongest survive:
Sweated four men at the air pumps, fast as the handles could go,
Forcing the air down that reached him heated and tainted, and slow -Kanzo Makame the diver stayed seven minutes below;
Came up on deck like a dead man, paralysed body and brain;
Suffered, while blood was returning, infinite tortures of pain:
Sailed once again to the Darnleys -- laughed and descended again!
Scarce grew the shell in the shallows, rarely a patch could they touch;
Always the take was so little, always the labour so much;
Always they thought of the Islands held by the lumbering Dutch -Islands where shell was in plenty lying in passage and bay,
Islands where divers could gather hundreds of shell in a day.
But the lumbering Dutch in their gunboats they hunted the divers away.
Joe Nagasaki, the "tender", finding the profits grow small,
432
Said, "Let us go to the Islands, try for a number one haul!
If we get caught, go to prison -- let them take lugger and all!"
Kanzo Makame, the diver -- knowing full well what it meant -Fatalist, gambler, and stoic, smiled a broad smile of content,
Flattened in mainsail and foresail, and off to the Islands they went.
Close to the headlands they drifted, picking up shell by the ton,
Piled up on deck were the oysters, opening wide in the sun,
When, from the lee of the headland, boomed the report of a gun.
Then if the diver was sighted, pearl-shell and lugger must go -Joe Nagasaki decided (quick was the word and the blow),
Cut both the pipe and the life-line, leaving the diver below!
Kanzo Makame, the diver, failing to quite understand,
Pulled the "haul up" on the life-line, found it was slack in his hand;
Then, like a little brown stoic, lay down and died on the sand.
Joe Nagasaki, the "tender", smiling a sanctified smile,
Headed her straight for the gunboat--throwing out shells all the while -Then went aboard and reported, "No makee dive in three mile!
"Dress no have got and no helmet -- diver go shore on the spree;
Plenty wind come and break rudder -- lugger get blown out to sea:
Take me to Japanee Consul, he help a poor Japanee!"
So the Dutch let him go; but they watched him, as off from the Islands he ran,
Doubting him much -- but what would you? You have to be sure of your man
Ere you wake up that nest-ful of hornets -- the little brown men of Japan.
Down in the ooze and the coral, down where earth's wonders are spread,
Helmeted, ghastly, and swollen, Kanzo Makame lies dead.
Joe Nagasaki, his "tender", is owner and diver instead.
Wearer of pearls in your necklace, comfort yourself if you can.
These are the risks of the pearling -- these are the ways of Japan;
"Plenty more Japanee diver plenty more little brown man!"
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
1303:1. ‘’Astfel, esenta lumanarii nu este ceara care lasa urme, ci lumina.’’
2. ‘’Cel ce iubeste doar aproprierea dragostei, nu va cunoaste niciodata intalnirea cu ea.’’
3. ‘’Caci am aflat ca omul este asemenea unei citadele. Rastoarna zidurile pentru a-si gasi libertatea, dar nu mai e decat fortareata nimicita, deschisa inspre stele. Atunci incepe spaima de a nu mai fi.’’
4. ‘’Si am inteles ca au nevoie de liniste. Caci numai in liniste adevarul fiecaruia se leaga si prinde radacini. Caci ceea ce e important, inainte de toate,…, este timpul.’’
5. ‘’ …limbajul nu contine nimic care sa fie vrednic de interes. Invata sa asculti nu zarva cuvintelor, nici rationamentele ce le permit sa se insele. Invata sa privesti mai departe.’’
‘’Iata pentru ce am dispretuit dintotdeauna, ca fiind zadarnica, zarva cuvintelor. Si nu m-am increzut in artificiile limbajului. ‘’
6. ‘’ Caci abilitatea nu este decat un cuvant gol. In creatie nu exista ocoluri. Creezi ceea ce faci si nimic mai mult. Iar daca pretinzi ca urmarind un scop, te indrepti spre un altul, deosebit de primul, doar cel pe care cuvintele il inseala te va crede abil.’’
7. ‘’Caci fiecare iubeste in felul sau aceeasi imagine. Doar un limbaj insuficient ii opune pe oameni unii altora, caci dorintele lor nu difera. N-am intalnit niciodata pe cel care sa doreasca dezordinea sau josnicia sau ruina. Imaginea care-i framanta si pe care ar vrea s-o intemeieze se aseamana de la un capat la celalat al universului, dar caile de atingere a ei difera.’’
8. ‘’ Desigur, cu cat munca pe care o consumi in numele dragostei este mai grea, cu atat mai mult te exalta. Cu cat dai mai mult, cu atat cresti mai mult. Dar trebuie sa existe cineva care sa primeasca. A pierde nu inseamna niciodata a darui.’’
9. ‘’ Caci, o data mai mult, am aflat ca logica ucide viata. Si ca nu contine nimic prin ea insasi… Dar facatorii de formule s-au inselat asupra omului. Au confundat formula, care este umbra plata a cedrului, cu cedrul, din volumul, greutatea si culoarea lui, cu incarcatura sa de pasari si frunzisul sau, care nu s-ar putea exprima si cuprinde in cuvinte firave…Caci aceia confunda formula care desemneaza, cu obiectul desemnat.
Si cum ar putea suporta ceea ce nu se poate formula, sau nu s-a implinit inca, sau intra in contradictie cu un alt adevar? Cum sa stie ca, intr-un limbaj care formuleaza dar nu cuprinde, doua adevaruri se pot opune?’’
10. ‘’ Dar daca nu te ating, te construiesc ca pe un templu. Si te inalt in lumina. Si tacerea ta inchide in ea campiile. Iar eu te iubesc dincolo de mine sau tine. Si inventez imnuri pentru a-ti celebra imperiul…Nu esti decat o treapta in drumul meu spre eternitate.’’
11. ‘’ Dar cei pe care ii numesc liberi si hotarand numai pentru ei insisi, inexorabil singuri, aceia nu sunt condusi, plutesc fara vant in panze, iar rezistenta lor nu este decat capriciu incoerent. Cei pe care ii urasc, sunt, mai ales, cei care nu exista cu adevarat. Rasa de caini ce se cred liberi, fiind liberi de a-si schimba opiniile, de a nega (cum ar putea sti ca neaga, de vreme ce ei insisi sunt judecatori?), liberi de a trisa, de a renega si de a se vinde , si pe care ii fac sa-si schimbe parerile doar aratandu-le troaca atunci cand le e foame.’’
12. ‘’Caci dragostea nu-ti e data ca un cadou al acestui obraz, la fel cum linistea si calmul nu sunt produs al privelistii, ci al ascensiunii reusite, al muntelui dominat, al instalarii tale in cer. La fel- dragostea. Iluzia este ca o intalnesti, cand de fapt se invata.Si se inseala cel care rataceste prin viata, pentru a fi cucerit, cunoscand prin scurte fioruri , gustul tumultului inimii si visand sa intalneasca marea febra ce il va incinge pentru totdeauna, desi ea nu este decat o desarta victorie a inimii sale. De asemenea, nu te odihnesti in dragoste, daca ea nu se transforma din zi in zi, ca in maternitate. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry,#NFDB
1304:Honorable, happy, and successful marriage is surely the principal goal of every normal person. Marriage is perhaps the most vital of all the decisions and has the most far-reaching effects, for it has to do not only with immediate happiness, but also with eternal joys. It affects not only the two people involved, but also their families and particularly their children and their children’s children down through the many generations.
In selecting a companion for life and for eternity, certainly the most careful planning and thinking and praying and fasting should be done to be sure that of all the decisions, this one must not be wrong. In true marriage there must be a union of minds as well as of hearts. Emotions must not wholly determine decisions, but the mind and the heart, strengthened by fasting and prayer and serious consideration, will give one a maximum chance of marital happiness. It brings with it sacrifice, sharing, and a demand for great selflessness. . . .
Some think of happiness as a glamorous life of ease, luxury, and constant thrills; but true marriage is based on a happiness which is more than that, one which comes from giving, serving, sharing, sacrificing, and selflessness. . . .
One comes to realize very soon after marriage that the spouse has weaknesses not previously revealed or discovered. The virtues which were constantly magnified during courtship now grow relatively smaller, and the weaknesses which seemed so small and insignificant during courtship now grow to sizable proportions. The hour has come for understanding hearts, for self-appraisal, and for good common sense, reasoning, and planning. . . .
“Soul mates” are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price.
There is a never-failing formula which will guarantee to every couple a happy and eternal marriage; but like all formulas, the principal ingredients must not be left out, reduced, or limited. The selection before courting and then the continued courting after the marriage process are equally important, but not more important than the marriage itself, the success of which depends upon the two individuals—not upon one, but upon two. . . .
The formula is simple; the ingredients are few, though there are many amplifications of each.
First, there must be the proper approach toward marriage, which contemplates the selection of a spouse who reaches as nearly as possible the pinnacle of perfection in all the matters which are of importance to the individuals. And then those two parties must come to the altar in the temple realizing that they must work hard toward this successful joint living.
Second, there must be a great unselfishness, forgetting self and directing all of the family life and all pertaining thereunto to the good of the family, subjugating self.
Third, there must be continued courting and expressions of affection, kindness, and consideration to keep love alive and growing.
Fourth, there must be a complete living of the commandments of the Lord as defined in the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . .
Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage is not a legal coverall, but it means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all. . . .
To be really happy in marriage, one must have a continued faithful observance of the commandments of the Lord. No one, single or married, was ever sublimely happy unless he was righteous. ~ Spencer W Kimball,#NFDB
1305:CHAPTER XIII
OF THE BANISHINGS: AND OF THE PURIFICATIONS.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The wand is not a wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.
That is a mere logical commonplace: in magick one must go much farther than this. One finds one's analogy in electricity. If insulation is imperfect, the whole current goes back to earth. It is useless to plead that in all those miles of wire there is only one-hundredth of an inch unprotected. It is no good building a ship if the water can enter, through however small a hole.
That first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.
If one littlest thought intrude upon the mind of the Mystic, his concentration is absolutely destroyed; and his consciousness remains on exactly the same level as the Stockbroker's. Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother. If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it.> {101}
The Magician must therefore take the utmost care in the matter of purification, "firstly", of himself, "secondly", of his instruments, "thirdly", of the place of working. Ancient Magicians recommended a preliminary purification of from three days to many months. During this period of training they took the utmost pains with diet. They avoided animal food, lest the elemental spirit of the animal should get into their atmosphere. They practised sexual abstinence, lest they should be influenced in any way by the spirit of the wife. Even in regard to the excrements of the body they were equally careful; in trimming the hair and nails, they ceremonially destroyed> the severed portion. They fasted, so that the body itself might destroy anything extraneous to the bare necessity of its existence. They purified the mind by special prayers and conservations. They avoided the contamination of social intercourse, especially the conjugal kind; and their servitors were disciples specially chosen and consecrated for the work.
In modern times our superior understanding of the essentials of this process enables us to dispense to some extent with its external rigours; but the internal purification must be even more carefully performed. We may eat meat, provided that in doing so we affirm that we eat it in order to strengthen us for the special purpose of our proposed invocation.> {102}
By thus avoiding those actions which might excite the comment of our neighbours we avoid the graver dangers of falling into spiritual pride.
We have understood the saying: "To the pure all things are pure", and we have learnt how to act up to it. We can analyse the mind far more acutely than could the ancients, and we can therefore distinguish the real and right feeling from its imitations. A man may eat meat from self-indulgence, or in order to avoid the dangers of asceticism. We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose.
It is ceremonially desirable to seal and affirm this mental purity by Ritual, and accordingly the first operation in any actual ceremony is bathing and robing, with appropriate words. The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous to antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the fame of mind suitable to that one thought.
A similar operation takes place in the preparation of every instrument, as has been seen in the Chapter devoted to that subject. In the preparation of theplace of working, the same considerations apply. We first remove from that place all objects; and we then put into it those objects, and only those {103} objects, which are necessary. During many days we occupy ourselves in this process of cleansing and consecration; and this again is confirmed in the actual ceremony.
The cleansed and consecrated Magician takes his cleansed and consecrated instruments into that cleansed and consecrated place, and there proceeds to repeat that double ceremony in the ceremony itself, which has these same two main parts. The first part of every ceremony is the banishing; the second, the invoking. The same formula is repeated even in the ceremony of banishing itself, for in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper.
In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that force ... ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#NFDB
1306:In Utrumque Paratus
'Then hey for boot and horse, lad !
And round the world away !
Young blood will have its course, lad !
And every dog his day !'—C. Kingsley.
There's a formula which the west country clowns
Once used, ere their blows fell thick,
At the fairs on the Devon and Cornwall downs,
In their bouts with the single-stick.
You may read a moral, not far amiss,
If you care to moralize,
In the crossing guard, where the ash-plants kiss,
To the words 'God spare our eyes.'
No game was ever yet worth a rap
For a rational man to play,
Into which no accident, no mishap,
Could possibly find its way.
If you hold the willow, a shooter from Wills
May transform you into a hopper,
And the football meadow is rife with spills,
If you feel disposed for a cropper ;
In a rattling gallop with hound and horse
You may chance to reverse the medal
On the sward, with the saddle your loins across,
And your hunter's loins on the saddle ;
In the stubbles you'll find it hard to frame
A remonstrance firm, yet civil,
When oft as 'our mutual friend' takes aim,
Long odds may be laid on the rising game,
And against your gaiters level ;
There's danger even where fish are caught
To those who a wetting fear ;
For what's worth having must ay be bought,
And sport's like life, and life's like sport,
'It ain't all skittles and beer.'
The honey bag lies close to the sting,
The rose is fenced by the thorn,
196
Shall we leave to others their gathering,
And turn from clustering fruits that cling
To the garden wall in scorn ?
Albeit those purple grapes hang high,
Like the fox in the ancient tale,
Let us pause and try, ere we pass them by,
Though we, like the fox, may fail.
All hurry is worse than useless ; think
On the adage, ' 'Tis pace that kills ;'
Shun bad tobacco, avoid strong drink,
Abstain from Holloway's pills,
Wear woollen socks, they're the best you'll find,
Beware how you leave off flannel ;
And whatever you do, don't change your mind
When once you have picked your panel ;
With a bank of cloud in the south-south-east,
Stand ready to shorten sail ;
Fight shy of a corporation feast ;
Don't trust to a martingale ;
Keep your powder dry, and shut one eye,
Not both, when you touch your trigger ;
Don't stop with your head too frequently
(This advice ain't meant for a nigger) ;
Look before you leap, if you like, but if
You mean leaping, don't look long,
Or the weakest place will soon grow stiff,
And the strongest doubly strong ;
As far as you can, to every man,
Let your aid be freely given,
And hit out straight, 'tis your shortest plan,
When against the ropes you're driven.
Mere pluck, though not in the least sublime,
Is wiser than blank dismay,
Since 'No sparrow can fall before its time,'
And we're valued higher than they ;
So hope for the best and leave the rest
In charge of a stronger hand,
Like the honest boors in the far-off west,
With the formula terse and grand.
197
They were men for the most part rough and rude,
Dull and illiterate,
But they nursed no quarrel, they cherished no feud,
They were strangers to spite and hate ;
In a kindly spirit they took their stand,
That brothers and sons might learn
How a man should uphold the sports of his land,
And strike his best with a strong right hand,
And take his strokes in return.
' 'Twas a barbarous practice,' the Quaker cries,
' 'Tis a thing of the past, thank heaven'—
Keep your thanks till the combative instinct dies
With the taint of the olden leaven ;
Yes, the times are changed, for better or worse,
The prayer that no harm befall
Has given its place to a drunken curse,
And the manly game to a brawl.
Our burdens are heavy, our natures weak,
Some pastime devoid of harm
May we look for ? 'Puritan elder, speak !'
'Yea, friend, peradventure thou mayest seek
Recreation singing a psalm.'
If I did, your visage so grim and stern
Would relax in a ghastly smile,
For of music I never one note could learn,
And my feeble minstrelsy would turn
Your chant to discord vile.
Tho' the Philistine's mail could naught avail,
Nor the spear like a weaver's beam,
There are episodes yet in the Psalmist's tale,
To obliterate which his poems fail,
Which his exploits fail to redeem.
Can the Hittite's wrongs forgotten be ?
Does HE warble 'Non nobis Domine,'
With his monarch in blissful concert, free
From all malice to flesh inherent ;
Zeruiah's offspring, who served so well,
Yet between the horns of the altar fell—
Does HIS voice the 'Quid gloriaris' swell,
Or the 'Quare fremuerunt' ?
198
It may well be thus where DAVID sings,
And Uriah joins in the chorus,
But while earth to earthy matter clings,
Neither you nor the bravest of Judah's kings
As a pattern can stand before us.
~ Adam Lindsay Gordon,#NFDB
1307:Theology In Extremis: Or A Soliloquy That May Have
Been Delivered In India, June, 1857
"They would have spared life to any of their English prisoners who should
consent to profess Mahometanism, by repeating the usual short formula; but
only one half-caste cared to save himself in that way." -- Extract from an Indian
newspaper.
MORITURUS LOQUITUR.
Oft in the pleasant summer years,
Reading the tales of days bygone,
I have mused on the story of human tears,
All that man unto man had done,
Massacre, torture, and black despair;
Reading it all in my easy-chair.
Passionate prayer for a minute's life;
Tortured crying for death as rest;
Husband pleading for child or wife,
Pitiless stroke upon tender breast.
Was it all real as that I lay there
Lazily stretched on my easy-chair?
Could I believe in those hard old times,
Here in this safe luxurious age?
Were the horrors invented to season rhymes,
Or truly is man so fierce in his rage?
What could I suffer, and what could I dare?
I who was bred to that easy-chair.
They were my fathers, the men of yore,
Little they recked of a cruel death;
They would dip their hands in a heretic's gore,
They stood and burnt for a rule of faith.
What would I burn for, and whom not spare?
I, who had faith in an easy-chair.
Now do I see old tales are true,
Here in the clutch of a savage foe;
Now shall I know what my fathers knew,
Bodily anguish and bitter woe,
Naked and bound in the strong sun's glare,
Far from my civilized easy-chair.
Now have I tasted and understood
That old world feeling of mortal hate;
For the eyes all round us are hot with blood;
They will kill us coolly -- they do but wait;
While I, I would sell ten lives, at least,
For one fair stroke at that devilish priest
Just in return for the kick he gave,
Bidding me call on the prophet's name;
Even a dog by this may save
Skin from the knife, and soul from the flame;
My soul! if he can let the prophet burn it,
But life is sweet if a word may earn it.
A bullock's death, and at thirty years!
Just one phrase, and a man gets off it;
Look at that mongrel clerk in his tears
Whining aloud the name of the prophet;
Only a formula easy to patter,
And, God Almighty, what can it matter?
"Matter enough," will my comrade say
Praying aloud here close at my side,
"Whether you mourn in despair alway,
Cursed for ever by Christ denied;
Or whether you suffer a minute's pain
All the reward of Heaven to gain."
Not for a moment faltereth he,
Sure of the promise and pardon of sin;
Thus did the martyrs die, I see,
Little to lose and muckle to win;
Death means Heaven, he longs to receive it,
But what shall I do if I don't believe it?
Life is pleasant, and friends may be nigh,
10
Fain would I speak one word and be spared;
Yet I could be silent and cheerfully die,
If I were only sure God cared;
If I had faith, and were only certain
That light is behind that terrible curtain.
But what if He listeth nothing at all
Of words a poor wretch in his terror may say?
That mighty God who created all
To labour and live their appointed day;
Who stoops not either to bless or ban,
Weaving the woof of an endless plan.
He is the Reaper, and binds the sheaf,
Shall not the season its order keep?
Can it be changed by a man's belief?
Millions of harvests still to reap;
Will God reward, if I die for a creed,
Or will He but pity, and sow more seed?
Surely He pities who made the brain,
When breaks that mirror of memories sweet,
When the hard blow falleth, and never again
Nerve shall quiver nor pulse shall beat;
Bitter the vision of vanishing joys;
Surely He pities when man destroys.
Here stand I on the ocean's brink,
Who hath brought news of the further shore?
How shall I cross it? Sail or sink,
One thing is sure, I return no more;
Shall I find haven, or aye shall I be
Tossed in the depths of a shoreless sea?
They tell fair tales of a far-off land,
Of love rekindled, of forms renewed;
There may I only touch one hand
Here life's ruin will little be rued;
But the hand I have pressed and the voice I have heard,
To lose them for ever, and all for a word?
Now do I feel that my heart must break
11
All for one glimpse of a woman's face;
Swiftly the slumbering memories wake
Odour and shadow of hour and place;
One bright ray through the darkening past
Leaps from the lamp as it brightens last,
Showing me summer in western land
Now, as the cool breeze murmureth
In leaf and flower -- And here I stand
In this plain all bare save the shadow of death;
Leaving my life in its full noonday,
And no one to know why I flung it away.
Why? Am I bidding for glory's roll?
I shall be murdered and clean forgot;
Is it a bargain to save my soul?
God, whom I trust in, bargains not;
Yet for the honour of English race,
May I not live or endure disgrace.
Ay, but the word, if I could have said it,
I by no terrors of hell perplext;
Hard to be silent and have no credit
From man in this world, or reward in the next;
None to bear witness and reckon the cost
Of the name that is saved by the life that is lost.
I must be gone to the crowd untold
Of men by the cause which they served unknown,
Who moulder in myriad graves of old;
Never a story and never a stone
Tells of the martyrs who die like me,
Just for the pride of the old countree.
~ Alfred Comyn Lyall,#NFDB
1308:[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
1309: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
1310:or Callistratus. Similarly, the hero in The Acharnians complains about Cleon
"dragging me into court" over "last year's play" but here again it is not clear if
this was said on behalf of ~ Aristophanes
or Callistratus, either of whom might
have been prosecuted by Cleon.
Comments made by the Chorus on behalf of ~ Aristophanes
in The Clouds have
been interpreted as evidence that he can have been hardly more than 18 years
old when his first play The Banqueters was produced. The second parabasis in
Wasps appears to indicate that he reached some kind of temporary
accommodation with Cleon following either the controversy over The Babylonians
or a subsequent controversy over The Knights.[ It has been inferred from
statements in The Clouds and Peace that ~ Aristophanes
was prematurely bald.
We know that ~ Aristophanes
was probably victorious at least once at the City
Dionysia (with Babylonians in 427)and at least three times at the Lenaia, with
Acharnians in 425, Knights in 424, and Frogs in 405. Frogs in fact won the
unique distinction of a repeat performance at a subsequent festival. We know
that a son of ~ Aristophanes
, Araros, was also a comic poet and he could have
been heavily involved in the production of his father's play Wealth II in s is also
thought to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of the now
lost plays Aeolosicon II and Cocalus, and it is possible that the last of these won
the prize at the City Dionysia in 387. It appears that a second son, Philippus, was
twice victorious at the Lenaia and he could have directed some of Eubulus’
comedies.A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus, and a man by
the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the
first probably in the late 370s.
Plato's The Symposium appears to be a useful source of biographical information
about ~ Aristophanes
, but its reliability is open to doubt. It purports to be a record
of conversations at a dinner party at which both ~ Aristophanes
and Socrates are
guests, held some seven years after the performance of The Clouds, the play in
which Socrates was cruelly caricatured. One of the guests, Alcibiades, even
quotes from the play when teasing Socrates over his appearance and yet there is
no indication of any ill-feeling between Socrates and ~ Aristophanes
. Plato's
~ Aristophanes
is in fact a genial character and this has been interpreted as
evidence of Plato's own friendship with him (their friendship appears to be
corroborated by an epitaph for ~ Aristophanes
, reputedly written by Plato, in which
the playwright's soul is compared to an eternal shrine for the Graces). Plato was
only a boy when the events in The Symposium are supposed to have occurred
and it is possible that his ~ Aristophanes
is in fact based on a reading of the plays.
For example, conversation among the guests turns to the subject of Love and
~ Aristophanes
explains his notion of it in terms of an amusing allegory, a device
he often uses in his plays. He is represented as suffering an attack of hiccoughs
and this might be a humorous reference to the crude physical jokes in his plays.
He tells the other guests that he is quite happy to be thought amusing but he is
wary of appearing ridiculous. This fear of being ridiculed is consistent with his
declaration in The Knights that he embarked on a career of comic playwright
warily after witnessing the public contempt and ridicule that other dramatists had
incurred.
~ Aristophanes
survived The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic revolutions and two
democratic restorations; this has been interpreted as evidence that he was not
actively involved in politics despite his highly political plays. He was probably
appointed to the Council of Five Hundred for a year at the beginning of the fourth
century but such appointments were very common in democratic tes, in the trial
leading up to his own death, put the issue of a personal conscience in those
troubled times quite succinctly:
"...he who will really fight for the right, if he would live even for a little while,
must have a private station and not a public one.
~ Aristophanes
the Poet
The language in ~ Aristophanes
' plays, and in Old Comedy generally, was valued
by ancient commentators as a model of the Attic dialect. The orator Quintilian
believed that the charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy an
example for orators to study and follow, and he considered it inferior in these
respects only to the works of
A full appreciation of ~ Aristophanes
' plays requires an understanding of the poetic
forms he employed with virtuoso skill, and of their different rhythms and
associations. There were three broad poetic forms: iambic dialogue, tetrameter
verses and lyrics:
Iambic dialogue: ~ Aristophanes
achieves an effect resembling natural speech
through the use of the iambic hexameter (corresponding to the effects achieved
by English poets such as
based on words that are similar rather than identical, and it has been observed
that there could be more of them than scholars have yet been able to identify.
Others are based on double meanings. Sometimes entire scenes are constructed
on puns, as in The Acharnians with the Megarian farmer and his pigs: the
Megarian farmer defies the Athenian embargo against Megarian trade, and tries
to trade his daughters disguised as pigs, except "pig" was ancient slang for
"vagina". Since the embargo against Megara was the pretext for the
Peloponnesian War, ~ Aristophanes
naturally concludes that this whole mess
happened because of "three cunts".
It can be argued that the most important feature of the language of the plays is
imagery, particularly the use of similes, metaphors and pictorial expressions. In
'The Knights', for example, the ears of a character with selective hearing are
represented as parasols that open and close.In The Frogs, Aeschylus is said to
compose verses in the manner of a horse rolling in a sandpit. Some plays feature
revelations of human perfectibility that are poetic rather than religious in
character, such as the marriage of the hero Pisthetairos to Zeus's paramour in
The Birds and the 'recreation' of old Athens, crowned with roses, at the end of
The Knights.
~ Aristophanes
and Old Comedy
The Greek word for 'comedy' (komoidía) derives from the words for 'revel' and
'song' (komos and ode) and according to Aristotle comic drama actually
developed from song. The first, official comedy at the City Dionysia was not
staged until 487/6 BC, by which time tragedy had already been long established
there. The first comedy at the Lenaia was staged later still, only about 20 years
before the performance there of The Acharnians, the first of ~ Aristophanes
'
surviving plays. According to Aristotle, comedy was slow to gain official
acceptance because nobody took it seriously yet, only sixty years after comedy
first appeared at 'The City Dionysia', ~ Aristophanes
observed that producing
comedies was the most difficult work of tition at the Dionysian festivals needed
dramatic conventions for plays to be judged, but it also fuelled innovations.
Developments were quite rapid and Aristotle was able to distinguish between
'old' and 'new' comedy by 330 BC. The trend from Old Comedy to New Comedy
saw a move away from highly topical concerns with real individuals and local
issues towards generalized situations and stock characters. This was partly due
to the internationalization of cultural perspectives during and after the
Peloponnesian War. For ancient commentators such as Plutarch, New Comedy
was a more sophisticated form of drama than Old Comedy. However Old Comedy
was in fact a complex and sophisticated dramatic form incorporating many
approaches to humour and entertainment. In ~ Aristophanes
' early plays, the
genre appears to have developed around a complex set of dramatic conventions
and these were only gradually simplified and abandoned.
The City Dionysia and the Lenaia were celebrated in honour of Dionysus, a god
who represented Man's darker nature (Euripides' play The Bacchae offers the
best insight into 5th Century ideas about this god). Old Comedy can be
understood as a celebration of the exuberant sense of release inherent in his
worship It was more interested in finding targets for satire than in any kind of
advocacy. During the City Dionysia, a statue of the god was brought to the
theatre from a temple outside the city and it remained in the theatre throughout
the festival, overseeing the plays like a privileged member of the audience.[102]
In The Frogs, the god appears also as a dramatic character and he enters the
theatre ludicrously disguised as Hercules. He observes to the audience that every
time he is on hand to hear a joke from a comic dramatist like Phrynichus (one of
~ Aristophanes
' rivals) he ages by more than a year. The scene opens the play and
it is a reminder to the audience that nobody is above mockery in Old Comedy —
not even its patron god and its practitioners! Gods, artists, politicians and
ordinary citizens were legitimate targets, comedy was a kind of licensed
buffoonery and there was no legal redress for anyone who was slandered in a
play. There were some limits to the scope of the satire, but they are not easily
defined. Impiety could be punished in 5th century Athens but absurdities implicit
in traditional religion were open to ridicule. The polis was not allowed to be
slandered but, as stated in the biography section of this article, that could
depend on who was in the audience and which festival was involved.
For convenience, Old Comedy, as represented by ~ Aristophanes
' early plays, is
analysed below in terms of three broad characteristics — topicality, festivity and
complexity. Dramatic structure contributes to the complexity of ~ Aristophanes
'
plays. However it is associated with poetic rhythms and meters that have little
relevance to English translations and it is therefore treated in a separate section.
Influence and legacy
The tragic dramatists, Sophocles and Euripides, died near the end of the
Peloponnesian War and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop, yet
comedy did continue to develop after the defeat of Athens and it is possible that
it did so because, in ~ Aristophanes
, it had a master craftsman who lived long
enough to help usher it into a new age. Indeed, according to one ancient source
(Platonius, c.9th Century AD), one of ~ Aristophanes
's last plays, Aioliskon, had
neither a parabasis nor any choral lyrics (making it a type of Middle Comedy),
while Kolakos anticipated all the elements of New Comedy, including a rape and
a recognition scene. ~ Aristophanes
seems to have had some appreciation of his
formative role in the development of comedy, as indicated by his comment in
Clouds that his audience would be judged by other times according to its
reception of his plays. Clouds was awarded third (i.e. last) place after its original
performance and the text that has come down to the modern age was a
subsequent draft that ~ Aristophanes
intended to be read rather than circulation of
his plays in manuscript extended their influence beyond the original audience,
over whom in fact they seem to have had little or no practical influence: they did
not affect the career of Cleon, they failed to persuade the Athenians to pursue an
honourable peace with Sparta and it is not clear that they were instrumental in
the trial and execution of Socrates, whose death probably resulted from public
animosity towards the philosopher's disgraced associates (such as Alcibiades),
exacerbated of course by his own intransigence during the plays, in manuscript
form, have been put to some surprising uses — as indicated earlier, they were
used in the study of rhetoric on the recommendation of Quintilian and by
students of the Attic dialect in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD. It is possible
that Plato sent copies of the plays to Dionysius of Syracuse so that he might
learn about Athenian life and government.
Latin translations of the plays by Andreas Divus (Venice 1528) were circulated
widely throughout Europe in the Renaissance and these were soon followed by
translations and adaptations in modern languages. Racine, for example, drew Les
Plaideurs (1668) from The Wasps.
winged."
Drama
1909: Wasps, original Greek, Cambridge University undergraduate production,
music by Vaughan Williams;
2004, July–October: The Frogs (musical), adapted by Nathan Lane, music and
lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, performed at The Vivian Beaumont Theatre
Broadway;
1962-2006: various plays by students and staff, Kings College London, in the
original Greek:Frogs 1962,1971,1988; Thesmophoriazusae 1965, 1974, 1985;
Acharnians 1968, 1992, 2004; Clouds 1977, 1990; Birds 1982, 2000;
Ecclesiazusae 2006; Peace 1970; Wasps 1981
2002: Lysistrata, adapted by Robert Brustein, music by Galt McDermot,
performed by American Repertory Theatre, Boston U.S.A.;
10
2008, May–June: Frogs, adapted by David Greenspan, music by Thomas
Cabaniss, performed by Classic Stage Company, New York, U.S.A.
Literature
The romantic poet, Percy Shelley, wrote a comic, lyrical drama (Swellfoot the
Tyrrant) in imitation of ~ Aristophanes
' play The Frogs after he was reminded of
the Chorus in that play by a herd of pigs passing to market under the window of
his lodgings in San Giuliano, Italy.
~ Aristophanes
(particularly in reference to The Clouds) is mentioned frequently by
the character Menedemos in the Hellenic Traders series of novels by H N
Turteltaub.
A liberal version of the comedies have been published in comic book format,
initially by "Agrotikes Ekdoseis" during the 1990s and republished over the years
by other companies. The plot was written by Tasos Apostolidis and the sketches
were of George Akokalidis. The stories feature either ~ Aristophanes
narrating
them, directing the play, or even as a character inside one of his stories.
Electronic Media
The Wasps, radio play adapted by David Pountney, music by Vaughan Williams,
recorded 26–28 July 2005, Albert Halls, Bolten, in association with BBC, under
Halle label;
Acropolis Now is a comedy radio show for the BBC set in Ancient Greece. It
features ~ Aristophanes
, Socrates and many other famous Greeks. (Not to be
confused with the Australian sitcom of the same name.) ~ Aristophanes
is
characterised as a celebrity playwright, and most of his plays have the title
formula: One of Our [e.g] Slaves has an Enormous Knob (a reference to the
exaggerated appendages worn by Greek comic actors)
~ Aristophanes
Against the World was a radio play by Martyn Wade and broadcast
on BBC Radio 4. Loosely based on several of his plays, it featured Clive Merrison
as ~ Aristophanes
.
In The Odd Couple, Oscar and Felix are on Password, and when the password is
bird, Felix’s esoteric clue is "~ Aristophanes
" because of his play The Birds. During
the commercial break (having failed to guess the password and lost the round),
Oscar orders Felix not to give any more Greek clues and angrily growls,
"~ Aristophanes
is ridiculous"! Then when it's Oscar’s turn to give the clue on the
11
team’s next shot, the password is ridiculous and Oscar angrily growls
"~ Aristophanes
", to which Felix gleefully responds, "Ridiculous!"
Music
Satiric Dances for a Comedy by ~ Aristophanes
is a three-movement piece for
concert band composed by Norman Dello Joio. It was commissioned in
commemoration of the Bicentennial of April 19, 1775 (the start of the American
Revolutionary War) by the Concord (Massachusetts) Band. The commission was
funded by the Town of Concord and assistance was given by the Eastern National
Park and Monument Association in cooperation with the National Park Service.
12
A Parody On Euripides's Lyric Verse
Halcyons ye by the flowing sea
Waves that warble twitteringly,
Circling over the tumbling blue,
Dipping your down in its briny dew,
Spi-i-iders in corners dim
Spi-spi-spinning your fairy film,
Shuttles echoing round the room
Silver notes of the whistling loom,
Where the light-footed dolphin skips
Down the wake of the dark-prowed ships,
Over the course of the racing steed
Where the clustering tendrils breed
Grapes to drown dull care in delight,
Oh! mother make me a child again just for to-night!
I don't exactly see how that last line is to scan,
But that's a consideration I leave to our musical man.
~ Aristophanes,#NFDB
372 Integral Yoga
88 Occultism
39 Psychology
34 Philosophy
27 Fiction
20 Christianity
10 Yoga
8 Science
8 Poetry
8 Integral Theory
5 Education
2 Theosophy
2 Cybernetics
1 Thelema
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
275 Sri Aurobindo
193 The Mother
102 Satprem
97 Nolini Kanta Gupta
53 Aleister Crowley
42 Carl Jung
27 H P Lovecraft
17 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
16 Aldous Huxley
12 A B Purani
10 Friedrich Nietzsche
9 Jorge Luis Borges
9 George Van Vrekhem
7 Paul Richard
6 Jordan Peterson
6 James George Frazer
5 Sri Ramakrishna
5 Plato
3 Walt Whitman
3 Swami Krishnananda
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Ken Wilber
3 Franz Bardon
2 Rudolf Steiner
2 R Buckminster Fuller
2 Plotinus
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Norbert Wiener
2 Mahendranath Gupta
67 The Synthesis Of Yoga
44 The Life Divine
31 Magick Without Tears
29 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
27 Lovecraft - Poems
23 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
22 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
21 Liber ABA
21 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
18 Agenda Vol 03
17 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
16 The Perennial Philosophy
16 Essays On The Gita
15 Record of Yoga
14 The Human Cycle
14 Savitri
14 Essays Divine And Human
13 Mysterium Coniunctionis
13 Agenda Vol 05
12 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
12 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
12 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
11 Questions And Answers 1953
10 Prayers And Meditations
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
10 Agenda Vol 08
10 Agenda Vol 07
10 Agenda Vol 01
9 Questions And Answers 1955
9 Preparing for the Miraculous
9 Letters On Yoga I
9 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
9 Aion
8 Twilight of the Idols
8 The Practice of Psycho therapy
8 The Phenomenon of Man
8 Questions And Answers 1956
8 Agenda Vol 09
8 Agenda Vol 02
8 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
7 The Secret Of The Veda
7 Labyrinths
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
6 Vedic and Philological Studies
6 The Golden Bough
6 Talks
6 Questions And Answers 1954
6 Maps of Meaning
6 Isha Upanishad
6 Agenda Vol 10
6 Agenda Vol 04
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 The Future of Man
5 Letters On Yoga IV
5 Agenda Vol 06
4 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
4 On Education
3 Words Of The Mother II
3 Whitman - Poems
3 The Study and Practice of Yoga
3 The Red Book Liber Novus
3 The Practice of Magical Evocation
3 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 Letters On Yoga II
3 Let Me Explain
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 Agenda Vol 13
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2 The Integral Yoga
2 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
2 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
2 Liber Null
2 Letters On Yoga III
2 Cybernetics
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ritualistically these four terms are the formulae for oblation to four Deities, Powers or Presences, whom the sacrificer wishes to please and propitiate in order to have their help and blessing and in order thereby to discharge his dharma or duty of life. Svh is the offering especially dedicated to Agni, the foremost of the Gods, for he is the divine messenger who carries men's offering to the Gods and brings their blessing to men. Vaatkr is the offering to the Gods generally. Hantakr is the offering to mankind, to our kin, an especial form of it being the worship of the guests,sarvadevamayo' tithi. Svadh is the offering to the departed Fathers (Pitris).
The duty of life consists, it is said, in the repaying of three debts which every man contracts as soon as he takes birth upon earth the debt to the Gods, to Men and to the Ancestors. This threefold debt or duty has, in other terms, reference to the three fields or domains wherein an embodied being lives and moves and to which he must adjust and react rightly -if he is to secure for his life an integral fulfilment. These are the family, society and the world and beyond-world. The Gods are the Powers that rule the world and beyond, they are the forms and forces of the One Spirit underlying the universe, the varied expressions of divine Truth and Reality: To worship the Gods, to do one's duty by them, means to come into contact and to be unitedin being, consciousness and activitywith the universal and spiritual existence, which is the supreme end and purpose of human life. The seconda more circumscribed fieldis the society to which one belongs, the particular group of humanity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of humanity, of Man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma, the ethic of an ideal life.
--
Air is Mind, the world of thought, of conscious formation; it is where life-movements are taken up and given a shape or articulate formula for an organised expression. The forms here have not, however, the concrete rigidity of Matter, but are pliant and variable and fluidin fact, they are more in the nature of possibilities, rather than actualities. The Vedic Maruts are thought-gods, and lndra (the Luminous Mind), their king, is called the Fashioner of perfect forms.
Ether or Space is the infinitude of the Spirit, the limitless Presence that dwells in and yet transcends the body, the life the heart and the mind.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Keshab was the leader of the Brahmo Samaj, one of the two great movements that, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, played an important part in shaping the course of the renascence of India. The founder of the Brahmo movement had been the great Raja Rammohan Roy (1774-1833). Though born in an orthodox brahmin family, Rammohan Roy had shown great sympathy for Islam and Christianity. He had gone to Tibet in search of the Buddhist mysteries. He had extracted from Christianity its ethical system, but had rejected the divinity of Christ as he had denied the Hindu Incarnations. The religion of Islam influenced him, to a great extent, in the formulation of his monotheistic doctrines. But he always went back to the Vedas for his spiritual inspiration. The Brahmo Samaj, which he founded in 1828, was dedicated to the "worship and adoration of the Eternal, the Unsearchable, the Immutable Being, who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe". The Samaj was open to all without distinction of colour, creed, caste, nation, or religion.
The real organizer of the Samaj was Devendranath Tagore (1817-1905), the father of the poet Rabindranath. His physical and spiritual beauty, aristocratic aloofness, penetrating intellect, and poetic sensibility made him the foremost leader of the educated Bengalis. These addressed him by the respectful epithet of Maharshi, the "Great Seer". The Maharshi was a Sanskrit scholar and, unlike Raja Rammohan Roy, drew his inspiration entirely from the Upanishads. He was an implacable enemy of image worship ship and also fought to stop the infiltration of Christian ideas into the Samaj. He gave the movement its faith and ritual. Under his influence the Brahmo Samaj professed One Self-existent Supreme Being who had created the universe out of nothing, the God of Truth, Infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Power, the Eternal and Omnipotent, the One without a Second. Man should love Him and do His will, believe in Him and worship Him, and thus merit salvation in the world to come.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
A.'.A.'. have changed the formula of their progress.
These two formulae, Solve et Coagula, are now ex-
plained, and the universe is exhibited as the interplay
--
it is the formula of the Scarlet woman; but no impression
must be allowed to dominate you, only to fructify you;
--
Paragraph 1, however, is Frater Perdurabo's formula-
tion of his perception of the Universal Joke, also
--
The formula of Samadhi is the same, from the
lowest to the highest. The Rosy-Cross is the Universal
--
that method of destroying the reason by formulating
contradictions is definitely inculcated.
--
magical formulae. Blood and virginity have always
been the most acceptable offerings to all the gods, but
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
Anticipating, cooperating with, and employing the forces of nature can be accomplished only by the mind. The wisdom manifest in the omni-interorderliness of the family of generalized principles operative in Universe can be employed only by the highest integrity of engagement of the mind's metaphysical intuiting and formulating capabilities.
We are able to assert that this rationally coordinating system bridge has been established between science and the humanities because we have made adequate experimental testing of it in a computerized world-resource-use-exploration system, which by virtue of the proper inclusion of all the parameters-as guaranteed by the synergetic start with Universe and the progressive differentiation out of all the parts-has demonstrated a number of alternate ways in which it is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all humans but also to permit all humans' individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals interfering with others.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The Gita in its chapters on the Vibhuti and the Avatar takes in general the same position. It shows that the present formula of our nature, and therefore the mental personality of man, is not final. A Vibhuti embodies in a human manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary human personality. The Vibhuti the embodiment of a divine quality or power, and the Avatar the divine incarnation, are not to be looked upon as supraphysical miracles thrown at humanity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of human possibility, a sign that points to the goal of evolution.
In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HERE are two necessities of Nature's workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Secondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But in order that we may be wisely guided in our effort, we must know, first, the general principle and purpose underlying this separative impulse and, next, the particular utilities upon which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. For the general principle we must interrogate the universal workings of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective
Wisdom, prajna prasr.ta puran. of the Upanishad, Wisdom that went forth from the Eternal since the beginning. For the particular utilities we must cast a penetrative eye on the different methods of Yoga and distinguish among the mass of their details the governing idea which they serve and the radical force which gives birth and energy to their processes of effectuation.
--
Do such psychological conceptions correspond to anything real and possible? All Yoga asserts them as its ultimate experience and supreme aim. They form the governing principles of our highest possible state of consciousness, our widest possible range of existence. There is, we say, a harmony of supreme faculties, corresponding roughly to the psychological faculties of revelation, inspiration and intuition, yet acting not in the intuitive reason or the divine mind, but on a still higher plane, which see Truth directly face to face, or rather live in the truth of things both universal and transcendent and are its formulation and luminous activity. And these faculties are the light of a conscious existence superseding the egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight7 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self- formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable whether conceived as a pure Impersonality or as a cosmic Personality manifesting the universe. But in Yoga they are regarded also in their psychological aspects as states of subjective existence to which our waking consciousness is now alien, but which dwell in us in a superconscious plane and to which, therefore, we may always ascend.
For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karan.a), as opposed to the two others which are instruments (karan.a), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.
--
Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer and all-embracing Yoga.
2 The Unified, in whom conscious thought is concentrated, who is all delight and enjoyer of delight, the Wise. . . . He is the Lord of all, the Omniscient, the inner Guide.
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, - it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
--
Perfection includes perfection of mind and body, so that the highest results of Rajayoga and Hathayoga should be contained in the widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by mankind. At any rate a full development of the general mental and physical faculties and experiences attainable by humanity through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral method. Nor would these have any raison d'etre unless employed for an integral mental and physical life. Such a mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. Thus we would arrive at a synthesis of the three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument.
Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind.
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet what can be more poetic in essence than philosophy, if by philosophy we mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his own being, the why and the whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of human joys and sorrows the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the human element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is humanity in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude.
We do not say that poets have never sung of God and Soul and things transcendent. Poets have always done that. But what I say is this that presentation of spiritual truths, as they are in their own home, in other words, treated philosophically and yet in a supreme poetic manner, has always been a rarity. We have, indeed, in India the Gita and the Upanishads, great philosophical poems, if there were any. But for one thing they are on dizzy heights out of the reach of common man and for another they are idolised more as philosophy than as poetry. Doubtless, our Vaishnava poets sang of God and Love Divine; and Rabindranath, in one sense, a typical modern Vaishnava, did the same. And their songs are masterpieces. But are they not all human, too human, as the mad prophet would say? In them it is the human significance, the human manner that touches and moves us the spiritual significance remains esoteric, is suggested, is a matter of deduction. Sri Aurobindo has dealt with spiritual experiences in a different way. He has not clothed them in human symbols and allegories, in images and figures of the mere earthly and secular life: he presents them in their nakedness, just as they are seen and realised. He has not sought to tone down the rigour of truth with contrivances that easily charm and captivate the common human mind and heart. Nor has he indulged like so many poet philosophers in vague generalisations and colourless or too colourful truisms that do not embody a clear thought or rounded idea, a radiant judgment. Sri Aurobindo has given us in his poetry thoughts that are clear-cut, ideas beautifully chiselledhe is always luminously forceful.
--
It is the bare truth, "truth in its own home", as I have said already using a phrase of the ancient sages, that is formulated here without the prop of any external symbolism. There is no veil, no mist, no uncertainty or ambiguity. It is clarity itself, an almost scientific exactness and precision. In all this there is something of the straightness and fullness of vision that characterised the Vedic Rishis, something of their supernal genius which could mould speech into the very expression of what is beyond speech, which could sublimate the small and the finite into forms of the Vast and the Infinite. Mark how in these aphoristic lines embodying a deep spiritual experience, the inexpressible has been expressed with a luminous felicity:
Delight that labours in its opposite,
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A considerable amount of vague misunderstanding and misapprehension seems to exist in the minds of a certain section of our people as to what Sri Aurobindo is doing in his retirement at Pondicherry. On the other hand, a very precise exposition, an exact formula of what he is not doing has been curiously furnished by a well-known patriot in his indictment of what he chooses to call the Pondicherry School of contemplation. But he has arrived at this formula by openly and fearlessly affirming what does not exist; for the things that Sri Aurobindo is accused of doing are just the things that he is not doing. In the first place, Sri Aurobindo is not doing peaceful contemplation; in the second place, he is not doing active propaganda either; in the third place, he is not doing prnyma or even dhyna in the ordinary sense of the word; and, lastly, he is not proclaiming or following the maxim that although action may be tolerated as good, his particular brand of Yoga is something higher and better.
Evidently the eminent politician and his school of activism are labouring under a Himalayan confusion: when they speak of Sri Aurobindo, they really have in their mind some of the old schools of spiritual discipline. But one of the marked aspects of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and practice has been precisely his insistence on putting aside the inert and life-shunning quietism, illusionism, asceticism and monasticism of a latter-day and decadent India. These ideals are perhaps as much obstacles in his way as in the way of the activistic school. Only Sri Aurobindo has not had the temerity to say that it is a weakness to seek refuge in contemplation or to suggest that a Buddha was a weakling or a Shankara a poltroon.
--
And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere school of thought, that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.
***
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All movementswhe ther of thought or of life, whether in the individual or in the massproceed from a fundamental intuition which lies in the background as the logical presupposition, the psychological motive and the spiritual force. A certain attitude of the soul, a certain angle of vision is what is posited first; all other thingsall thoughts and feelings and activities are but necessary attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise on the conscious and dynamic levels, in the outer world, the truth which has thus already been seized in some secret core of our being. The intuition may not, of course, be present to the conscious mind, it may not be ostensibly sought for, one may even deny the existence of such a preconceived notion and proceed to establish truth on a tabula rasa; none the less it is this hidden bias that judges, this secret consciousness that formulates, this unknown power that fashions.
Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying view-point which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievementsour science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present-day activities.
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities are uplifted and suffused with a "light that never was, on sea or land."
Another great poet of the spirit says also, almost like Tagore:
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the formulas of their stupendous speech,
Till heaven and hell become purveyors to earth
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-operation. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the demand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. The scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
However, individualism has given us a truth and a formula which collectivism ignored. Self-determination is a thing which has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us and we should see whether we can harmonise the two. Collectivism signifies that the individual should not look to himself alone, should not be shut up in his freedom but expand himself and envelop others in a wider freedom, see other creatures in himself and himself in other creatures, as the Gita says. Collectivism demands that the individual need not and should not exhaust himself entirely in securing and enjoying his personal freedom, but that he can and should work for the salvation of others; the truth it upholds is this that the individual is from a certain point of view only a part of the group and by ignoring the latter it ignores itself in the end.
Now, a spiritual communism embraces individualism and collectivism, fuses them in a higher truth, establishes them in an intimate and absolute harmony. The individual is the centre, the group is the circumference and the two form one whore circle. The individual by fulfilling the truth of his real individuality fulfils also the truth of a commonality. There are no different laws for the two. The individuals do not stand apart from and against one another, the dharma of one does not clash with the dharma of the other. The ripples in the bosom of the sea, however distinct and discrete in appearance, form but a single mass, all follow the same law of hydrodynamics that the mother sea incarnates. Stars and planets and nebulae, each separate heavenly body has its characteristic form and nature and function and yet all fulfil the same law of gravitation and beat the measure of the silent symphony of spaces. Individualities are the freedoms of the collective being and collectivity the concentration of individual beings. The same soul looking inward appears as the individual being and looking outward appears as the collective being.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
how to formulate it.
Every group, if it is a real one - that is, one made up according to the ability of the individuals who compose it - must
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nicholas Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other than the empirical ego that man normally is"not this that one worships" as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete whole, a creative focus; the true individual is a microcosm yet holding in it and imaging the macrocosm. Only perhaps greater stress is laid upon the aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin, would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces: Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the Conscious Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and emanation of the transcendent impersonality.
There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not merely an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for responsive love. There are divine as well as human passions and therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it." The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour.
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The total eradication of Evil from the world and human nature and the remoulding of a terrestrial life in the substance and pattern of the Highest Good that is beyond all dualities is a conception which it was not for Goe the to envisage. In the order of reality or existence, first there is the consciousness of division, of trenchant separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of consciousness. But there is still a higher status, the status of transcendence in which evil is not simply embraced but dissolved and even transmuted into a supreme reality of which it is an aberration, a reflection or projection, a lower formulation. That is the mystery of a spiritual realisation to which Goe the aspired perhaps, but had not the necessary initiation to enter into.
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01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here is the crux of the question. The dictum of utilitarian philosophers is a golden rule which is easy to formulate but not so to execute. For the line of demarcation between one's own rights and the equal rights of others is so undefinable and variable that a title suit is inevitable in each case. In asserting and establishing and even maintaining one's rights there is always the possibilityalmost the certaintyof encroaching upon others' rights.
What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberration, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (Rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.
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We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Consciousness at Its origin and in its primitive formulation is dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas); in that state things have mostly an undifferentiated collective existence, they helplessly move about acted upon by forces outside them. A rise in growth and evolution brings about differentiation, specialisation, organisation. And this means consciousness of oneself of the distinct and separate existence of each and everyone, in other words, self-assertion, the claim, the right of each individual unit to be itself, to become itself first and foremost. It is a necessary development; for it signifies the growth of self consciousness in the units out of a mass unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. It is the expression of rajas, the mode of dynamism, of strife and struggle, it is the corrective of tamas.
In the earliest and primitive society men lived totally in a mass consciousness. Their life was a blind obedienceobedience to the chief the patriarch or pater familiasobedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty; it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation. In reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice, which is the very soul of the conception of duty.
The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate units. The growth of independent individuality naturally means at first clash and rivalry, and a violently competitive society is the result. It is only at this stage that the conception of duty can fruitfully come in and develop in man and his society the mode of Sattwa, which is that of light and wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then only a society is sought to be moulded on the principle of co-ordination and co-operation.
0 1955-10-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
These movements may be accompanied by three formulas, or any one of them, depending upon the case:
1) May Your Will be done and not mine.
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This morning, I suddenly looked at my body (usually, I dont look at it I am inside it, working), I looked at my body and said to myself, Lets see, what would a witness say about this body?the witness Sri Aurobindo speaks of in The Synthesis of Yoga. Nothing very remarkable. So I formulated it like this (Mother reads a written note):
This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the sage.
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To be able to see the problem as it is, it is absolutely indispensable, as a first step, to get out of the mental consciousness, even out of a mental transcription (in the highest mind) of the supramental vision and truth. A thing cannot be seen as it is, in its truth, except in the supramental consciousness, and if you try to explain, it immediately begins to escape you because you are obliged to give it a mental formulation.
As for me, I saw the thing only at the time of this experience,4 and as a result of this experience. But it is impossible to formulate even the experience itself, and as soon as I endeavored to formulate it and the more I was able to formulate it, the more the thing faded, escaped.
Consequently, if you do not remember having had the experience, you are left in the same condition as before, but with the difference that now you know, you can know, that these material laws do not correspond to the truth thats all. They do not at all correspond to the truth, so consequently, if you want to be faithful to your aspiration, you must in no way legitimize all that. Rather, you must say that it is an infirmity from which we are suffering for the moment, for an intermediate periodit is an infirmity and an ignorance for it really is an ignorance (this is not just a word): it is ignorance, it is not the thing as it is, even in regard to our present material bodies. Therefore, we will not legitimize anything. What we say is thisit is an infirmity which has to be endured for the time being, until we get out of it, but we do NOT ACKNOWLEDGE all this as a concrete reality. It does NOT have a concrete reality, it has a false realitywhat we call concrete reality is a false reality.
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
My experience is that, individually, we are in relationship with that aspect of the Divine which is not necessarily the most in conformity with our natures, but which is the most essential for our development or the most necessary for our action. For me, it was always a question of action because, personally, individually, each aspiration for personal development had its own form, its own spontaneous expression, so I did not use any formula. But as soon as there was the least little difficulty in action, it sprang forth. Only long afterwards did I notice that it was formulated in a certain way I would utter it without even knowing what the words were. But it came like this: Dieu de bont et de misricorde. It was as if I wanted to eliminate from action all aspects that were not this one. And it lasted for I dont know, more than twenty or twenty-five years of my life. It came spontaneously.
Just recently one day, the contact became entirely physical, the whole body was in great exaltation, and I noticed that other lines were spontaneously being added to this Dieu de bont et de misricorde, and I noted them down. It was a springing forth of states of consciousness not words.
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For the moment, of all the formulas or mantras, the one that acts most directly on this body, that seizes all the cells and immediately does this (vibrating motion) is the Sanskrit mantra: OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH.
As soon as I sit for meditation, as soon as I have a quiet minute to concentrate, it always begins with this mantra, and there is a response in the body, in the cells of the body: they all start vibrating.
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother added: 'The most beautiful part of the experience is missing... When I try to formulate something in too precise a way, all the vastness of the experience evaporates. The entire world is being revealed in all its organization down to the minutest details but everything simultaneouslyhow can that be explained? It's not possible.'
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0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
He said he had received initiation in India (he knew a little Sanskrit and the Rig-Veda thoroughly), and then he formulated a tradition which he called the cosmic tradition and which he claimed to have received I dont know howfrom a tradition anterior to that of the Cabala and the Vedas. But there were many things (Madame Theon was the clairvoyant one, and she received visions; oh, she was wonderful!), many things that I myself had seen and known before knowing them which were then substantiated.
So personally, I am convinced that there was indeed a tradition anterior to both these traditions containing a knowledge very close to an integral knowledge. Certainly, there is a similarity in the experiences. When I came here and told Sri Aurobindo certain things I knew from the occult standpoint, he always said that it conformed to the Vedic tradition. And as for certain occult practices, he told me that they were entirely tantric and I knew nothing at that time, absolutely nothing, neither the Vedas nor the Tantras.
0 1958-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Scarcely had these words been formulated when there I was, at the bottom of the hole! And it was absolutely as if a tremendous, almighty spring were there, and then (Mother hits the table) vrrrm! I was cast out of the abyss into a vastness. My body immediately sat straight up, head on high, following the movement. If someone had been watching, this is what he would have seen: in a single bound, vrrrm! Straight up, to the maximum, my head on high.
And I followed all this without objectifying it in the least; I was not aware of what it was nor of what was happening, nor of any explanation at all, nothing: it was like that. I was living it, thats all. The experience was absolutely spontaneous. And after this rather painful descent, phew!there was a kind of super-comfort. I cant explain it otherwise, an ease,4 but an ease to the utmost. A perfect immobility in a sense of eternity but with an extraordinary INTENSITY of movement and life! An inner intensity, unmanifested; it was within, self-contained. And motionless (had there been an outside, it would have been motionless in relation to that) and it was in a life so immeasurable that it can only be expressed metaphorically as infinite. And with an intensity, a POWER, a force and a peace the peace of eternity. A silence, a calm. A POWER capable of of EVERYTHING. Everything.
0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In the other hemisphere, there is an intensity and a plenitude which are translated by a power different from the one here. How can I formulate it?I cannot.
The quality of the consciousness itself seems to change. It is not something higher than the summit we can attain here, it is not one MORE rung, not that. Here, we have reached the end, the summit, but its the quality that is different. The quality, in the sense that a fullness, a richness, a power is there (this is a translation, you see, in our way), but there is a something that that eludes us. It is truly a new reversal of consciousness.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It can hardly be formulated; these are merely impressions that follow one another. I know that when you thought of leaving with Swami,1 I saw that a door was opening, that it was the truth, that this was IT.
My immediate impression was that you were being put in direct contact with this this sort of Fatality that here they call karma, which is the consequence yes, something that must be exhausted, something that remains in the consciousness.
0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
X is at the summit of tantric initiation, and his power is not the fruit of a simple knowledge. He holds it directly from the Divine, and these things have been in his family traditionally from ten generations. No black magic can resist his power. His action is not brutal, he does not mechanically apply formulas, he holds this Science and knows how to apply it like an expert chemist, always in Light, Love and sweetness. If you agree that he come to see you, he will immediately know the source of these attacks upon you and will even be able to make the attacking force speak. He has this power. Of course, neither X nor Swami will divulge this to anyone, and everything will be kept secret. You have only to send word, or a telegram: No objection.
The work can be done from here also, but naturally it will not be quite as effective. In that case, you would have to set a specific time to synchronize the action in Rameswaram and Pondicherry. Swami can also do something in his pujas. It is for you to decide, but I hope you will not want to prolong this battle unnecessarily.
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I know I told you that I had had a vision, but you didnt understand what I told you that day. It was a vision of the place you occupy in my being and of the work we have to do together. Thats really how it is. These things [that I tell you] have their utility and a concrete life, and I see them as very powerful for world transformation theyre what I call experiences (which is much more than an experience because it extends far beyond the individual)and its the same whether its said or not said: the Action is done. But the fact that it is said, that it is formulated here and preserved, is exclusively for you, because you were made for this and this is why we met.
It doesnt need a lot of explaining.
0 1961-01-31, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is striking that Mother's body-experiences very often parallel recent theories of modern physics, as if mathematical equations were the means of formulating in human language certain complex phenomena, remote from our day to day reality, which Mother was living spontaneously in her bodyperhaps 'at the speed of light.'
***
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The terminology used by Mother and Sri Aurobindo is distinct from the terminology of Western psychology. This is how Sri Aurobindo defines 'inconscient' and 'subconscient': 'All upon earth is based on the Inconscient, as it is called, though it is not really inconscient at all, but rather a complete "sub"-conscience, a suppressed or involved consciousness, in which there is everything but nothing is formulated or expressed. The subconscient lies between this Inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body.'
Cent. Ed., XXII, p. 354
0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You can easily make a speech using flowers and I have noticed that this can effectively replace the old Vedic images, for instance, which no longer hold meaning for us, or the ambiguous phraseology of the ancient initiations. Flower language is much better because it contains the Force and is extremely plasticsince its not formulated in words, each one is free to arrange and receive it according to his own capacity. You can make long speeches using flowers!
I have nothing more to say now, except that the same situation prevails.
--
Its a curious thing speaking evidently helps me follow the experience. But I cant just begin speaking all alone up in my room! And talking to a tape recorder is useless. Up to now, it certainly flows the best with youby far. I havent tried with others, although occasionally Ive said something to Nolini, but his receptivity is fuzzy (I dont know whether you can understand this impression: its as though my. words were going into cotton-wool). Once, as I told you, I spoke with R., and with him I felt that three quarters of it was absolutely lostand as a matter of fact it was. But with you I begin to SEE, and the need to formulate makes me concentrate on my vision. And this I experience with you more than I ever have with anyone. So.
So you are bearing the consequences!
0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday, while waiting for X, I was as usual in communion with the Supreme in his aspect of Love. Suddenly I felt X arriving and spontaneously, like a Veda, a movement of gratitude for his great goodwill arose from my heart, and it was formulated as a prayer to the Supreme: Give him [X] the bliss of Your Love and the joys of Your Truth.
For a long time X has said nothing about his meditations with me, but just yesterday he told N. that he had some difficulty at the start of the meditation due to the presence of an adverse force, and it took him five minutes to overcome it!
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now I no longer have the experience of that state except as a memory, so I cant formulate it accurately. But what was very clear and comes very oftenvery oftenis the perception of a superimposition of falsehood over a real fact. This brings us back to what I was telling you some time ago,4 that everything is very simple in its truth, that human consciousness is what complicates everything. But the former was an even more total experience of it.
It is very interesting from the standpoint of death. I saw it once so clearly when someone (I no longer remember whom) had left his body. The word death and all these human reactions seemed so foolish! So senseless, ignorant, stupidfalse, without reality. There was simply something that shifted, like this (Mother draws a curve showing a shift of consciousness from one mode of being to another), and then we, in our false consciousness, made a drama out of it. But it was simply something evolving (same gesture).
0 1961-06-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There have been very, very few cases, a quite minimal number, when people have called (not very sincerely) and their call hasnt had much effect. But even these people have a protection. There was a woman here, an old woman who was not very sincere (she didnt live hereshe only came to visit) and the last time she visited she fell ill and died. Then I saw that she was completely dispersed into all her desires, all her memories, all her attachments and it had all been scattered here and there, into all sorts of things (one part of her was seeking, seeking where to go and what to do); anyway, it was rather pitiful. Afterwards I was asked, How did it happen? She was calling all the time. I replied that I had not heard her callit must not have been very sincere, only a formula.4
But its very rare that people get no response.
0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then there is a doctor, V., who comes here twice a year to give a check-up to all who take part in the physical education program and all the children. He is an extremely honest and sincere man who believes in the mission of medical science. Each time he comes, I write something in his diary on the day of his departure (his whole diary is full of things Ive written they usually appear in the Bulletin or somewhere). On that very same day I learned that V. was leaving, and it suddenly came to meso clearly! Falsehood in the body that sort of juxtaposition of contraries, the inversion of the Vibration (only it doesnt really invertits a curious phenomenon: the vibration remains what it is but its received inverted)this falsehood in the body is a falsehood in the CONSCIOUSNESS. The falsity of the consciousness naturally has material consequences and thats what illness is! I immediately made an experiment on my body to see if this held, if it actually works that way. And I realized that its true! When you are open and in contact with the Divine, the Vibration gives you strength, energy; and if you are quiet enough, it fills you with great joyand all of this in the cells of the body. You fall back into the ordinary consciousness and straightaway, without anything changing, the SAME thing, the SAME vibration coming from the SAME source turns into a pain, a malaise, a feeling of uncertainty, instability and decrepitude. To be sure of this, I repeated the experiment three or four times, and it was absolutely automatic, like the operation of a chemical formula: same conditions, same results.
This interested me greatly.
0 1961-11-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am telling you this because, as soon as I got your letter, I replied with what Ill read to you now; then I was immediately faced with something I couldnt formulate, the kind of thing that gives you the feeling of the unknown (all I knew was my own experience). So I did the usual thingbecame blank, turned towards the Truth; and I questioned Sri Aurobindo and beyondasking, if there were something to be known, that it be told to me. Then I dropped it, I paid no more attention. And only as I was coming here today was I told I cant really use the word told, but anyway, what was communicated to me concerning your question was that the difference between the two processes [the Rishis and the present one] is purely subjective, depending upon the way the experience is registered. I dont know if I can make myself clear. There is something which is the experience and which will be the Realization; and what appears to be a different, if not opposite, process is simply a subjective mental notation of one SINGLE experience. Do you follow?
Thats what I was told.
--
After reading your letter, I had a very strong feeling that you put the problem like that because you were considering it from a mental plane, which is the only plane where it exists; if you go beyond, there are no more oppositions or problems. These things are subtle, you know, and as soon as you try to formulate them, they elude you formulation deforms.
What I mean is that its not necessarily in trance, in another world, that one gets the supramental consciousness.
0 1962-02-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that is exactly what I have seen in the light of the events described in Perseus. If you dont take the problem generally but specifically, down to the least detail. But it evaporates as soon as you formulate it. Only when you feel it concretely, when you get a grip on it, can you grasp both things.
(silence)
--
Because a day or two ago (I dont remember exactly, it was rather fleeting but very interesting), I went through such a moment while walking in my room (it lasted while I was out on the balcony, too): suddenly a kind of absolute certainty that I knew nothing (there was no I at all) that one knew nothing (one, there was no one, there was only); one couldnt know (I have to use words), one couldnt know, there was nothing to know, it was totally hopeless, it was completely IMPOSSIBLE to understand anything, even, even going beyond the mind, and no formulation was possible, there was no possibility of understanding. It was really so absolute that helping others, making the world progress, spiritual life, seeking the Divine, all of that seemed idle talk, empty words! There was nothing in it, it was nothing, and there was nothing to understand, it was impossible to understandit was impossible to BE. The feeling of a total incapacity. The experience was like a solventeverything seemed to dissolve: the world, the earth, people, life, intelligence, all of it, everything was dissolved. An absolutely negative state. And my solution was the same as always: when the experience was total and complete, when nothing was left, then: Who cares! (it could really be put in the most ordinary words), I adore You! And the I was something utterly insubstantial: there was no form, no being, no qualityonly I adore You. This I was I adore You, there was just enough I to adore You with.
From that moment on there was an inexpressible Sweetness, and within that Sweetness, a Voice so sweet and harmonious too! There was a sound but no wordsyet it held a perfectly clear meaning for me, like very precise words: You have just had your most creative moment!
0 1962-02-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In a letter dated August 16, 1935, Sri Aurobindo writes: "Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thinglike a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his own case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure."
Once again, it is interesting to note that animals or plants, even "things," seem to respond to the influence more readily than men.
0 1962-02-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres a traditional way of doing it, I know the formula.
How does it go?
0 1962-05-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What I say there is quite true. When I dont observe, formulate or explain, the state is absolutely tranquil, peaceful, contented, sufficient unto itself. And out of it, I can see that something will definitely emerge.
But as soon as I try to make it emerge, it all fades awaymeaning it isnt ripe yet.
0 1962-05-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But with a very simple movement, you can easily eliminate that from the consciousness; this movement can be formulated in an almost childlike way: You alone, Lord, You alone can act. You alone, Lord, You alone can act. And then that easing off (its relaxation, actually): you just let yourself melt, let yourself melt. This (the head) keeps still, it doesnt stir; you are wholly in the sensation, you let yourself melt. And with a sense of boundlessness.
And no more distinctions.
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then someone came. There are symbolic people in these dreams; they seem to be made up of various parts of the beings of those around me, people who have a particular relationship with me and bring a particular help to the Work. They are symbolic characters and always the same: one of them is tall and thin, some are small, there are young ones, old ones. I cant say its this person or that person, but rather that something IN this or that person is represented in these characters. And one of them is like a big brotherhe helps out in certain circumstances; if theres a boat, for instance, the big brother steers it. So he came up to me and said, Yes, I know the method, and began to try. Stop, for heavens sake! I said. Youll spoil everything; to make it work I have to say: I WANT TO GO THERE. When he began trying to bring me across with his own methods, the water grew muddy again and I started to sink! No no no! I protested. Dont do that, thats notit at all! THAT has to (although I wasnt formulating it to myself, what I meant was the sense of a certain higher Will) THAT has to say: I WANT TO GO THERE; then it works.
After that, the experience changed, other things happened. But what I have just related is certainly part and parcel of that experience the other day [the two rooms, one inside the other], because the two were coexistent.1
0 1962-06-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Petit, before you go to sleep, when you get into bed, simply think of me a little, with the will to receive what I send youjust for the space of a few seconds before you go to sleep, thats all. Dont try to concentrate and keep yourself awake, just formulate it, then go to sleep. Because I am really trying!
Of course, I know youre trying! Im not accusing anyone Im the one thats blocked.
0 1962-07-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ever since Einstein's Theory of Relativity, we have known that such an experience of time's relative nature is "physically" feasible. We need only consider the example of time aboard a spaceship approaching the speed of light: time "slows down," and the same event will take less time aboard the spaceship than on earth. In this instance, speed is what makes time slow down. In Mother's experience (which is every bit as "physical"), the "intensity of the Presence" seems to be the origin of time change. In other words, consciousness is what makes time slow down. Thus we are witnessing two experiences with identical physical results, but formulated in different languages. In one, we speak of "speed," in the other of "consciousness." But what is speed, after all?... (Moreover, the implications of this "language" difference are quite colossal, for it would indeed be simpler to press on a "consciousness button" than on an accelerator that had to take us to the speed of light.) Speed is a question of distance. Distance is a question of two legs or two wings: it implies a limited phenomenon or a limited being. When we say "at the speed of light," we imagine our two legs or our two wings moving very, very fast. And all the phenomena of the universe are seen and conceived of in relation to these two legs, these two wings or this rocketship they are creations of our present-day biped biology. But for a being (a supramental being, of the future biology) containing everything within himself, who is immediately everywhere, without distance, where is "speed"? ... The only "speed of light" is biped. Speed increases and time slows down, they say. The future biology says: consciousness intensifies and time slows down or ceases to existdistances are abolished, the body doesn't age. And the world's whole physical cage collapses. "Time is a rhythm of consciousness," says Mother. We change rhythm and the physical world changes. Might this be the whole problem of transformation?
Asked later about this unfinished sentence, Mother said, "I stopped because it was an impression and not a certainty. We'll talk about it again later." Was Mother hinting at a stage when she would live in both times simultaneously?...
0 1962-08-04, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And through certain things, I can perceive the very clear, precise and absolute Direction coming from the Supreme. And He is arranging all those thingsforms, various intellectual formsexactly as they should be. Because here (pointing to the crown of the head), and even from here (lower) down to here (the forehead), its all immobile. All these vibrations come, pass through, whirl around, they come from everywhere, but here (the head) nothing moves, theres no response. And yet I have seen that on the intellectual level there are a number of what Sri Aurobindo calls frames, certain principles of organization6 giving a precise orientation to the yogas action. One of them, the strongest, is my translation of The Synthesis of Yoga. I do a page almost every day and on that page I invariably find an idea or a sentence that EXACTLY expresses the field of experiences I was in that day and the night before; and some of the details. And interestingly enough, certain points in the pages you read me today were the EXACT frame of a series of experiences Ive been havingalmost word for word, with the same words.7 That sort of thing. Its like intellectual forms being assembled to give the field of experience precision, because theres nothing here (the forehead), its blankyet some form is necessary! Well, the forms Sri Aurobindo has given predominate, but what you write has its place, and a very precise and interesting place: the way of thinking. And I see that theres an immense field of intellectual thought, intellectual formulation, with varying degrees of intensity and precision, serving as a SIEVE for the Supremes Will to pass through. And the sievethis sort of immense universal sieveis what gives the precision.8 Its very interesting. That way, the mind remains perfectly stillit has nothing to do, everything is done for it! It is nothing but a mirrora living mirror where everything gets inscribed and which can reflect back its image without becoming active.
The nature of my nights is changing, the nature of my days is changing.
0 1962-08-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And its there all the time! I saw it the other day, I am seeing it nowit seems to be a permanent feature. And its the origin of all intellectual formulations (those closest to the Truth, of course, with no distortion). Very interesting.
***
0 1962-08-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Why do you want to formulate what youre going to tell him in advance? Rather than some superficial convention or an illusion you used to live with, keep reality in your consciousness.
Dont decide anything mentally.
0 1962-10-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is a fairly common experience. When it occurs, and for some time afterwards (not very long), everything seems to organize itself quite naturally around that Light. Then, little by little, it blends with all the rest. The intellectual awareness of it remains, formulated in one way or another that much is left but its like an empty husk. It no longer has the driving force that transforms all movements of the being in the image of that Light. And this is what Sri Aurobindo means: the world moves fast, the Lord moves ever forward, and all that remains is but a trail He leaves in His wake: it no longer has the same instantaneous and almighty force it had at the MOMENT He projected it into the world.
Its like a rain of truth falling, and anyone who can catch even a drop of it receives a revelation. But unless they themselves advance at a fantastic pace, the Lord and His rain of truth will already be far, far away, and theyll have to run very fast to catch up!
--
We always express things in terms of high and low. As Ive often said, other words are needed, another way of formulating things.
You say I didnt understand your question, but I understood it perfectly, I knew perfectly well what you wanted. But what can be said about That! It simply cannot be spoken of, and heres the proof: if we could talk about it, it would be here. And even then we probably wouldnt talk about it.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, what you find there are thought formations that are expressed in each persons brain in his own language. There are thought combinations for novels, plays, even philosophical systems. They are combinations of pure thought, not formulated in any language, but they are automatically expressed in each ones brain according to his particular language. It is the domain of pure thought. Thats where you work when you want to work for the whole earth; you dont send out thoughts formulated in words, you send out a pure thought, which then formulates itself in any language in any brain: in all those who are receptive. These formations are at anyones disposalnobody can say, Its MY idea, its MY book. Anyone capable of ascending to that zone can get hold of the formations and transcribe them materially. I once made an experiment of that kind; I wanted to see what would happen, so I made a formation myself and let it go off on its way. And in the same year, two quite different people, who didnt even know each other, one in England and the other in America, got hold of my formation; the one in England wrote a book, while the one in America created a play. And circumstances so arranged themselves that both the book and the play found their way to me.
Higher up, there is a fourth zone, a zone of colored lights, plays of colored lights. Thats the order: first form, then sound, then ideas, then colored lights. But that zone is already more distant from humanity; it is a zone of forces, a zone which appears as colored lights. No formscolored lights representing forces. And one can combine these forces so that they work in the terrestrial atmosphere and bring about certain events. Its a zone of action, independent of form, sound and thought; it is above all that. A zone of active power and might you can use for a particular purposeif you have the capacity to do so.
0 1962-10-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To have it (just to give you an idea) took me a year of exclusive concentration on finding that within myself that is, to enter into contact with the immanent God. I did nothing but that, thought of nothing but that, wanted nothing but that. There was even a rather funny instance, because I had resolved to do it (I had already been working for a very long time, of course; Madame Thon had told me about my mission on earth and all that, so you can imagine I am talking about the psychic being belonging to this present creation, this formationMo ther touches her body) anyway, it was New Years Eve and I decided: Within the coming year. I had a large, almost square studio, a bit bigger than this room, with a door leading onto a patio. I opened the little door and looked at the sky and there, just as I looked, was a shooting star. You know the tradition: if you formulate an aspiration just as you see a shooting star, before the star disappears, it will be realized within the year. And there, just as I opened the door, was a shooting star I was totally in my aspiration: Union with the inner Divine. And before the end of December of the following year, I had the experience.
But I was entirely concentrated on that. I was in Paris, and I did nothing else but that; when I walked down the street, I was thinking only of that. One day, as I was crossing the Boulevard Saint Michel, I was almost run over (Ive told you this), because I was thinking of nothing but thatconcentrating, concentrating like sitting in front of a closed door, and it was painful! (intense gesture to the chest) Physically painful, from the pressure. And then suddenly, for no apparent reason I was neither more concentrated nor anything elsepoof! It opened. And with that. It didnt just last for hours, it lasted for months, mon petit! It didnt leave me, that light, that dazzling light, that light and immensity. And the sense of THAT willing, THAT knowing, THAT ruling the whole life, THAT guiding everythingsince then, this sense has never left me for a minute. And always, whenever I had a decision to make, I would simply stop for a second and receive the indication from there.
0 1962-11-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its getting interesting. Its the formulationnot the theory, not the explanation (its more than intellectual), but the literary expression of what Ive been experiencing all these nights. Not only at night, in the daytime too.
Its as if I were touching the dregs of things.
--
You have formulated it very, very well. Do you unwittingly feel my experience and write it, or do I. I dont know, its all bound up together. But its most interesting.
Because my impression was that the higher I rise, the more I notice things below. I wasnt making a doctrine or theory of it, of course I got rid of that habit a long time ago. But I was looking at it, merely taking note of the fact, without telling myself it was for this or that reason (as you explain here in your book). I observed the phenomenon and was able to say: the more I feel this constant, luminous Presence, the more I see those things. So it has become very clear to me that it is impossible to manifest THAT integrally without everything below being offered up to the Light.
0 1962-11-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It took me a long while to formulate it. What I am telling you now came gradually, slowly, through a sort of silent revelation. At the moment, it was nothing but Sat, an immobile Existence.
I didnt seek this experience, nothing. I simply sat down. The previous time,3 there was that massive presence of Sri Aurobindo. I had been forewarned that this time it would be different (besides, Ive never had the same experience twice), but this was utterly unexpectedit didnt come as a response to a will to know or anything at all. I seemed to be simply faced with a fact: it was shown to me. I was witness to my own experience, thats all. And I was absolutely certain of its meaningas when you KNOW and theres no need to discuss or elaborate or explain: thats how it is. And when it was gone, it was gone suddenly, and nothing remained but a blissful tranquillity, a sort of absolute certainty that things ARE like that. Although the appearances may seem altogether different, things ARE like that.
--
Is it silver, is it? Its indefinable. Thats just what makes that grass so exquisite. Well, the tulle was that color. Afterwards, a long time after, when I began to observe and to not actually think, but to try to formulate it, I noticed the color was identical. Now I know why I named it Humility! I said to myself. Its like being in a domain where things are known quite naturally, you understand theres no seeking.
How lovely it was! The sense of delicate beauty in things.
0 1962-12-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was in both French and English. He called it Fundamental Axioms of Cosmic Philosophy. It was the work of a certain French metaphysician who was well known around the turn of the centuryhis name began with a B. He met Theon in Egypt when Theon was with Blavatski; they started a magazine with an ancient Egyptian name (I cant recall what it was), and then he told Theon (Theon must have already known French) to publish a Cosmic Review and the Cosmic Books. And this B. is the one who formulated all this gobbledygook.
There used to be the name of the printer and the year it was printed, but its not there any more.
--
Yes, Edouard Schur. He was a contemporary of Edouard Schur, a bit older (I met Schur, by the waya rather hollow individual). His name began with a B and hes the one who formulated these Axioms.
You once mentioned someone called Barley.
0 1962-12-19, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Naturally, the whole crowd and the people around me kept asking, Now that its all set up, when will there be balcony darshans again? (Because when I came back inside I said, So! Youve built a balcony, have you?). When are we going to have them again? So the intermediary said, I dont know, its not up to me. Consternation! Then I kept very quiet for a little while, listening on high, and from high, high up there came, very slowly (it comes practically drop by drop because you have to do it VERY quietlyit comes drop by drop), what That said I had to reply: Nothing definite. I was told, It depends. It all depends I clearly see that it all depends on the special work being done on my body and on the results of that work. And it isnt formulated: I am not told, I am not told whats going to happen; I am only told, Heres how it might be. (Mother laughs) All right. Thats fine, I said.
But it was funny; it was really an experience, because had you asked me my impression beforeh and (my, I mean what usually talks), my impression was that I just had to decide to go to the balcony and it would happen (the only impossibility I saw was finding time for it). But thats not how it is, thats not it AT ALL. Its something else, utterly new, something I dont know; I have absolutely no reference points, and decisions are made on the highest levelonly with regard to the body. I mean for the work in general, for the terrestrial vision and all that, theres no difference: its seen, its known. But for this special thing in the body, I am not consulted.
--
And I see clearly that trying to formulate it would spoil everything. You really cant formulate a curve until you come to the end of itotherwise, you spoil its course.
But its very interesting.
0 1963-07-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a kind of certitude (not quite formulated in words: a certitude in sensation, in feeling) that once this work is completed, the result will be almost like a thunderbolt. Because the Powers action through the mind gets diluted, qualified, adapted, altered, and so on, and how much reaches down here? (gesture as of water disappearing into sand) While the day it acts through this matter (Mother touches her body), obviously it will be overwhelming. There isnt a shadow of doubt. But when will that be? After how long? I cant say. When you see the thing in detail, you know, it appears interminable.
I console myself with the thought that the ways of the Lord are unknown to us, and that the day it pleases Him to declare, Here, now its all changed, (Mother laughs) all well have to do is contemplate!
0 1963-08-21, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday, it was like that almost the whole day long. But all at once something came (I dont know from where or how neither from above nor from within nor from I dont know): there is only ONE Raison dtre, only ONE Reality, only ONE Life, and there is nothing other than THAT. It was THAT (not in the least mentally, there was no intellectual formulation, nothing), it was Something that was Light (far more than Light), Power (far more than power), Omnipotence (far more than Omnipotence), and also an intensity of sweetness, of warmth, of plenitudeall that togetheralong with that Something, which naturally words cannot describe. And That came all at once, like that, when there was such a frightful state of anguish, because it was nothinga nothing you couldnt get out of. There was no way of getting out of that nothing, because it was nothing.
You know, all those who seek Nirvana, all their disgust of life, all that is almost enjoyable in comparison! Thats not it. Thats not it, it was a thousand times, a million times worse. It was nothing, and because it was nothing it was impossible to get out of itthere was no no solution.
0 1963-09-04, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But things are rather complex. For the body in its ordinary consciousness, its absolutely normal state is when it doesnt feel itself living. When the body doesnt feel itself living, that means its functioning normally; as soon as it feels itself living in some part of itself, it means that something isnt quite normal, and instinctively (I dont mean the vital or mental consciousness), but its primal consciousness is alarmed, because its not normal (not what it calls normal); and then that sort of alarm (an alarm thats not formulated in thoughts) brings it into contact with a whole world of adverse and defeatist suggestionsoh, there is an INTENSE atmosphere of pessimistic, defeatist, adverse suggestions in which human lives are bathed, as it were. Its even very strong here, very strong I mean in the Ashramvery strong. People who are very sensitive and whose consciousness isnt firmly rooted in faith are very (what shall I say?) very deeply not deeply but intimately attacked by that atmosphere.
And it makes bodies very ill-at-ease.
0 1963-09-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But then, once you are here on this earth and you have to go to the end, even if the end is nothingness, you go to the end and its just as well to do so as best you can, that is to say, to your fullest satisfaction. I happened to have some philosophical curiosity and to study all kinds of problems, and I came upon Sri Aurobindos teaching, and what he taught (I would say revealed, but not to a materialist) is by far, among the systems men have formulated, the most satisfying FOR ME, the most complete, and what answers the most satisfactorily all the questions that can be asked; it is the one that helps me the most in life to have the feeling that life is worth living. Consequently, I try to conform entirely to his teaching and to live it integrally in order to live as best I can for me. I dont mind at all if others dont believe in itwhether they believe in it or not is all the same to me; I dont need the support of others conviction, its enough if I am myself satisfied.
Well, theres no reply to that.
0 1963-09-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When I have an experience, I dont even try to formulate it I never try: I live it as intensely as I can and keep it alive as long as I can. Then suddenly theres a kind of rivulet: a rivulet of words that come, and they come all together, then they arrange themselves I have nothing to do with it all!
I dont know whether its listening or seeing: its something in between. For a very long time, all my contacts with the invisible were visual contacts, but now there is sound too. So this is how it works: I simply have to be attentive, that is to say, not actively busy with something else. If I stay still, it comes: its exactly like a rivulet, a tiny rivulet flowing out of a mountain; its very clear and pure like pure water, very transparent, and very white and luminous at the same time. It comes (gesture as of pearls of water dropping) and it arranges itself here, just above the head, in the form of words. It arranges itself, and someone, I dont know who (probably Sri Aurobindo! because its someone with a poetic power), looks after the sound and the placement of the words, and puts them in the proper order. Finally, after a little while, its complete. And then I write it downits very amusing.
0 1963-12-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And all the experiences come in that way (Mother makes a round, global gesture). It cant be expressed with words; there are a hundred things that come together like that, and which (gesture of round movements within that round totality), and then there is the sense of a light (which might be like a will, but not a will formulated with words), a light that moves within it all and arranges it all, then produces a resultwhich isnt one small thing, one point or one thing: its a mass of things; and its always moving, always in motion, always in a kind of progression towards a more perfect reorganization. And the sense of individual action, of individual participation, of individual will, seems so IDIOTIC that its absolutely impossible to have it. Even if one tried, one couldnt. Once one LIVES that the whole sense of individual importance in all that seems so STUPID, you know, that its absolutely impossible to think that way or feel that way.
I would like to be able to pass this experience on to others, because, well, its definitive: once you LIVE that for several hours, its over, you can no longer entertain any illusion,3 its not possibleits impossible, its so STUPID, you know! Above all, so silly, so flatits impossible (Mother makes the same gesture of a round, moving totality). But then you cannot say, I said this, the other answered that! How can we express ourselves? Our language is still truly inadequate. Its not that way its (same round gesture) and there isnt even either sense or direction: its not that this goes that way and that goes this way (gesture from one person to another, or from inside to outside), or that it goes this way and comes back that way (gesture from low to high and high to low), thats not it; its a whole a whole that moves, moves always forward, and with internal vibrations, internal movements. So according to the given point of concentration, this or that action is done.
0 1964-01-15, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
More and more, there is something that presses to make itself known and is formulated like this: what wants to come for next February1 is the Truth-Light (Mother repeats like an incantation) the Truth-Light, the Truth-Force, the Truth-Light, the Truth-Force to prepare the way for the manifestation of supreme Love.
But that is for later on.
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But when you have the experience perfectly sincerely, that is, when you dont kid yourself, its necessarily one single point, ONE WAY of putting it, thats all. And it can only be that. There is, besides, the very obvious observation that when you habitually use a certain language, the experience expresses itself in that language: for me, it always comes either in English or in French; it doesnt come in Chinese or Japanese! The words are necessarily English or French, with sometimes a Sanskrit word, but thats because physically I learned Sanskrit. Otherwise, I heard (not physically) Sanskrit uttered by another being, but it doesnt crystallize, it remains hazy, and when I return to a completely material consciousness, I remember a certain vague sound, but not a precise word. Therefore, the minute it is formulated, its ALWAYS an individual angle.
It takes a sort of VERY AUSTERE sincerity. You are carried away by enthusiasm because the experience brings an extraordinary power, the Power is there its there before the words, it diminishes with the words the Power is there, and with that Power you feel very universal, you feel, Its a universal Revelation. True, it is a universal revelation, but once you say it with words, its no longer universal: its only applicable to those brains built to understand that particular way of saying it. The Force is behind, but one has to go beyond the words.
0 1964-03-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To translate I go to the place where things are crystallized and formulated. Nowadays my translations are not exactly an amalgamation, but they are under the influence of both languages: my English is a little French and my French is a little Englishits a mixture of the two. And I see that from the standpoint of expression, its rather beneficial, for a certain subtlety comes from it.
I dont translate at all, I never try to translate: I simply go back to the place where it came from, and instead of receiving this way (gesture above the head, like scales tipping to the right for French) I receive that way (the scales tip to the left for English), and I see that it doesnt make much difference: the origin is a sort of amalgamation of the two languages. Perhaps it could give birth to a somewhat more supple form in both languages: a little more precise in English, a little more supple in French.
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had precisely that great difficulty (it was on February 29): all the time while I was living in that consciousness of the DIRECT manifestation of the Truth, I tried to formulate what I was feeling, what I was seeingit was impossible. There were no words. And immediately, merely formulating things made me instantly fall back into the other consciousness.
On that occasion, the memory of this aphorism on the sun and the earth came back to me. Even to say a change of consciousness a change of consciousness is still a movement.
0 1964-04-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday, the 24th, there was a meditation.2 It was intense and formulated itself thus:
Suffocated by the shallowness of the human
0 1964-09-23, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The problem is made worse by the fact that the goodwill of the cells (a necessarily ignorant goodwill) doesnt know if one attitude is better than the other, if it should choose between the two, if both should be accepted they dont know! And as it isnt mentalized or formulated or with words, its very difficult. Oh, as soon as the words are there all that has been said comes back, and its over. Its not that, its not that anymore. Even if strong sensations or a vital force come up, its not a problem anymore. The problem is only HERE, in this (Mother strikes her body).
Nights, for instance, are a long awareness, a great action, a discovery of all kinds of things, a taking stock of the situation as it is but there arent any problems! But the minute the body (I cant say wakes up because it isnt asleep: its only in a state of rest sufficiently complete for its personal difficulties not to interfere), but from time to time, what well call waking up takes place, that is to say, the purely physical consciousness comes back and the whole problem comes back instantly. Instantly the problem is there. And without your remembering it: the problem doesnt come back because you remember it, its that the problem is there, in the very cells.
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then (Mother points to her own body), this seems to be the lesson for these aggregates (bodies, you know, seem to me to be simply aggregates). And as long as there is, behind, a will to keep this together for some reason or other, it stays together, but These last few days (yesterday or the day before), there was this: a sort of completely decentralized consciousness (I am always referring to the physical consciousness, of course, not at all to the higher consciousness), a decentralized consciousness that happened to be here, there, there, in this body, that body (in what people call this person and that person, but that notion doesnt quite exist anymore), and then there was a kind of intervention of a universal consciousness in the cells, as though it were asking these cells what their reason was for wanting to retain this combination (if we may say so) or this aggregate while in fact making them understand or feel the difficulties that come, for example, from the number of years, wear and tear, external difficultiesfrom all the deterioration caused by friction, wear and tear. But they seemed to be perfectly indifferent to that! The response of the cells was interesting enough, in the sense that they seemed to attach importance ONLY TO THE CAPACITY TO REMAIN IN CONSCIOUS CONTACT WITH THE HIGHER FORCE. It was like an aspiration (not formulated in words, naturally), and like a what in English they call yearning, a longing for that Contact with the divine Force, the Force of Harmony, the Force of Truth and the Force of Love, and [the cells response was] that because of that, they valued the present combination.
It was an altogether different point of view.
--
I quite understand: some people dont like the idea of a Divine because it immediately gets mixed up with all the European or Western conceptions (which are dreadful), and so it makes their lives a little bit more complicated but we dont need that! The something we need, the Perfection we need, the Light we need, the Love we need, the Truth we need, the supreme Perfection we need and thats all. The formulas the fewer the formulas, the better. A need, a need, a need that THE Thing alone can satisfy, nothing else, no half measure. That alone. And then, move on! Move on! Your path will be your path, it doesnt matter; any path, any path whatever, even the follies of todays American youth can be a path, it doesnt matter.
As Sri Aurobindo said, if you cant have Gods love (I am translating), well then, find a way to fight with God and have a wrestlers relationship with Him.1
0 1964-10-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
They make a system, a formula out of everything, they have all their ideas
Yes, yes.
0 1964-10-24a, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Basically, thats always what men ask of religions; the God of religion is a god who must do them favors: I believe in You, therefore You must do this for me (it isnt formulated so bluntly, but it is like that), It isnt the aspiration to be guided on the path in order to do exactly what should be done for the Transformation to take place. And thats what I was clearly told: It MUST NOT be miraculous powers. The power of the Help is there, fully, of course, but the miraculous power that does things without their being the result of a progress achieved, that must not be.
(Mother goes on copying her note)
--
Oh, but there has been a dreadful revolt in the Ashrams atmosphere! Not in their conscious mind, but in the subconscienta terrible revolt. In order to write down my declaration, in order to formulate it, I had to overcome a whole mass of things, it was extraordinary! There have even been individual reactions: Then I am going away. I said, Very well, here is the exact proof.
It was interesting.
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its odd; from the point of view of Truth, this is the problem thats being worked out. And when the concentration becomes very acute and very intense, something seems to burst inside the consciousness, and then spreadsspreads outin the intensity of a Love. And then it is like an answer, not to a question because it isnt formulated, but to the will to be.
(long silence)
0 1964-11-12, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As a matter of fact, it was after I spoke to him (I mentioned it to him as a sort of dizzy spell) that I was able to perceive precisely those routes. I wondered if it wasnt the projection on a magnifying screen of phenomena taking place between different brain cells? Because those sorts of dizzy spells always follow (today there hasnt been anything at all), they always follow a moment or a day of intense aspiration for the transformation of the brain. It may be that. You know, all those brain cells in there are hitched together, and if those hitchings are disturbed, generally people become deranged; and it gave me the impression of a magnifying projection enabling me to follow the connections established between certain brain cells, so that the functioning may not be the automatic, semiconscious functioning of the old state anymore and the brain may truly become the instrument of the higher Force. Because the formula of my aspiration is always, Lord, take possession of this brain, and its always after this intense aspiration that those kinds of phenomena occur. So it is to prepare the brain to be the direct expression of the higher Force.
This is what I have learned these last few days.
0 1964-11-21, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mon petit, thats because what you call aspiration is a movement of your psychic consciousness, mentally formulated and supported by the vital but it ISNT YOUR BODY. And its only if you are very attentive to the vibration of the cells, if you are accustomed to observing them and feeling them that you can see. Well, I dont know, but I cant complain about my bodys cells. You know, it isnt a perception, it isnt a sensation, it is a LIVED FAITH in the existence of the Supreme aloneyou know, a faith that its the only Reality and the only Existence. Just that, and everything seems to swell up, as if all these cells were swelling up with such joy! Only, it doesnt take the form of a feeling, not even of a sensation, even less of a thought; so if you arent very attentive, you dont notice it. But, for instance, when I repeat the mantra, its repeated by that famous physical mind, which is so stupid (the mantra is the only thing that can keep a rein on it), and now it has become so identified that the mantra is its whole life, it is like a pulsation of its being; but then when I come to the invocation (there is a series of invocations: each one has its own effect on the body), when I come to Manifest Your Love, I see a sort of twinkling of a golden light, which represents an intense joy in all the cells.
It isnt easy to observe, you must be very, very, very detached from the movement of thought, otherwise you dont notice it. But if you see it, you see that even those cells are there waiting for the Thing.
0 1964-11-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Afterwards, for the rest of the day, it was as if the body were asking, or were encouraged to ask (usually, it doesnt ask, it doesnt even ask for health or anything), and for the first time yesterday in the afternoon, it seemed to be saying, with a sort of aspiration almost not formulated in words, but with the feeling and impression: Am I not going to be ready for You to live in these cells? For these cells to be You? Words spoil it because they give a somewhat brutal and hard precision, but it was as if the cells were saying, Never will we have that marvelous Peace. It was a peace, but a peace full of creative power, and so rich, containing an infinite power, rich with joy; and it gave the body the courage to say, We will be THAT only if You are here, and You alone.
Sri Aurobindo wrote, Every event (like every moment of life) will be a marvel when it is the marvelous Whole that lives that lives in the body. This was really like the expression of what the body felt. And it is its ONLY raison dtrethere is no other, all the rest It went through every disgust, every disdain, every indifference, to the point where it asked, But how can we live? What for? Why, why do we exist, why were we created? Why? All that is nothing! And strangely, there was a sort of memory of the eons of time during which people lived in this ignorance of the why and in a sort of bewilderment. That so much time could have been spent to find the only thing the only thing that exists! And why all that, why? All that, centuries of absurd sensations. It was curious: like a slow memory of a futile and useless lifeabsurd and so painful! Why all that in order to find THAT?
0 1965-03-06, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother looks for a note) We have faith in Sri Aurobindo, he represents for us something that we formulate for ourselves with the words we find the most adequate to express our experience. For us those words are obviously the best to formulate our experience. But if in our enthusiasm we were convinced that they are the only ones suitable to express correctly what Sri Aurobindo is and the experience he gave us, we would become dogmatic and would be on the verge of founding a religion.
Oh, yes, indeed!
0 1965-05-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So then, the surgeon gentleman will tell you, Well operate, (laughing) and the gentleman who isnt a surgeon will want to give injections. No, to make it easier for you to read or work, you can get the right lenses; and then my own remedy is to sit very stillvery stillwith your elbows on a table and your eyes in your palms and then if you can have in your heart an aspiration and tell the Lord, Lord, take possession of Your domain, enter Your kingdom here, do a little cleaning, like that even formulating the thing in a very childlike manner (the Lord isnt a pontiff, he doesnt like ceremonies: he likes sincerity), here, like this (gesture to the heart), something that says, Oh oh, that really wants thats all. Tell him like that, Come here, come, enter my eyes, come, do come, look through these eyes. Its much stronger than all the rest.
Only, its very good to get lenses to make your work easier in the meantime. But, for that, you dont need a pontiff; you need a man with goodwill who knows how to choose lenses.
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw the other dayit was very interesting, the very day he was on his way here (I wasnt thinking of him I never think of people), suddenly I saw all that the knowledge of the pundits and those who profess to follow a spiritual life (the whole class of sannyasins, pundits, purohits,1 etc.), all that that represents. (I am not referring to religions in other countries: its specific to India.) And they are people who have a knowledge, a mental knowledge, of course, but very precise and very exact, of the movements in relation to the Overmind: all the gods and godheads and their ways of being and the relationships between men and gods; and they have tried to organize and formulate the relationships men have with gods so that, as was said in the past, men would not be the cattle of the godsthey have tried to change the human position with regard to deities. Its interesting, its a whole interesting field which to me does not represent the true thing. They on their part think that is spiritual lifeits not spiritual life, but it is a higher mental region which borders on the Overmind, which even enters into the Overmind, and which is completely organized; its a sort of legislation of the relationships between men and gods. From that point of view, its interesting.
I saw that very clearly: the place it has in the universal organization. And if its in its place, then its quite all rightwhen a thing is in its place it becomes very good.
0 1965-07-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If I had some peace I would write it down (because it comes all formulated) and it could be interesting. It must belong to the realm of revelation. Its like a luminous strip passing by, but it is all organized. But one needs peace (I scribbled the last note here while they were preparing my breakfast, and after that ). But anyway, its not of transcendent interest; its only because its very clear, very precise, and it obviously doesnt have the character of ordinary human thought: its ready-made, it comes ready-made.
In that state, for instance, all the cells, the whole body keeps stillyou no longer have a body, you no longer have cells, you no longer have all those disorders, all that friction: all that goes away. It disappears and another consciousness dominates. You understand why someone who could remain in it would be able to live indefinitely. But its probably conditioned, in the sense that the others must have their field of activity too, otherwise the progress wouldnt be general. But anyway, its nothing really transcendent, its just interesting.
0 1965-07-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We cannot help thinking of Sri Aurobindo's "mathematical formula": "Now," he wrote on 16 August 1935, "I have got the hang of the whole hanged thinglike a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure." Mother uses almost the same words.
See in particular Conversations with Pavitra of 20 November 1926. Pavitra complained that "this mechanical part of the mind is carrying me along." And Sri Aurobindo replied, "It is simply an outer functioning and it will be rejected in the course of the procedure." That was in 1926. Sri Aurobindo changed his mind later, perhaps in fact when he discovered his "mathematical formula."
***
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Looking at it from that angle, we could say that the acceptance of limits is what permitted the manifestation. The possibility of the manifestation came with the acceptance of the sense of limit. Its impossible to express. As soon as you start speaking, you always get a sense of something that goes like this (same gesture of reversal), a sort of tipping over, and then its finished, the essence is gone. Then metaphysical sense comes along and says, We might put it this way, we might put it that way. To make sentences: each point contains the Consciousness of the Infinite and of Eternity (these are words, nothing but words). But the possibility of the experience is there. Its a sort of stepping back outside space. We could say for fun that even the stone, evenoh, certainly water, certainly firehas the power of Consciousness: the original (all the words that come are idiotic!), essential, primordial (all this is meaningless), eternal, infinite Consciousness. Its meaningless, to me its like dust thrown on a pane of glass to prevent it from being transparent! Anyway, conclusion: after having lived that experience (I had it repeatedly over the last few days, it remained there sovereignly despite everythingwork, activitiesand it ruled over everything), all attachment to any formula whatever, even those that have stirred peoples for ages, seems childishness to me. And then it becomes just a choice: you choose things to be like this or like that or like this; you say this or that or thisenjoy yourselves, my children if you find it enjoyable.
But it is certain (this is an observation for common use), it is certain that the human mind, in order to have an impulse to act, needs to build a dwelling for itselfa more or less vast one, more or less complete, more or less supple, but it needs a dwelling. (Laughing) But thats not it! That warps everything!
0 1966-04-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, with a certainty that as soon as you come back, as soon as you just try to speak one word (or even if you dont speak), as soon as you try to formulate in one way or another: finished.
Yet there OBSTINATELY remains a certitude that the creation is NOT a transitory way to recapture the true Consciousness: its something that has its own reality and that will have its own existence IN THE TRUTH.
0 1966-06-11, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And at the same time I also had the experience (an experience Ive had very, very often) that when you live in the Light, there is perfect comprehension, and it isnt something reflected or seen, thats not it, it is something that IS, that exists: a living Light. And as soon as you want to express it, it gets into the balloon, and then it becomes conventional (even without uttering words: just saying it to yourself). When you are like this (immobile gesture turned Upward), then its The Thing. And as soon as you try to formulate it to yourself, and, even more so, to write it, it seems to get into the balloon and it becomes conventional. To such a point that these days its very difficult for me, when I am active, to write anything, I find it so flat and dry and distorted.
But at night (laughing) as if by reaction, I dictate all kinds of things! But I dont remember what I write, its absolutely elsewhere.
0 1966-06-15, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With me, its the other way around; its here [materially] that it has become numbnot numb, not at all a feeling of sleeping or its being in what people call a dream, but its not a dream. Its an inner perception, something, but without thought, like that, in the realm of of what? Of perception, yes, of consciousness, but a consciousness thats not intellectually formulated. And theres a sort of rhythm like this (Mother gestures to show the very supple and harmonious motion of a pendulum), materially. What was forever working and harping on things (its unbearable), now, oh, its very, very pleasant, very pleasant. But up there (gesture above the head), That is there; its becoming awesome, you know, from the standpoint of action, of perception.
Its not exactly a numbness, but
0 1966-08-17, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"Truth cannot be formulated in words, but it can be lived, provided one is pure and plastic enough."
During the previous conversation, Satprem read out to Mother a few pages from The Sannyasin.
0 1966-10-05, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I cant say that I worry (I never do), but I was wondering sometimes I wonder, Is it going to go on, or I am not quite sure of whats going to happen, because I never try to know nor do I desire to know, but I dont feel I am told. (I think this is another mental stupidity and when nothing is formulated, it means things are all right and as they should be.) But, of course, there is a childishness that would like to be told, Do this this way and that that way, and this But it doesnt work! Its not like that!
I dont receive any command: when I have something to say, I receive the exact word or sentence, in an absolute way; but for action, I dont receive any command, because I dont think I have any hesitation, I never wonder, Should I do this or should I do that? Never. My whole effort is to live from minute to minute. I mean, to do every minute exactly what should be done, without making plans, without thinking, without because it all becomes mental; as soon as you start thinking something out, thats no longer it. But quite instinctively and spontaneously, I do what needs to be done: this, that, this. When something needs a response, it comes. As for money, its the same thing; the only thing I am led to do is to say, So-and-so has asked for so much, such-and-such Service needs so much, like that (not a long time in advance, but when it becomes imperative). And thats all. Its like that. So I dont know what will happen tomorrow; I dont at all seek to know whats going to happen. But on that day, I seemed to be asking, Well, give me proof that You are interested.Poff! it came just at the right time. So I laughed, I said to myself, What a baby I must still be!
0 1966-11-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I never think of anythingoh, thats a blessing, you know, mon petit! I never think of anything without good reason! I am like this (gesture of immobile contemplation, turned upward). The only thing thats formulated with words is: Lord, You what You will, what You know, what You do, there is only You. You. Like that (same gesture of immobility). And all of a sudden, without thinking about it, without looking for it, plop! a drop of lightah!
Its convenient.
0 1966-12-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But that inspiration comes from the highest region, the region beyond all individualizations. Thats why its something we find difficult to formulate and explain. Its complete, perfect in itself, but it doesnt have anything of the character of our mental formulation, not at all; it doesnt even have the character of a formulated idea. And its absolutely imperative, absolutely. But then, as soon as it touches the mental zone, it seems to attract words. My impression is that the more silent I am, the more precise it is; in other words, the more inactive the mind is, the more precise the expression. So thats what it is, its that force coming down and attracting words. Its not even ideas (it doesnt come through the region of ideas): its an experience, its something living which comes and which, to take expression, catches hold of words. What came on Sunday was like that: I was asked that question on the Grace, then I was seized by a concentrated, extremely strong silence for maybe a minute (not even that long), and it came. Then I spoke. I heard myself speaking. But then it clearly came through Sri Aurobindo.
If it were already written, fully ready somewhere, you couldnt change anything in it; when it was there you would feel its perfect in itself and you cant change anything in it.
--
When the words come quite spontaneously, its good, but Its an odd phenomenon: sometimes the pure experience alone is therewhat is it? You cant formulate it; in order to formulate it, you are immediately forced to use words, and words diminish. But I remember, at the time of the experience, I spoke, hardly hearing what I said, but I had the experience. (The experience was wonderfully clear, powerful, immenseuniversal, you know.) Then I listened to myself speaking, and I saw that first shrinkage. Then I began sensing the other mind making a tremendous effort to try and understand (!), and so I let the expression shrink a little more: I was obliged to let it shrink so as to make myself understood. And I followed all those phases of successive shrinkages. But at the time, the speech was very powerful: it was exactly Sri Aurobindos style and way of speaking, and very powerful. Now its only a vague impression, like a memory. But one always hasalways, in every case, even in the best conditions, even in a case like this one in which the formulation is given by Sri Aurobindo the sense of a shrinkage. A shrinkage in the sense that much escapes; its slightly hardened, weakened, diminished, and there are also certain subtleties that escape they escape, they evaporate, they are too subtle to be concretized in words. And if one had a will for a perfect expression, it would certainly be very disappointing. I quite understand; if you want your book to reach the peak of its perfection, its impossible. Its impossible to be realized, one feels the difference with whats up above and thats very disappointing.
I am constantly disappointed.
0 1966-12-17, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The disciple's question was formulated thus: "When I heard in Gingy that B. had drowned in a pond, I was incapable of believing or being shocked by the news. The only question I asked in myself was, 'How could this have happened! Mother knew we were in Gingy, therefore Her protection was with each of us. So how could this have happened?'"
***
0 1966-12-24, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Truth cannot be formulated, it cannot be defined, but it can be LIVED.
And one who has completely dedicated himself to the Truth, who wants to live the Truth and serve the Truth, will know EVERY MINUTE what he has to do: it will be a sort of intuition or revelation (more often than not wordless, but sometimes also expressed in words), which will every minute let him know the truth of that minute. And thats what is so interesting. They want to know the Truth, but as something well defined, well sorted out, well established; and then you are nice and quiet, you no longer need to seek! You adopt it and say, This is the Truth, and then its rigidly set thats what all religions did, they set up their truth as a dogma. But thats not the Truth anymore.
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats specific to each language (apart from a few differences in words) is the order in which ideas are presented: the construction of sentences. The Japanese (and especially the Chinese) have solved the problem by using only the sign of the idea. Now, under the influence from outside, they have added phonetic signs to build a sentence; but even now the order in the construction of the ideas is different. Its different in Japan and different in China. And unless you FEEL this, you can never know a foreign language really well. So we speak according to our very old habit (and basically its more convenient for us simply because it comes automatically). But when I receive, for instance, its not even a thought: its Sri Aurobindos formulated consciousness; then, there is a sort of progressive approximation of the expression, and sometimes it comes very clearly; but very often its a spontaneous mixture of French and English forms and I feel it is something else trying to be expressed. At times (it follows the notation), it makes me correct something; at other times it comes perfectly wellit depends. Oh, it depends on the limpidity. If you are very tranquil, it comes very well. And there, too, I see its not really French and not really English. Its not so much the words (words are nothing) as the ORDER in which things come up. And when afterwards I look at it objectively, I see its in part the order in which they come in French, and in part the order in which they come in English. And the result is a mixture, which is neither one language nor the other, and endeavours to express what might be called a new way of consciousness.
It leads me to think that something will be worked out that way, and that any too strict, too narrow attachment to the old rules is a hindrance to the evolution of expression. From that point of view, French is a long way behind EnglishEnglish is much more supple. But the languages in countries like China and Japan that use ideograms seem to be infinitely more supple than our own.
--
These new thoughts and new experiences, this new logic and new mathematics, are now taught in higher studies, but all the primary and secondary studies have remained in the old formula, so I have been very seriously thinking of opening primary and secondary schools in Auroville, based on the new systemas a trial.
But how is it done? Its a problem that interests me very much: how do you catch this new expression?
--
So what should be done there (and what I am trying to do) is the same work of receptive silence and to let inspiration, the inspirational consciousness, gather the necessary elements. For that we must be very tranquil. We must be very supple, in the sense of surrendered; I mean, allow as little habitual activity as possible to mix inbe almost like an automaton. But with the full perception of the consciousness trying to be expressed, so that nothing gets mixed in with it. Thats the most important thing: to receive this consciousness and hold it like really like something sacred, without anything getting mixed in with it, like that. So then, there is a problem of attraction, we could say, and of concretization in the formula.4 I always tell myself that if I knew many languages, it would make use of all that; unfortunately I know only two (I know only two thoroughly) and I have only very superficial and minimal glimpses of two or three others thats not enough. Only, I have been in contact with very different methods: the method of the Far East and the Sanskrit method, and of course the methods of the West. It does give a sort of base, but its not sufficient I am at the opposite extreme from erudition. I have always felt that erudition shrivels up thoughtit parches the brain. (But I have great respect for scholars, oh! indeed, and I seek their advice, but for myself it wont do!)
Once, very long ago, when Sri Aurobindo was telling me about himself, that is, of his childhood, his education, I put the question to him, I asked him, Why am I, as an individual being, so mediocre? I can do anything; all that I have tried to do I have done, but never in a superior way: always like this (gesture to an average level). Then he answered me (at the time I took it as a kindness or commiseration), Thats because it gives great supplenessa great suppleness and a vast scope; because those who have perfection are concentrated and specialized. As I said, I took it simply like a caress to comfort a child. But now I realize that the most important thing is not to have any fixity: nothing should be set, definitive, like the sense of a perfection in the realization that puts a total stop to the forward march. The sense of incapacity (with the meaning I said of mediocrity, of something by no means exceptional) leaves you in a sort of expectation (gesture of aspiration upward) of something better. And then, the most important thing is supplenesssuppleness, suppleness. Suppleness and breadth: reject nothing as useless or bad or inferiornothing; set nothing up as really superior and beautifulnothing. Remain ever open, ever open.
0 1967-04-05, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It would be interesting to formulate or work out a new method of teaching for the children, taking them very young. Very young, its easy. We need people (oh, we would need remarkable teachers) who have, first of all, sufficient documentation on what is known to be able to answer any question; and at the same time, at least the knowledge, if not the experience (the experience would be better) of the true intuitive intellectual attitude, and (naturally, the capacity would be still preferable) but in any case the knowledge that the true way to know is mental silence: an attentive silence turned towards the truer Consciousness, and the capacity to receive what comes from there. The best would be to have that capacity; in any case, it should be explained that its the true thing, a kind of demonstration, and that it works not only with regard to what must be learned, the whole field of knowledge, but also with regard to the whole field of what must be done: the capacity to receive the exact indication of HOW to do it, and as one progresses, it turns into a very clear perception of what must be done, and the precise indication of WHEN it must be done. At the very least, as soon as the children have the capacity to reflect (it begins at seven, but around fourteen or fifteen its very clear), they should be given some first hints at the age of seven, and a complete explanation at fourteen, of how to do it and that its the sole means of being in contact with the deeper truth of things; that all the rest is a more or less clumsy mental approximation of something you can know directly.
The conclusion is that the teachers themselves should have at least a sincere beginning of discipline and experience: it is not a question of piling up books and of repeating them like that. Thats not the way to be a teacher the whole earth is like that, let it be like that outside if it makes them happy! As for us, we arent propagandists, we simply want to show what can be done and try to prove that it MUST be done.
0 1967-07-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You remember, in America a society or university or whatever held a kind of contest to prove life after death,1 and they gave two or three questions to be resolved. And I was asked, Why dont you answer? I said, the questions are not properly formulated, theyre put by ignorant people, so how can one answer? (I told you that long ago, I think.) Well, its the same thing here. What they ask is ignorant, it isnt properly formulated; its formulated by people who dont understand anything, so how can one answer them!
***
0 1967-07-29, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be clear, I should tell the whole thing. Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak to someone about this constant presence of Sri Aurobindo, here, who sees, says, does, all the time. Then, after I had spoken, I wondered, How is it that this brain Because, I think I told you, when Sri Aurobindo left his body, several times, several days in a row, I stood near his bed for one or two hours, and I feltMATERIALLY feltwhat came out of his body enter mine. To such a point that I remember having said, Well, if anyone denies afterlife, I have proof it exists. So I thought, Why does this brain (Mothers) go on working according to its usual routine now that the consciousness of the Presence is constant? Then this morning I had this experience, and while having the experience, I felt, This is how Sri Aurobindo used to see! (Laughing) That must be it! And for some time I have noticed that as soon as, for this body or for other bodies, for events, for as soon as something is formulated (its neither a desire nor an aspiration, but something like the living perception of a possibility that SHOULD be realizedit comes sometimes), it gets done! It gets done automatically and immediately. So this morning, for, oh, half an hour, the impression was so charming, so pleasant: Ah, there we are! THIS IS HOW we should see things!
Afterwards I had to be busy with other things, but its there. And the question was, Why? Why isnt there in this brain the capacity to perceive and transcribe things as he had it?
0 1967-10-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(After a long silence) For my part, I have always felt that writing was your way of doing the sadhana. That is, not meditating or anything of the sort, but writing, is your way of doing the sadhana. When you write, I see a sort of transmutation taking place in you. Not only something you call personal, something which is your way of writing or your book, not only that, but formulating things in the most accurate, the most precise fashion, is your way of doing the sadhana. Its a sadhana up above.
That is to say that in my view, the process of expression is more important than the outer result. There is an inner result (which isnt expressed in words), which is far more important than the outer result. The last time, when you wrote the book on Sri Aurobindo, it was perfectly clear; with the last book too (the first version of the Sannyasin), but even more so: there was that sort of inner transmutation which was far more important than what you were writingin my view.
0 1967-11-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The most difficult thing in the material world, here, is to fight against the result of all those millennia of experiences that have created a sort of pessimistic and defeatist consciousnessa general consciousness, you know, like this (gesture enveloping the earth). It isnt formulated in words, but for that consciousness it can be expressed thus, Yes, we dont deny the existence of all those divine things, but they arent for us, theyre for (gesture to the heights)
Quite miserable. A sort of general state like that, quite miserable. And thats the thing, you understand, thats what all those who had experiences on the heights saw, and they said, Its hopeless.
0 1967-11-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One or two days ago, I dont know, there was a sort of general vision of this striving of the earth towards its divinization, and someone seemed to be saying (not someone: it was the witness-consciousness, the consciousness observing, but it gets formulated in wordsvery often its formulated in English and I have a kind of impression that it is Sri Aurobindo, his active consciousness, but sometimes it gets translated into words only in my consciousness), and these last few days, it was something saying, Yes, the time of proclamations, the time of revelations is pastnow, on to action.
Proclamations, revelations, prophecies, all that is after all very comfortable, it gives a sense of something concrete; now its very obscure, there is a sense that its very obscure, invisible (it will be visible only in results far, far ahead), and not understood.
0 1967-12-06, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the state Ive just described is possible in the bodys cells and in the corporeal consciousness, also in the psychic consciousness; but vitally and mentally, even if you understand, it seems like an almost impossible realization because of a fixity, a fixity in the form: the form of thoughts and the form of sensations. Mentally it could only be expressed as an acceptance of all thoughts, all formulae, raising them up towards something thats no longer a thought, no longer a mentally formulated thing, but a light, a conscious light that organises and unifies. But if you take them all on the same plane You can accept everything, but everything as one viewpointone among innumerable viewpoints on something that cannot be expressed in words, because as soon as you put words on it, it becomes a formula, and the formula takes the power away. But physically, in the bodys cells, its very, very clearly perceptible and is lived quite spontaneously: you receive only from on high, and you spread it.
***
0 1967-12-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its meant to break formulae, you know, thought formulae, mental categories, and its not my fault (I mean I didnt do it deliberately). It came like that (Mother reads her message):
The best way to hasten the manifestation of the Divines Love is to collaborate for the triumph of the Truth.
--
But the interesting part is that formulating it in words makes it sound artificialits much more sincere, much truer, much more spontaneous than anything expressed or expressible by the mind. No formula can render the sinceritysimplicity, sincerity, spontaneity, something uncalculatingof the material movement. There was a time when expressing or formulating caused a very unpleasant sensation, like putting something artificial on something spontaneously true; and that unpleasantness was cured only, to begin with, by a higher knowledge that all that is formulated must be surpassed. For instance, every experience expressed or described CALLS FOR a new progress, a new experience. In other words, it hastens the movement. That has been a consolation, because in fact, with the old sensation of something very stable and solid and immobile because of inertia (a past inertia, which is now being transformed but has left marks), because of that inertia there is a tendency to prefer things to be solid; so there is a thrill at being forced to No, no! No rest, no halt, go on!farther and farther and farther on When an experience has been very fruitful and highly pleasant, let us say, when its had a great force and a great effect, the first movement is to say, We wont talk about that, well keep it. Then after comes, Well say it in order to go farther onto go farther on, ever farther, ever farther.
There is a stability in the resolve and in the aspiration, a stability that can be found nowhere as much as here (Mother strikes the ground). Thats a characteristic of Matter. And you know, when it has given itself and has faith, it becomes so stable, so constant, and the joy, that sort of widening, of luminous expansionit becomes such a perpetual need that in no other part of the being has it ever been like that. Its something ESTABLISHED. And established effortlessly, established spontaneously, naturally, normally. So we can foresee that when this Matter will become truly divinetruly divineits manifestation will be infinitely more complete, more perfect in the details, and more stable than anywhere else.
--
Generally I only have to listen, and Sri Aurobindo speaks to me. Sri Aurobindos English was very supple; purists used to argue over certain formulations, and I remember, about certain criticisms he would tell me, But thats because they dont understand! If I put it this way, it means one thing, and if I put it that way, it means something else. And if I move one word to another place in my sentence, it changes the meaning. He was very exact.
If you take little words like this one (Mother hesitated between collaborate to the triumph of the Truth and collaborate for), there is a subtle difference in meaning whether you use one or the other. And the classic formula generally gives the more banal meaning, the more ordinary, the more superficial.
Lobelia longiflora.
0 1967-12-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No rules or laws are being framed. Things will get formulated as the underlying Truth of the township emerges and takes shape progressively. We do not anticipate.
Is that all?
--
No rules or laws are being framed. Things will get formulated as the underlying Truth of the township emerges and takes shape progressively. We do not anticipate.
What I mean is that usually (always till now, and more and more so), men establish mental rules according to their conceptions and their ideal, then they apply them (Mother lowers her fist, as if to show the world under the mental grip). And thats absolutely false, arbitrary, unreal, with the result that things revolt, or else waste away and disappear. Its the experience of LIFE ITSELF that must slowly work out rules AS SUPPLE AND VAST as possible, in order that they remain ever progressive. Nothing must be fixed. Thats the immense error of governments: they build a framework and say, Here is what weve established, now we must live under it. So naturally, Life is crushed and prevented from progressing. It is Life itself, developing more and more in a progression towards Light, Knowledge, Power, that must progressively establish rules as general as possible, so as to be extremely supple and capable of changing according to needof changing AS RAPIDLY as habits and needs do.
0 1968-03-13, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And there, all that remains all that remains is That! And That is what has the power. But even when we say, All that remains is That (laughing), we situate it WITHIN something else! Words and language are unsuited to express something that exceeds the consciousness. As soon as you formulate it, you bring it down.
(silence)
0 1968-03-16, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It may be (maybe, because as soon as you try to formulate, you mentalize, and as soon as you mentalize, it gets shrunk, diminished, limited, it loses the power of truth but anyway), it may be that in this universe as it is constituted, perfection is (Mother remains absorbed for a long time). It eludes words. We might put it this way (but its dry and lifeless): its the perception (is it only perception? Its not just perception; its neither perception nor knowledge nor awareness), its the awareness of the oneness of the wholea oneness perceived, lived, realized in the individual. But thats nothing, mere words. The universe seems to have been created to realize this paradox of the awareness of the whole, an awareness lived (not just perceived but lived) in every part, every element making up the whole.
So in order to give form to those elements, it all began with Separation, and it was Separation that gave birth to this division between what we call good and evil; but from the point of view of sensationsensation in the most material partwe may say its suffering and Ananda. And the movement is to put a stop to all separation and to realize the total consciousness in every part (which mentally speaking is absurd, but its like that).
Thats far too philosophical for my taste, not concrete enough. But this mornings experience was concrete, and concrete because it stemmed from extremely concrete sensations in the body, from the presence of this constant duality which looks like an opposition (not only opposition, but mutual negation) between we may take the symbol of suffering and Ananda. And the true state (which for the moment appears impossible to formulate in words, but which was lived and felt) is an all-containing totality; but instead of containing everything as clashing elements, its a harmony of everything, an equilibrium of everything. And once this equilibrium is realized in the creation, the creation will be able (if you put it into words, its no longer that) we might say, able to go on progressing without break.
But thats not it.
0 1968-04-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I didnt want to make rules for Auroville, but I am going to be forced to start formulating certain things, because there happens to be difficulties. I dont know what to do.
What I wanted to say came; its very simple (Mother takes a written note), simply like this (its about very small things):
--
Thats why the most general formula is to say that any self-forgetfulness is contrary to life in Auroville. One doesnt go to Auroville to forget, or to forget oneselfany self-forgetfulness, in any form.
Ah, but self-forgetfulness, if you take it from a moral standpoint! (Mother laughs)
--
(Mother laughs) The minute one formulates
It would be more correct to say:
--
Some articles have appeared in newspapers about Aurovilles foundation, for instance with the theme, A utopia on the way to realization. So then, there are those who tell you, Youll never succeed! Their argument is, They are human beings and they will remain human thats where theyre wrong. Human nature cannot be changed, thats the basis on which they tell you, You wont succeed. Therefore the only thing needed is not only to accept and to want the future, but to adhere to the will for transformation and progress. As a general formula, thats quite fine.
But you see, with drugs, for instancetake chloroform used for operations: well, on every individual chloroform has different effects (they dont accept that in theory, but its a fact). We have S. here, who was an anesthetist, and the upshot of his experience is that it has a different effect on everyone. Some it hurls into unconsciousness (the large majority, I think), but in certain cases, on the contrary, people are thrown into another consciousness.
0 1968-06-26, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And a consciousnessa perception, rathera growing perception of a state which I dont know how to explain it. There are two simultaneous states: the state of uninterrupted, almost endless continuity, and the state of toppling over into decomposition (for the body); the two are constantly like this (Mother places one hand closely over the other). And the choice the constant choicebased, in fact, on a reliance leaning for support on the divine Consciousness for all things and every second, or ceasing to lean on it. To the cells, that choice appears to be a free choice, with a very strong sense (but not at all formulated in words) of the support constantly given by the supreme Consciousness to help them rely on it alone.
Its not mentalizedhardly mentalized at alland almost impossible to formulate. But its very clear. Very clear what is it? Its not in the sensationits in the state of consciousness. Its very clear states of consciousness. But hard to express. Continuous states, continuous, continuous: night and day, ceaselessly, continuously. The planes change, the activities change, but its continuous. The mode of being or way of being may cease and give place to another, but that state of consciousness is perpetual, uninterrupted, universal, eternaloutside timeoutside time, outside space. Its the state of the consciousness.
(a gust of wind sweeps away the letters on Mothers table)
0 1968-07-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I also put (and this is from me), the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life. That whole formula, I know, was an attempt to express the thing without using the word God, because There was in my life a period of at least twenty years during which those words used to make me bristle, so I understand very well the feeling it evokes in people. Later, it was Sri Aurobindo who made me rise above all that; but its because he pulled me very high up that I rose above all that, otherwise, on an intellectual level, it didnt do at all. It evokes the narrowest religiosity, and it wont do. So I dont want that the country is now fully in it, here in India. I dont want to raise that first obstacle. Thats why I made this long sentence.
***
0 1968-09-21, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like this: the body is absolutely convinced that there is only one Willone Consciousness, one Will. Consequently, whatever happens is part of that Consciousness and that Will. Thats how it is, you understand. So it cant get angry. It has one spontaneous tendency: let the aspiration be more intense, the surrender more complete, the trust more total. It gets formulated like this: ThatThat which is everything and is oneis nevertheless, despite all appearances, it is nevertheless the Supreme Goodness, the Supreme Beauty, the Supreme Harmony everything reaches out towards That. That is it. And we too reach out towards That. There, thats the bodys philosophy. But not in the manner of the other parts of the being: quite spontaneous, and with a sort of indisputability.
(silence)
0 1968-11-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
and me! The meetings will take place sub secreto specialissimo, a formula equivalent to top secret.
Oh, hell be in it!
0 1968-11-23, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then, when I listen, It also says things; I told Him, But then, why do people always climb up above? And with the most extraordinary, fantastic humor: Because they want me to be very far from their consciousness! Things like that, but not formulated so precisely: impressions. Several timesseveral times I heard: Why do they go so far away to seek whats (you know, the theories that have said, Its within you) to seek whats everywhere?
I didnt say it to that person, first of all because the experience wasnt a continuous thing as it now is.
And above all, there was: NO NEW RELIGIONS! No dogmas, no fixed teaching. Avoidat any cost avoid turning it into a new religion. Because the moment it was formulated in an elegant way that imposed itself and had a force, IT WOULD BE OVER.
You get the impression that He is everywhere, but everywhere, and theres nothing else. And we arent aware of it because we are shriveled up (I dont know how to put it), dried. up. Weve made (laughing) tremendous efforts to separate ourselvesand weve succeeded! Weve succeeded, but only in our consciousness, not in the fact. In the fact, Its there. Its there. Theres NOTHING but That. What we know, what we see, what we touch is as if bathing, floating within That; but its permeable; its permeable, absolutely: That goes through it. The sense of separateness comes from here (Mother touches her forehead).
0 1969-02-08, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It cant be said. At least I cant say it I cant, this body is incapable of formulating it methodically and clearly. But as far as learning is concerned, its certainly learning!
At the same time, that gives the true notion This morning (as if to give reference points), certain questions of religion were also mixing in: of religions, religious people from different religions, attitudes in religions. All that came with the vision of the whole and a total absence of all personal reactions (when it saw them, the seeing consciousness had no personal reactions; for instance, the reaction of one religion towards another, of one creed towards another, of one so-called system of knowledge towards another, and so on: all those reactions and conflicts found in the human mind), it was seen like this (dominating gesture, as if above a becalmed sea), it was all seen TOGETHER, and all on the same plane; on a same plane which is like a mental zone and has absolutely nothing to do with the Truthits an unbelievable camouflaging of the Truth. The so-called truths for which men have fought against each other, have died, have destroyed with all human passions: an almost ridiculous camouflaging of the Truth.
0 1969-03-26, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The silence was dense, the stupefaction huge. And I went on again: But we believe we are the interpreters, and except us none has the right to speak. Nevertheless we are faced with the current phenomenon of anti-establishment protest. The youth is running away from us, our formulas are old, ineffective, we preach without conviction, we demand absurd things, and to have peace, we stick a label of sin on all taboos. I know that my speech will be called subversive. In dictatorial or established regimes, those who move forward are suspicious. For twenty centuries we have used the weapon of heresy, and we know the atrocities that were committed in the name of Christ: that was our defenseit was his wisdom to keep power But if Christ suddenly appeared here, in front of us, do you think he would recognize himself in us? Is the Christ we preach the Christ of the BEATITUDES? Our preoccupation is to prohibit opening. And we make fools of ourselves with the pill. But are we also preoccupied with the TRUTH? Yet we should read our holy books again, but read them without passion, without egoistic interest; almost two thousand years ago, St. Paul said, Multifariam, multisque modis olim Deus loquens in prophetis, novissime diebus istis locutus est nobis in Filio (several times and in several ways God has spoken through the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son Jesus Christ). Thus God has spoken in several ways. I know that a new light has just appeared, a new Consciousness let us go in search of it. But we shall have to step down from our throne, from our convenience; perhaps to leave the place to others and do away with the Hierarchy: no more Pope or Cardinals or Bishops, but all of us seekers of the TRUTH, of the CONSCIOUSNESS, the POWER, the SUPRANATURAL, the SUPRAHUMAN..
Satprem, I left the room and went away for a walk in the countryside. What is going to happen to me? Will they put me on trial? Will they declare me insane, heretic? I am waiting. I am eager to go and see Mother. I am preparing my travel for Easter. (That took place on Monday the 24th of February.) To this day, no reaction. Has the Pope been informed? I do not know. I have continued with the inquiry entrusted to me. I feel very calm, very strong. I have not spoken about all that to any of those close to me (not even to Msgr. R.). The malefic character seen in dream (Msgr. Z) was present, but he did not react either.
0 1969-04-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Those experiences last for several hours every day, and they make you feel the two sides like that, with a clear distinction, very clear, in what people do, in what they say, in the relationship with events, and also the different states of consciousness (everything takes place in the consciousness, of course, its not at all a thought, its not formulated, I dont know how to explain). And this Consciousness also teaches action in silenceat a distance as well as in the presence. All kinds of things, its constantly, constantly teaching one thing or another. And not formulated: there are no formulas, its not thoughts, but states of consciousness. And the relationship between the various states of consciousness: how they dovetail with one another, how they mix with one another, how they can be separated, how It cant be explained: it can be lived (the body is being taught how to live), but it cant be explained. For everythingeverything, all activities.
As soon as you try to formulate it, there comes in that mental element. Its no longer that.
Very, very active. A constant activity of demonstration, of teachingin action, in life (not mental, not in thought). And as soon as speech, for instance, comes, it takes away the truth of the thing, I dont know It turns it into literature, as it were.
0 1969-08-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, I had an experience like that (I dont know if it was this morning or yesterday morning or in the night, but anyway). For some time, I was in a consciousness in which the separate individuality no longer existed, but the principle (how should I Put it?) the particular principle of each individual persisted in the universal Consciousness. And then, mon petit, everything became so marvelous! It lasted maybe for an hour, a little more or a little less, I dont know, but anyway long enough to (Mother smiles), I mean, to lounge in it. There was no more, NO MORE separation, that had disappeared, but a certain (how to explain?), almost like an outlook; each individuals outlook (not just the outlook, but at the same time the stand in actionstand, that is, the part of the action initiated by that outlook), that persisted. It persisted in the Oneno separation. And then, each thing has its own placewith the whole marvelously effective. At the same time I cant say, words are impotent. At the time of the experience, I remembered a sentence of Sri Aurobindo in which he said that in the end, the Lord is only a child at play (you know it, he put it in a certain way4), and I understood WHY he used those words, it was it was something which our language obviously cant formulate, but to LIVE in that, to live that is you understand, its the impression of so, so perfect an omnipotence, so harmonious, and at the same time, yes, so harmonious that its all smiling. Its inexpressible. Inexpressible. I had the experience, then it went away It got mixed up with the daily work.
And I remember Its interesting because while I was in that state, I remembered the question youd asked me about Pavitra, whether the principle of individuality persists; so something in me said to you, Now you see, its like this! (Mother laughs) I remembered your question, I said, Its like this, there is NO MORE separation, but but this marvel of complexity remains the marvel of a complexity. And the impression is that everything, but everything that is has its own place, but when its in its place, then its perfectly harmonious.
0 1969-09-20, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe though it doesnt like to be formulated in words: it instantly becomes very small.
Not now! (Mother laughs)
0 1969-09-24, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because it would be interesting if in front of you he tried to formulate his question outwardly He understands quite well that evolution has reached a point where things must accelerate and those Forces of Harmony must be brought into the world, but basically, he feels such a power in him that he wouldnt want to act arbitrarily: he wouldnt want to break the equilibrium, but to follow the Law. And for that, total vision is needed. He told me, The miracles Christ worked, for instance (there is no such thing as miracles, by the way), all that I can do, but if I did it, with the means of communication of modern science, it would immediately be known the world over, and something of that sort could strike a great blow to the ordinary mind which only believes in the truths of matter. He asks, That would be a means of action, but should I do that? His problem is one of action.
What is he doing now?
0 1970-06-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To such a point that when I write its also like that. So I try to put what our idiotic formulas can hold and I put so much, so much that cant be expressed with words, that when they read back to me what I wrote, I feel like saying, You must be joking, you took away everything!
***
0 1971-11-24, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Again, you say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only,those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence. These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.
You have insisted on my writing and asked for the Truth and I have answered. But if you want to be a Mussulman, no one prevents you. If the Truth I bring is too great for you to understand or to bear, you are free to go and live in a half-truth or in your own ignorance. I am not here to convert anyone; I do not preach to the world to come to me and I call no one. I am here to establish the divine life and the divine consciousness in those who of themselves feel the call to come to me and cleave to it and in no others. I am not asking you and the Mother is not asking you to accept us. You can go any day and live either the worldly life or a religious life according to your own preference. But as you are free, so also are others free to stay here and follow their own way.
0 1972-01-12, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Had you been there when it came6 (it came in connection with a question T.J. asked me), you would have understood it from what I wrote, because the consciousness was there. But I never know when it comesit doesnt come at will. I remember when I had the experience, all at once I felt I understood, everything became clear. But when I tried to formulate it, it had already receded into the background.
You told me once in an Agenda about a similar experience you had.
0 1972-05-04, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Strange feeling. Since last night, a strange impression that the Divine has become (how to formulate it?) like a golden Force pressing down like this (gesture of pressure on the earth). They alone, who by their aspiration are able to pass through to the Divine Origin, will escape catastrophes.
There was a catastrophe in Madras: one of our best cars was in a very serious accident.
0 1972-10-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A possible formulation would be: constantly, constantly as if on one hand I were telling the Lord, What do You want me to do?, and on the other hand.
(silence eyes closed, hands opened in total surrender)
02.01 - Metaphysical Thought and the Supreme Truth, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Any seeking of the supreme Truth through intellect alone must end either in Agnosticism of this kind or else in some intellectual system or mind-constructed formula. There have been hundreds of these systems and formulas and there can be hundreds more, but none can be definitive. Each may have its value for the mind, and different systems with their contrary conclusions can have an equal appeal to intelligences of equal power and competence. All this labour of speculation has its utility in training the human mind and helping to keep before it the idea of Something beyond and Ultimate towards which it must turn. But the intellectual Reason can only point vaguely or feel gropingly towards it or try to indicate partial and even conflicting aspects of its manifestation here; it cannot enter into and know it. As long as we remain in the domain of the intellect only, an impartial pondering over all that has been thought and sought after, a constant throwing up of ideas, of all the possible ideas, and the formation of this or that philosophical belief, opinion or conclusion is all that can be done. This kind of disinterested search after Truth would be the only possible attitude for any wide and plastic intelligence. But any conclusion so arrived at would be only speculative; it could have no spiritual value; it would not give the decisive experience or the spiritual certitude for which the soul is seeking. If the intellect is our highest possible instrument and there is no other means of arriving at supraphysical Truth, then a wise and large Agnosticism must be our ultimate attitude. Things in the manifestation may be known to some degree, but the Supreme and all that is beyond the Mind must remain for ever unknowable.
It is only if there is a greater consciousness beyond Mind and that consciousness is accessible to us that we can know and enter into the ultimate Reality. Intellectual speculation, logical reasoning as to whether there is or is not such a greater consciousness cannot carry us very far. What we need is a way to get the experience of it, to reach it, enter into it, live in it.
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now to the first question. It is usually contended that the ideal is an impossibility, a chimera, since it involves on the face of it a self-contradiction. For, is not divinity the very opposite of humanity, immortality that of mortality and Matter that of the Spirit? These pairs, all of them, are formed of two mutually exclusive terms. This is what Mayavada posits. But need it be necessarily and inevitably so? What is affirmed is after all a postulate and one can start from other postulates as well. The truth, of course, is that all theories or views of existence are centrally formulations of an experience; and each experience has its own postulate.
To begin with, we refuse to admit or recognise that there is or is bound to be a contradiction or opposition between Matter and Spirit, between body and soul or between the human and the divine. We start with an experience, a realisation which declares the essential unity and identity of the duality. That is the thing that has to be posited first clear and nett. The question next arises how the two are one and identical; this demands some clarification. For, is it meant that they are one and the same in the sense that Zeus and Jupiter are the same or that water and H2O are the same? Apart from any barren theorising, is it not a universal and eternal and invariable experience that to attain to the Divine one must leave behind the human, to become the immortal one must cease to be a mortal and to live in the Spirit one has to deny Matter? The real answer, however, is that it is so and it is not so. The dilemma is not so trenchant as it has been made out to be.
To the regard of one line of experience, Matter seems opposed to Spirit only so far as the actual and outer formulation of Matter is concerned: even then the opposition is only apparent and relative. This is the very crux of the problem. For, to such a regard Spirit becomes Matter also, it is also Matterannam brahma eva. Spirit is consciousness, cit; and Matter, it is said, is unconsciousness, acit. But unconsciousness need not be and is not, in our view, the absolute negation or utter absence of consciousness, it is only an involved or involute consciousness. If consciousness is wakefulness, unconsciousness is nothing more than forgetfulness: it is only an abeyance or suspension of consciousness, not annihilation.
Thus the spiritualisation of Matter becomes possible simply because Matter and Spirit are not absolutely different, contradictory or incommensurable entities; they are one and the same reality, in different modeseven as water or water vapour and ice are in substance one and identical, although different in appearance. Spirit has become Matter and Matter at heart is Spirit. Spirit is latent in Matter, as Matter itself is a possible formulation involved in Spirit. Matter has come out of Spirit as Spirit pressed upon itself and gradually condensed and consolidated into the concrete material reality. Spirit has become Matter by a process of crystallisation, of self-limitation and exclusive concentration. The movement follows a definite line of self-modification, along a downward gradient till it is consummated: it is one among an infinite variety of possible self-modifications, chosen and exclusively developed with a special purpose and a definite fulfilment In view.
A movement of involution through a series of termsof consciousnessof gradually diminishing facial value has made the Spirit terminate in Matter. If it is so, it stands to reason that a movement of evolution, a return journey would make Matter culminate in Spirit. Thus the very fact of Spirit having become Matter, of Matter being a mode of the Spirit, at once creates the possibility of Matter being transmuted into Spirit. Now even granting such a possibility, it may be argued yet that the thing achieved is a resolution of Matter into Spirit; it means the destruction of the characteristic form and consistency that is called Matter. We know, thanks to modern Science, that Matter can be transmuted into pure energy, but then it loses its materiality, it is dematerialised.
That is what some of the old spiritual disciplines taught. Even if there is no unbridgeable gulf between Spirit and Matter, they said, even if they are not incommensurables but form one reality, Spirit is the reality in essence, Matter is an inferior formulation. Matter has unrolled itself out of the infinite, it can only be and it has got to be rolled back again into the Spirit.
Here comes the second cardinal principle in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the reality, viz, that an inferior formulation of the Spirit, an involute on a lower plane is not essentially or truly, even in its outer and dynamic nature and character, a mere temporary or by-the-way reality, an epiphenomenon; its sole function is not simply to impede, diminish and obscure the real reality so that it has to be gradually rejected and eliminated on the way back to the source. As a matter of fact, an inferior formulation has a double function; in the line of descent it limits, obscures, deviates and in the end falsifies the higher reality; at the same time, however, it concretises, energises, incarnates what it obscures. But in the ascending line, that is to say, in the movement of reversal from the inferior to the superior, the movement need not be always that of disincarnation and dissolution, it may be that of purification and illumination and fulfilment. The analogy will not be, then, that of Matter being dematerialised into pure energy but that of Matter being transformed into a radiant substance, not losing itself in the process of radiation, being wholly made of the undying luminous stuff.
Such a movement of transforming evolution is not merely a possibility or a probability: it is a fact of Nature. Indeed, natural evolution means nothing less than that. First of all, evolution means the reversibility of Nature; for, it is the backward movement of an involutionary process. We have said that the supreme truth and realitysat-cit-ananda, as it is calledmultiplied and concretised itself gradually through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Supermind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents,the farthest apparently from the original source, the movement turns round and seeks to go up the ladder through the same gradations it has traversed. But this process of reversal is not merely a resolution and dissolution, it is a process of greater fulfilment and synthetisation, of sublimation as well as of integration.
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We will try to understand the nature of sublimation and transformation by analogy and illustration. Mind, for example, we know, is an instrument which by itself is incapable of attaining to the knowledge of the Spirit or the consciousness of the Truth. As it is constituted at present, it is not only not capable of that knowledge and consciousness, but is an obstacle to them. Its vibrations and formulations disturb and vitiate the higher rhythm. That is why it is repeated so often in the Upanishads:
Nai tarkena matirapney1
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.
It poured into the Ever-stable's flux
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At the very outset when and where the Many has come out into manifestation in the Onehere also it must be remembered that we are using a temporal figure in respect of an extra-temporal factthere and then is formed a characteristic range of reality which is a perfect equation of the one and the many: that is to say, the one in becoming many still remains the same immaculate one in and through the many, and likewise the many in spite of its manifoldnessand because of the special quality of the manifoldnessstill continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, ta cit, in Vedic terminology. They are seed-truths, the original mother-truths in the Divine Consciousness. They comprise the fundamental essential many aspects and formulations of an infinite Infinity. At this stage these do not come into clash or conflict, for here each contains all and the All contains each one in absolute unity and essential identity. Each individual formation is united with and partakes of the nature of the one supreme Reality. Although difference is born here, separation is not yet come. Variety is there, but not discord, individuality is there, not egoism. This is the first step of Descent, the earliest one-not, we must remind ourselves again, historically but psychologically and logically the descent of the Transcendent into the Cosmic as the vast and varied Supermindcitra praketo ajania vibhw of the Absolute into the relational manifestation as Vidysakti (Gnosis).
The next steps, farther down or away, arrive when the drive towards differentiation and multiplication gathers momentum becomes accentuated, and separation and isolation increase in degree and emphasis. The lines of individuation fall more and more apart from each other, tending to form closed circles, each confining more and more exclusively to itself, stressing its own particular and special value and function, in contradistinction to or even against other lines. Thus the descent or fall from the Supermind leads, in the first instance, to the creation or appearance of the Overmind. It is the level of consciousness where the perfect balance of the One and the Many is disturbed and the emphasis begins to be laid on the many. The source of incompatibility between the two just starts here as if Many is notOne and One is not Many. It is the beginning of Ignorance, Avidya, Maya. Still in the higher hemisphere of the Overmind, the sense of unity is yet maintained, although there is no longer the sense of absolute identity of the two; they are experienced as complementaries, both form a harmony, a harmony as of different and distinct but conjoint notes. The Many has come forward, yet the unity is also there supporting it-the unity is an immanent godhead, controlling the patent reality of the Many. It is in the lower hemisphere of the Overmind that unity is thrown into the background half-submerged, flickering, and the principle of multiplicity comes forward with all insistence. Division and rivalry are the characteristic marks of its organisation. Yet the unity does not disappear altogether, only it remains very much inactive, like a sleeping partner. It is not directly perceived and envisaged, not immediately felt but is evoked as reminiscence. The Supermind, then, is the first crystallisation of the Infinite into individual centres, in the Overmind these centres at the outset become more exclusively individualised and then jealously self-centred.
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When consciousness has reached the farthest limit of its opposite, when it has reduced itself to absolutely unconscious and mechanical atoms of Matter, when the highest has descended into and become the lowest, then, by the very force of its downward drive, it has swung round and begun to mount up again. As it could not proceed farther on the downward gradient, having reached the extreme and ultimate limit of inconscience, consciousness had to turn round, as it were, by the very pressure of its inner impetus. First, then, there is a descent, a gradual involution, a veiling and closing up; next, an ascent, a gradual evolution, unfoldment and expression. We now see, however, that the last limit at the bottomMatteralthough appearing to be unconscious, is really not so: it is inconscient. That is to say, it holds consciousness secreted and involved within itself; it is, indeed, a special formulation of consciousness. It is the exclusive concentration of consciousness upon single points in itself: it is consciousness throwing itself out in scattered units and, by reason of separative identification with them and absorption into them, losing itself, forgetting itself in an absolute fixation of attention. The phenomenon is very similar to what happens when in the ordinary consciousness a worker, while doing a work, becomes so engrossed in it that he loses consciousness of himself, identifies himself with the work and in fact becomes the work, the visible resultant being a mechanical execution.
Now this imprisoned consciousness in Matter forces Matter to be conscious again when driven on the upward gradient. This tension creates a fire, as it were, in the heart of Matter, a mighty combustion and whorl in the core of things, of which the blazing sun is an image and a symbol. All this pressure and heat and concussion and explosion mean a mighty struggle in Matter to give birth to that which is within. Consciousness that is latent must be made patent; it must reveal itself in Matter and through Matter, making Matter its vehicle and embodiment. This is the mystery of the birth of Life, the first sprouting of consciousness in Matter. Life is half-awakened consciousness, consciousness yet in a dream state. Its earliest and most rudimentary manifestation is embodied in the plant or vegetable world. The submerged consciousness strives to come still further up, to express itself to a greater degree and in a clearer mode, to become more free and plastic in its movements; hence the appearance of the animal as the next higher formulation. Here consciousness delivers itself as a psyche, a rudimentary one, no doubt, a being of feeling and sensation, and elementary mentality playing in a field of vitalised Matter. Even then it is not satisfied with itself, it asks for a still more free and clear articulation: it is not satisfied, for it has not yet found its own level. Hence after the animal, arrives man with a full-fledged Mind, with intelligence and self-consciousness and capacity for self-determination.
Thus we see that evolution, the unfolding of consciousness follows exactly the line of its involution, only the other way round: the mounting consciousness re-ascends step by step the same gradient, retraces the same path along which it had descended. The descending steps are broadly speaking (I) Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, (2) Supermind and its secondary form Overmind, (3) Mind(i) mind proper and (ii) the intermediary psyche, (4) Life, (5) Matter. The ascending consciousness starting from Matter rises into Life, passes on through Life and Psyche into Mind, driving towards the Supermind and Sachchidananda. At the present stage of evolution, consciousness has arrived at the higher levels of Mind; it is now striving to cross it altogether and enter the Overmind and the Supermind. It will not rest content until it arrives at the organisation in and through the Supermind: for that is the drive and purpose of Nature in the next cycle of evolution.
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Next is the domain of the Supermind with which the manifestation of the Divine starts. We have said it is the world of typal realities, of the first seed-realities, where the One and the Many are united and fused in each other, where the absolute unity of the Supreme maintains itself in undiminished magnitude and expresses and formulates itself perfectly in and through the original multiplicity. Here take birth the first personalities, absolute truth-forms of the Divine. Here are the highest gods, the direct formations of the Divine himself. Here are the Four Powers and Personalities of swara whom Sri Aurobindo has named after the Vaishnava terminology: (i) Mahavira, embodying the Brahmin quality of Knowledge and Light and wide Consciousness, (ii) Balarama, embodying the Kshatriya quality of Force and intense dynamism, (iii) Pradyumna, embodying the quality of love and beauty the Vaishya virtue of mutuality and harmony and solidarity, and (iv) Aniruddha, embodying the Sudra quality of competent service, of organisation and execution in detail. Corresponding with these Four there are the other Four Powers and Personalities of the Divine Mother war (i) Maheshwari, (ii) Mahakali, (iii) Mahalakshmi and (iv) Mahasaraswati. Next in the downward gradient comes the Overmind where the individualised powers and personalities of the Divine tend to become self-sufficient and self-regarding; their absolute unity is loosened and the lines of multiplicity begin to be more independent of each other, each aiming at a special fulfilment of its own. Still the veil that is being drawn over the unity is yet transparent which continues to be sufficiently dynamic. This is the abode of the gods, the true and high gods: it is these that the Vedic Rishis appear to have envisaged and sought after. The all gods (vive dev) were indeed acknowledged to be but different names and forms of one supreme godhead (dev) it is the one god, says Rishi Dirghatamas, who is called multifariously whether as Agni or Yam a or Matariswan; it is the one god, again, who is described as having a thousand heads and a thousand feet. And yet they are separate entities, each has his own distinct and distinctive character and attribute, each demands a characteristic way of approach and worship. The tendency towards an exclusive stress is already at work on this level and it is the perception of this truth that lies behind the term henotheism used by European scholars to describe the Vedic Religion.
The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the gods have become all quite separate, self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and horizon. The overmind gods the true godsare creators in a world of balanced or harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam bhvayantah). Between the Overmind and the Mind there is a class of lesser godsthey have been called formateurs; they do not create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement, fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhynamrtis. But in the Mind the gods become still more fixed and rigid, stereotyped; the mental gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly understand or tolerate each other.
Mind is the birth-place of absolute division and exclusivismit is the own home of egoism. Egoism is that ignorant modea twist or knot of consciousness which cuts up the universal unity into disparate and antagonistic units: it creates isolated, mutually exclusive whorls in the harmonious rhythm and vast commonalty of the one consciousness or conscious existence. The Sankhya speaks of the principle of ego coming or appearing after the principle of vastness (mahat). The Vast is the region above the Mind, where the unitary consciousness is still intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asuraAsura, the mentalised vital being.
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The formulation or revelation of the Psyche marks another line of what we have been describing as the Descent of Consciousness. The phenomenon of individualisation has at its back the phenomenon of the growth of the Psyche. It is originally a spark or nucleus of consciousness thrown into Matter that starts growing and organising itself behind the veil, in and through the movements and activities of the apparent vehicle consisting of the triple nexus of Body (Matter) and Life and Mind. The extreme root of the psychic growth extends perhaps right into the body, consciousness of Matter, but its real physical basis and tenement is found only with the growth and formation of the physical heart. And yet the psychic individuality behind the animal organisation is very rudimentary. All that can be said is that it is there, in potentia, it exists, it is simple being: it has not started becoming. This is man's speciality: in him the psychic begins to be dynamic; to be organised and to organise, it is a psychic personality that he possesses. Now this flowering of the psychic personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another level of consciousness. That Person (or Superperson) is the jvatman, the Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. The Jivas are centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the infinite Consciousness: it is the supreme Consciousness eddying in unit formations to serve as the basis for the play of manifestation. They are not within the frame of manifestation (as the typal formations in the Supermind are), they are above or beyond or beside it and stand there eternally and invariably in and as part and parcel of the one supreme RealitySachchidananda. But the Jivatman from its own status casts its projection, representation, delegated formulationemanation, in the phraseology of the neo-Platonistsinto the manifestation of the triple complex of mind, life and body, that is to say, into the human vehicle, and thus stands behind as the psychic personality or the soul. This soul, we have seen, is a developing, organising focus of consciousness growing from below and comes to its own in the human being: or we can put it the other way, that is to say, when it comes to its own, then the human being appears. And it has come to its own precisely by a descent of its own self from above, in the same manner as with the other descents already described. Now, this coming to its own means that it begins henceforth to exercise its royal power, its natural and inherent divine right, viz, of consciously and directly controlling and organising its terrestrial kingdom which is the body and life and mind. The exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by a self-consciousness, I that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the I Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this self-conscious being has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of the underlying psychic personality that has formed here.
Thus we have three characteristics of the human personality accruing from the psychic consciousness that supports and inspires it:(1) self-consciousness: an animal acts, feels and even knows, but man knows that he acts, knows that he feels, knows even that he knows. This phenomenon of consciousness turning round upon itself is the hallmark of the human being; (2) a conscious will holding together and harmonising, fashioning and integrating the whole external nature evolved till now; (3) a purposive drive, a deliberate and voluntary orientation towards a higher and ever higher status of individualisation and personalisation,not only a horizontal movement seeking to embrace and organise the normal, the already attained level of consciousness, but also a vertical movement seeking to raise the level, attain altogether a new poise of higher organisation.
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We have spoken of four lines of Descent in the evolution and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly through emanations, projections, partial or lesser formulations, but directly in his own plenary self. He descends not as a disembodied force acting as a general movement, possessing, at the most, other objects and persons as its medium or instrument, but in an embodied form and in the fullness of his consciousness. The Indian word for Divine Incarnation, avatra, literally means he who has descended. The Divine comes down himself as a terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, in order to raise the terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary courseeven so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid mass of earth from out of the waters of the Deluge. It is his purpose to effect ascension of consciousness, a transmutation of being, to establish a truly New Order, a New Dharma, as it is termed dharmasamsthpanrthya. On the human level, he appears as a human person for two purposes. First of all, he shows, by example, how the ascension, the transmutation is to be effected, how a normal human being can rise from a lower status of consciousness to a higher one. The Divine is therefore known as the Lord of Yoga for Yoga is the means and method by which one consciously uplifts oneself, unites oneself with the Higher Reality. The embodied Divine is the ideal and pattern: he shows the path, himself walks the path and man can follow, if he chooses. The Biblical conception of the Son of GodGod made fleshas the intermediary between the human and the Divine, declaring, I am the Way and the Goal, expresses a very similar truth. The Divine takes a body for anotheroccultreason also. It is this: Matter or terrestrial life cannot be changedchanged radically, that is to say, transformed by the pure spiritual consciousness alone, lying above or within; also it is not sufficient to bring about only that much of change in terrestrial life which can be effected by the mere spiritual force acting in a general way. It looks as if the physical transformation which is what is meant by an ascension or emergence in the evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and higher status.
The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth at such a crisis of evolution. Earth and Man and man's earthly life need to be radically transfigured. The trouble and turbulence, the chaos and confusion that are now overwhelming this earth, indicate the acute tension before the release, the dtente of a NEW MANIFESTATION.
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A vaster formula, a greater scene.
Ever she circled towards some far-off Light:
--
And utter the magic formula of peace
And bring perfection to the scheme of things.
02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;
Interceptor of the listening of the soul,
--
The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.
In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And torture was the formula of delight,
Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her numbers and unerring formulas
She builds to clinch her summary of things.
02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
They formulate enigma's postulates
And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.
--
Their anarchy rammed into a formula
And from their giant randomness of Force,
--
And traced the last formula of limited things,
In transparent systems bodied termless truths,
--
Compressing Nature into a formula;
Their titan labour made all knowledge one,
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So the cry is for greater human values. Man needs food and shelter, goes without saying, but he yearns for other things also, air and light: he needs freedom, he needs culturehigher thoughts, finer emotions, nobler urges the field and expression of personal worth. The acquisition of knowledge, the creation of beauty, the pursuit of philosophy, art, literature, and science in their pure forms and for their own sake are things man holds dear to his heart. Without them life loses its charm and significance. Mind and sensibility must be free to roam, not turned and tied to the exclusive needs and interests of physical life, free, that is to say, to discover and create norms and ideals and truths that are values in themselves and also lend values to the matter-of-fact terrestrial life. It is not sufficient that all men should have work and wages, it is not sufficient that I all should have learnt the three R's, it is not sufficient that they should understand their rightssocial, political, economic and claim and vindicate them. Nor is it sufficient for men to r become merely useful or indispensablealthough happy and I contentedmembers of a collective body. The individual must be free, free in his creative joy to bring out and formulate, in thought, in speech, in action, in all the modes of expression, the truth, the beauty, the good he experiences within. An all-round culture, a well-developed mind, a well-organised life, a well-formed body, a harmonious working of all the members of the system at a high level of consciousness that is man's need, for there lies his self-fulfilment. That is the ideal of Humanismwhich the ancient Grco-Roman culture worshipped, which was again revived by the Renaissance and which once again became a fresh and living force after the great Revolution and is still the high light to which Science and modern knowledge turns.
The More Beyond
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him.2 It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this however an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps Socrates whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely, the genesis should be ascribed rather to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its fundamental character that which gave it its very namewas a protest against, a turning away from whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
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There is, however, a type of humanism that is specially known in Indiait is not human humanism, but, as it is called, divine humanism. That is to say, the human formula is maintained, but a new significance, a transcendent connotation is put into it. The general contour of the instrumentation is preserved, but the substance is transmuted. The brain, the heart and the physical consciousness not only change their direction, but their very nature and character. And the Divine himself is conceived of as such a Human Person for the norm of the human personality is an eternal verity in the divine consciousness.
Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to the human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms have been more or less symbols and figures having not merely human but a supra-human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila passes not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of consciousness cinmayabehind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.
03.01 - The New Year Initiation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the New Year Prayer the Mother has formulated for our sake. This is the turn She would have us give to our sadhana for the year. What is the special import of this new orientation? It is, one may say, to direct our efforts towards an objective expression, towards an application to life on the material plane.
One starts on the path of sadhana with an almost entire unconsciousness it is so in all evolutionary process. A goal is there, vague and indistinct, far off. Within him also the sadhaka feels an equally indefinite and indefinable urge, he seems to move without any fixed aim or purpose, with an urge simply to move and move on. This is what he feels as a yearning, as an aspirationcaraivete, as the Upanishad says. Then step by step as he progresses, his consciousness grows luminous, the aim also begins to take a clear and definite shape. The mind is able slowly to understand and grasp what it wants, the heart's yearning and attraction also begin to be transparent, quiet but deep. Still this cannot be called a change of nature, let alone transformation. Then only will our nature consent really to change when we become, when even our sense-organs become subject to our inner consciousness, when our actions and activities are inspired, guided and formed by the power and influence of this inner light.
03.02 - Aspects of Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"Unity was the sheet-anchor of Science up to now. But the latest theories seem to break up the universe into a mass of independent constituents each acting for itself. No doubt there is one Force still (if magnetism and electricity can be reduced to one formula as is sought to be done by Einstein), but it is a discontinuous unity in its manifestation at least. Science seems to be coming away from a materialistic Adwaita towards a restatement of the Sankhya idea."SRI AUROBINDO .
Every age has claimed to be modern and sought to establish its characteristic newness, the hall-mark that separates it from the preceding age.
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The scientific spirit, in one word, is rationalisationrationalisation of Mind as well as of Life. With regard to Mind, rationalisation means to get knowledge exclusively on the data of the senses; it is the formulation, in laws and principles, of facts observed by the physical organs, these laws and principles being the categories of the arranging, classifying, generalising faculty, called reason; its methodology also demands that the laws are to be as few as possible embracing as many facts as possible. Rationalisation of life means the government of life in accordance with these laws, so that the wastage in natural life due to the diversity and disparity off acts may be eliminated, at least minimised, and all movements of life ordered and organised in view of a single and constant purpose (which is perhaps the enhancement of the value of life). This rationalisation means further, in effect, mechanisation or efficiency, as its protagonists would prefer to call it. However, mechanistic efficiency, whether in the matter of knowledge or of lifeof mind or of morals was the motto of the early period of the gospel of science, the age of Huxley and Haeckel, of Bentham and the Mills. The formula no longer holds good either in the field of pure knowledge or in its application to life; it does not embody the aspiration and outlook of the contemporary mind, in spite of such inveterate rationalists as Russell and Wells or even Shaw (in Back to Methuselah, for example), who seem to be already becoming an anachronism in the present age.
The contemporary urge is not towards rationalisation, but rather towards irrationalisation. Orthodox science itself is taking greater and greater cognisance today of the irrational movements of nature, even of physical nature. Intuition and instinct are now welcomed as surer and truer instruments of knowledge and action than reason.
03.02 - The Gradations of Consciousness The Gradation of Planes, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If we regard the gradation of worlds or planes as a whole, we see them as a great connected complex movement; the higher precipitate their influences on the lower, the lower react to the higher and develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action. The material world has evolved life in obedience to a pressure from the vital plane, mind in obedience to a pressure from the mental plane. It is now trying to evolve supermind in obedience to a pressure from the supramental plane. In more detail, particular forces, movements, powers, beings of a higher world can throw themselves on the lower to establish appropriate and corresponding forms which will connect them with the material domain and, as it were, reproduce or project their action here. And each thing created here has, supporting it, subtler envelopes or forms of itself which make it subsist and connect it with forces acting from above. Man, for instance, has, besides his gross physical body, subtler sheaths or bodies by which he lives behind the veil in direct connection with supraphysical planes of consciousness and can be influenced by their powers, movements and beings. What takes place in life has always behind it preexistent movements and forms in the occult vital planes; what takes place in mind presupposes preexistent movements and forms in the occult mental planes. That is an aspect of things which becomes more and more evident, insistent and important, the more we progress in a dynamic Yoga.
But all this must not be taken in too rigid and mechanical a sense. It is an immense plastic movement full of the play of possibilities and must be seized by a flexible and subtle tact or sense in the seeing consciousness. It cannot be reduced to a too rigorous logical or mathematical formula.
The physical is not the only world; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the soul's home; others above with which we have little contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the gross physical and material plane.
03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Transcended was the human formula;
Man's heart that had obscured the Inviolable
03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The spirit, the pure self in man is formless; but his soul the spirit cast into the evolutionary mould in manifestationhas a form: it possesses a personal identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an imagea faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life,of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its evolutionary march through terrestrial life. A mystic poet says:
All dreams of the soul
03.04 - The Other Aspect of European Culture, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If then Europe can cut across the snares that Modernism has spread all about her and get behind the surface turmoils and ebullitions and seek that which she herself once knew and esteemed as the one thing needful, then will she really see what the East means, then only will she find the bond of indissoluble unity with Asia. For the Truth that Europe carried in her bosom is much bigger than anything she ever suspected even in her best days. And she carried it not with the full illumination and power of a Master, but rather in the twilight consciousness of a servant or a devotee. The Truth in its purity flowed there for the most part much under the main current of life, and its formulations in life were not its direct expressions and embodiments but echoes and images. It is Asia who grasps the Truth with the hand of the Master, the Truth in its full and absolute truth and it is Asia who can show in fact and life how to embody it integrally.
Europe's spiritual soul itself in the last analysis will be found to be only a derivative of Asia's own self. For all the Mysteries and Occult Disciplines the Christian, the Platonic, the Eleusinian and Orphic, the Kabalistic, the Druidicwhich lay imbedded in Europe's spiritual and religious genius, when traced further up to the very source, will carry us straight into Asia's lap, perhaps India's.
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
03.05 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We ask for freedom, liberty of the individual, self-determinationwell and good. But that does not mean the licence to do as one pleases, impelled by one's irrational idiosyncrasies. The individual must be truly individual, not a fractional being, the self must be the real self, not a shadow or surface formulation in order to have the full right to unfettered movement. Liberty, yes; but that means liberty for all which means again the other two terms of the great trinity, equality and fraternity. Individuality, yes; that means every individuality, in other words, solidarity. The two sides of the equation must be given equal value and equal emphasis. If the stress upon one leads to Nazism, Fascism or Stalinism, steam-rollered uniformity or streamlined regimentation, the death of the individual, the other emphasis leads to disintegration and disruption, to the same end in a different way. But in the world of today, after the victory in the last war over the Nazi conception of humanity, it seems as though the spirit of disruption has gone abroad, human consciousness has been atom-bombed into flying fragments; so we have the spectacle of all manner of parochialism pullulating on the earth, regional and ideologicalimperial blocs, nations, groups, parties have chequered ad infinitum, have balkanised human commonalty.
We badly needed a United Nations Organisation, but we are facing the utmost possible disunity. The lesson is that politics alone will not save us, nor even economics. The word has gone forth: what is required is a change of heart. The leaders of humanity must have a new heart grafted in place of the old. That is the surgical operation imperative at the moment. That heart will declare in its beats that the cosmos is not atomic but one and indivisible,ekam sat, neha nnsti kicana.
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him. It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this, however, an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps the father of European culture itself, Socrates, whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely the genesis should be ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance.It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character that which gave it its Very namewas a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
--
And yet there is a humanism that is proper to Indiait is not 'human humanism', but, as it is called, 'divine humanism'. That is to say, the human formula is maintained, but a new significance, a transcendent connotation is put into it. The general contour of the instrumentation is preserved, but the substance is transmuted. The brain, the heart and the physical consciousness not only change their direction, but their very nature and character. And the Divine Himself is conceived as such a Divine Person for the norm of the human personality in this view is an eternal verity in the divine consciousness.
Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other, the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms are more or less symbols and figures, having not merely a human but a suprahuman significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila takes place not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of the inner consciousness cinmayabehind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.
03.06 - Here or Otherwhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The question naturally turns upon the nature and the kind of workwhe ther there is a choice and selection in it. Gita speaks indeed of all works, ktsna-karmakt, but does that really mean any and every work that an ignorant man, an ordinary man steeped in the three Gunas does or can do? It cannot be so. For, although all activity, all energy has its source and impetus in the higher consciousness of the Divine, it assumes on the lower ranges indirect, diverted or even perverted formulations and expressions, not because of the inherent falsity of these so-called inferior strata, the instruments, but because of their temporary impurity and obscurity. There are evidently activities and impulsions born exclusively of desire, of attachment and egoism. There are habits of the body, urges of the vital, notions of the mind, there are individual and social functions that have no place in the spiritual scheme, they have to be rigorously eschewed and eliminated. Has not the Gita said, this is desire, this is passion born of the quality of Rajas? . . . There is not much meaning in trying to do these works unattached or to turn them towards the Divine. When you are unattached, when you turn to the Divine, these 'Simply drop away of themselves. Yes, there are social duties and activities and relations that inevitably dissolve and disappear as you move into the life divine. Some are perhaps tolerated for a period, some are occasions for the consciousness to battle and surmount, grow strong and pass beyond. You have to learn to go beyond and new-create your environment.
It was Danton who said, one carries not his country with him at the sole of his shoe. Even so you cannot hope to shift bodily your present social ensemble, place it wholesale in the divine life on the plea that it will be purified and transformed in the process. Purification is there indeed, but one must remember purification literally means burning and not a little of the past and present has to be burnt down to ashes.
03.09 - Sectarianism or Loyalty, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not sufficient to say that God is one and therefore wherever He is found and however He is found and whoever finds Him one must implicitly accept and obey and follow. God is one indeed: but it is equally true that he is multiple. God is not a point, but a limitless infinity, so that when one does reach Him one arrives at a particular spot, as it were, enters into only one of his many mansions. Likewise, God's manifestation upon earth has been infinitely diverse, his Vibhutis, Avataras, his prophets and viceregents have been of all sorts and kinds. Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and justification of creeds and dogmas. Only, it must be borne in mind, that one can be faithful even to a particular creed and dogma and yet transcend it, live a particular mode of life and yet possess at the back of it and as its support the very sense and consciousness of infinity itself. Where there is this synthetic and transcendent experience dogmatism has no place, nor conflict between creed and creed.
One can be as catholic and boundless as infinity, still one can and has to bow down to a special figure of it, since or if one who approaches it has a figure of his own. Just in the same way as when one is in the body, one has to live a particular life framed by the body, even the mind as well as the life are canalised in the mould of the body consciousness, and yet at the same time one can live in and through the inner consciousness immeasurably, innumerably in other bodies, in the unbarred expanse of the cosmic and the transcendent. The two experiences are not contradictory, rather they reinforce each other.
03.11 - Modernist Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A poeta true poetdoes not compose to exemplify a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path, a new organisation, a "new order", as it were, in the poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy its present inner urge. But solution of the problem does not lie in a sort of mechanical fabrication of novelties. A new creation is new, that is to say, fresh and living, not because of skilful manipulation of externals, but because of a new, a fresh and living inspiration. The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released.
It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the RomanticsWordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byroneach of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few poets have actually shown how or what that can be,a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzassuch lines, for example, from Eliot
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Tagore is modern, as modern as reasonably and sensibly one can be; he is a modern, but not a modernist. One is modern when one is inspired and moved by the spirit of the Time, one is modernist when one is bound to the letter, to the external formulas of the law of the Zeit-Geist. You remain modern if the new consciousness enters and dwells in your nature and character, you become modernist as soon as it degenerates into a tic and a mannerism.
The passage of mediaevalism to modernism can be defined as the passage from the local and parochial to the general and universal. The mediaeval consciousness is a segmented or linear consciousness: it is the view, at a time, from one particular angle of vision. The modern consciousness, on the other hand, is or tends to be a global view-point, a circular consciousness. The unilateral mentality proper to mediaevalism may be deep and penetrating and far-reaching, extending to the hidden and high realities, even to the highest and the most secretto God and Soul and Immortality; it would still be a one-sided vision and achievement. It is the characteristic function of-the modern consciousness to survey things not from a single point of view, but from all points of view, even the most disparate and incommensurable. The relativity of all experiencesnot necessarily their illusorinessis the great modern discovery; it is the parent of modern (scientific) scepticism and agnosticism; it is also the basis of a large, a global synthesis, which was never possible till now and which is the promise of to-morrow.
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Tagore is modern, because his modernism is based upon a truth not local and temporal, but eternal and universal, something that is the very bed-rock of human culture and civilisation. Indeed, Tagore is also ancient, as ancient as the Upanishads. The great truths, the basic realities experienced and formulated by the ancients ring clear and distinct in the core of all his artistic creation. Tagore's intellectual make-up may be as rationalistic and scientific as that of any typical modern man. Nor does he discard the good things (preya)that earth and life offer to man for his banquet; and he does not say like the bare ascetic: any vco vimucatha, "abandon everything else". But even like one of the Upanishadic Rishis, the great Yajnavalkya, he would possess and enjoy his share of terrestrial as well as of spiritual wealthubhayameva. In a world of modernism, although he acknowledges and appreciates mental and vital and physical values, he does not give them the place demanded for them. He has never forgotten the one thing needful. He has not lost the moorings of the soul. He has continued to nestle close to the eternal verities that sustain earth and creation and give a high value and purpose to man's life and creative activity.
In these iconoclastic times, we are liable, both in art and in life, to despise and even to deny certain basic factors which were held to be almost indispensable in the old world. The great triads the True, the Beautiful and the Good, or God, Soul and Immortalityare of no consequence to a modernist mind: these mighty words evoke no echo in the heart of a contemporary human being. Art and Life meant in the old world something decent, if not great. They were perhaps, as I have already said, framed within narrow limits, certain rigid principles that cribbed and cabined the human spirit in many ways; but they were not anarchic, they obeyed a law, a dharma, which they considered as an ideal, a standard to look up to and even live up to. The modernist is an anarchic being in all ways. He does not care for old-world verities which seem to him mere convention or superstition. Truth and Beauty and Harmony are non-existent for him: if at all they exist they bear a totally different connotation, the very opposite of that which is normally accepted.
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The intermediary faculty the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousness pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realitiesto take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.
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The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clo the our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.
The Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous, the physical, the material. Since the arrival of the Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need not speak any more of God and the gods and the divine principles indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something of what lies beyond intellect and reason.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Still it must be remembered that all these apparently diverse layers and degrees of being or consciousness or energy form essentially one indivisible unity and identity. What is called the highest and what is called the lowest are not in reality absolutely disparate and incommensurable entities: everywhere it is the highest that lies secreted and reigns supreme. The lowest is the highest itself seen from the reverse side, as it were: the norms and typal truths that obtain in the superconsciousness are also the very guiding formulas and principles in the secret heart of the Inconscience too, only they appear externally as deformations and caricatures of their true reality. But even here we can tap and release the full force of a superconscient energy. A particle of dead matter, we know today, is a mass of stilled energy, electrical and radiant in nature; even so an apparently inconscient entity is a packet of Superconsciousness in its highest potential of energy. The secret of releasing this atomic energy of the Spirit is found in the Science of Yoga.
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04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Can use the formulas of a moment's mood
To weigh unconscious lips with words from Fate:
04.03 - The Eternal East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has been pointed out and accepted generally as true is that of the spiritual East and the worldly or materialist West. Crudely and categorically formulated the truth remains no longer true. There is a very large amount of worldliness in the East, on the one hand, and on the other, mystics and spiritual seekers or leaders are not a rare phenomenon in the West. However, it can be said and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented, organised, almost consummated there in a supreme manner. Even as the science of Matter has reached its apotheosis in the West.
Recognising the difference, the momentous question confronting us is what should be our next move: must we accept the one and reject the other for the sake of human progress and fulfilment, or that a harmony and synthesis is possible and is demanded?
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is an aim, a goal to which humanity moves in obedience to a cosmic purpose, in accordance with a cosmic law. The principle of evolution has given an expression of formula to this cosmic law and purpose, although it is more or less an outward expression and in reference to an outward phenomenon.
The different limbs of an organism are held together and they work together harmoniously. The whole world, as we are finding it today, is indissolubly one. There is an inter relation and interaction that compel them all to stand together or fall together. This is, however, a static unity and harmony, a harmony that is in the being, in essence. For in the outward working there is always a play of discordquarrels and rivalries, competition and conflict, struggle and battle. Indeed this seems to be the rule, the other seems more an ideal than a fact. The unity that is found actually is rather the unity of a locked fight. Within the individual the same thing is there. There is a maladjustment among the organs and limbs, not only physically but also psychologically. But all the same beyond and beside this play of discord there is an inherent and overruling unity and harmony which creates the personality or individuality of the human person. The characteristic of the human person is his forward-looking gazehe has a purpose in life. This is exactly the dynamic element, the something more that is needed for the fulfilment of the organic unity. This element is what we know as the principle of progress which is the psychological name for evolution. In other words, there is in man and in the world not only a static unity and harmony in essence, but a progressive unity and harmony in manifestation. The individual moves towards the health and growth of the body and mind and the spirit. If one life is not sufficient for the purpose, as some seers declare, several lives are at the disposal of the individual to achieve it. In what sense can the same or something similar be said of the collective or group life?
04.04 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
This means to say that with the knowledge that is given us today, one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind to the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
04.06 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
This means that with the knowledge that is given us today one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind, the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
04.08 - An Evolutionary Problem, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Evolution is purposive: not because it has had always a mentally conscious aim before it, for the mind is a later production, but because the purpose is latent within as an involved force and is gradually unrolled and worked out. It is not as indeterminate and unpredictable as Bergson would have it; it has a veiled determination, a disposition implanted in the very movement by the stress of an apparent unconsciousness seeking conscious formulation. We might also say, reverting to our analogy, that the seed sprouts towards light and air, because it had absorbed light and air in its original formation out of the flower blooming in the open space: the impress of that contact is taken into the very grain of its substance, in its chromosomes and genesit remains there as an indelible memory (although not of the human cerebral variety). It is no wonder therefore that an inner urge towards light gradually leads towards the formation of the instrument for sight. The organism may have no notion of the external eye, but the external eye is only a projection of an inner eye that lies imbedded in the sensory continuum. Behind the physical eye there is a subtle eye, the eye of the eye, as the Upanishad calls it, the secret gaze of an involved consciousness in the apparently unconscious.
The whole articulation of the external organism is, as we know, contained in a secret disposition of elements within the cellnot in the way, as was once supposed, viz., that a whole full-grown tree lies in a miniature form within the seed andgrowth simply means a gradual enlargement of that form but that there is a pattern of ultimate particlesvital quantaa rhythm and vibration of life energy, that is the origin, the formal and efficient cause, of the material form. Deeper still, behind the blind instinctive urge of life, the unconsciousness that is the inertia of matter, there is a consciousness, a vision, a supernal self-conscious energy that inspires, guides, fashions the whole evolutionary scheme in the large as well as in all details.
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
III
05.01 - At the Origin of Ignorance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine Consciousness, basically and essentially one and unique, has inherent in it four cardinal attributesprinciples of its modulation, modes of its vibrationdeveloping into or appearing as four aspects and personalities. They are Light, Force, Delight and Knowledge. Originally and in the supreme status the four movements are one and indivisible and form one indissoluble identity with the Divine's pure essence and absolute unity. The differentiation or variability there in the Immutable is a play immanent in the integral self-nature of the Supreme. The one and the many form on that level a single entity, an undivided whole: the unity running in and through and holding the multiplicity and the multiplicity being the playfulness of the unity. Multiplicity, however, implies freedom of movement in the Unique. In other words, the very character of variability is the absolute freedom of the variables; the play consists precisely in the free choice and self-determination of the partners, the differentiated units. For a formation in the Divine Consciousness, an individualised formulation of its being must necessarily have the Divine's own freedom. Now, the result of this freedom is somewhat unexpected, to put it in the human way, that is to say, it was not explicit at that point, in that field of consciousness. For the freedom, in the normal course of its play, reached a degree or arrived at a mode which brought about I a shift and an impulsion meaning a rift and a clear separation: I the momentum of the free movement carried the individual formation beyond the range of its sense of unity and identity with all and the One. More and more it isolated itself, limiting itself to its own orbit and to its own fund of energy. This isolation, it must be noted, occurs at the origin without any sense of perversity or revolt or disobedience on the part of the free entity, as the legend formulated by the human mind imaged it. The movement of freedom and individual formation in its urge crosses, as it were, a borderline, passes from the safe zone within the Divine's own status into a different zone, creates it, as a matter of fact, by that overzealous and self-concentrated free movement. But, as I have said, there is no premeditation or arrire pense or bad will or spirit of contradiction there at the origin of the deviation. It is no original sin: it is a spontaneous, almost a logical consequence, an inevitable expression of the freedom that particulars enjoy as part and parcel of the Divine Universal.
And yet the result is strange and revolutionary. The game once begun develops its own scheme and pattern and modality. For that crucial step in the movement of freedom, that definite moving away, the assertion of complete independence and isolation immediately brought about a reversal of realities, a complete negation of the original attri butes. Thus Light became obscurity or Inconscience, Life became death, Delight became pain and suffering, Power became incapacity, Knowledge became Ignorance, and Truth became falsehood. In other words, Spirit became forthright Matter.
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine brings down with himself his shaft of light, and the light, as it spreads, begins to scatter and dissolve the clouds of ignorance. The Divine comes here below and as he formulates and concentrates his consciousness in or as an individualised channel, the power of the consciousness becomes dynamic and concrete and works out the desired change in th material plane. In the descent the Divine has to assume the lower potentials on the inferior levels and this involves an apparent veiling and lessening of his higher and divine degrees. In other words, the Divine in becoming human accepts and embraces in that embodiment all that humanity normally means, its weaknesses and frailties, its obstacles and difficulties, all the ignorance and inconscience. This sacrifice he has agreed to, has undertaken in order to create out of it a golden body, a radiant matter, a heavenly or divinised earth.
God made man, the spirit become flesh: this is Grace, the benediction of the Holy One upon the sinful earth. The working of Grace in one of its characteristic movements has been beautifully envisaged in esoteric Christianity. The burden of sin that is to say, of weakness, impurity and ignorancelies so heavy upon man, the force of gravitation is so absolute, that it is divine intervention alone, and in the most physical sense, which can save him. God takes upon himself man's load and relieves him of it: thus freed he can soar up easily and join the company of the Happy in heaven alongside God. This is the ransom paid by God to His Enemy, the vicarious atonement suffered by the Divine, the cross he has to bear when he comes upon this earth, into this vale of tears. I t is said, in terms of human feeling, pity so moved him that he left the happy abode of heaven, came down among men and lived like one of them, sharing their sorrow and pain and, what is divine, taking up the evil into himself, drinking, as it were, out of the poisoned bowl, so that man, frail mortal creature, may escape his doom.
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Sri Aurobindo aims at a power of consciousness, a formulation of the divine being that is integral. It takes up the whole man and it embraces all men: it works on a cosmic scale individually and collectively. That force of consciousness identifies itself with each and every individual being in all its parts and limbs; establishing itself in and working through their normal and habitual functionings, it moulds and refashions the earthly vessel. It is a global power, first of all, because it is the supreme creative Power, the original energy of consciousness that brought out this manifested universe, the matrix or the nodus that holds together and in an inviolable unity and harmony the fundamental truth-aspects of the' one and indivisible Reality. This luminous source and substance of all created things consists of their basic true truths which assume disguised and deformed appearances under the present conditions of the world. It is therefore, in the second instance, the secret power in created things which manifests in them as the evolutionary urge, which drives them to rediscover their reality and re-form the appearance as the direct expression and embodiment of this inner soul.
The Divine incarnates, as an individual in the concrete material actuality, this double aspect of the utter truth and reality. There are, what may be called, intermediary incarnations, some representing powersaspects of the Divinein the higher mental or overmental levels of consciousness, others those of the inner heart, yet others again those of the dynamic vital consciousness. But the integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the futureeven perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what we were made familiar with was more or less an image of hell, not hell itself, a region or experience in the vital (may be even in the mental): real hell is not the mass of desires or weaknesses of the flesh, not "living flesh", but dead Matter whose other name is Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lowerBrahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the Worldmet and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate).
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the particle of divinity in each, the developing consciousness the spark of Fire, the ray of Light the immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of earthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.
So the individualisation and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the surface, only when they obey and subserve the culture of the soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment of the true personality.
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The individualisation of the mind, its organisation as a special formation, as a vehicle of the true light, the light of the Psychic consciousness is comparatively easy for a man. Mind is the first member of the lower sphere that is taken up and dealt with by the soul; for it is the highest and the most characteristic element in man and less dense and less subject to the darkness inherent in human nature. The mental individual persists the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives and may survive very long the disruption of the vital being. This vital being is next in the rung to be taken up, organised and individualised by and around the psychic being. The organisation of the vital being in view of a particular object or aim in ordinary life is common enough: the purpose is limited, the scope restricted. Great men of action have done it and one has to do it more or less to be successful in life. This, however, may be called organisation; it is not individualisation in the true sense, much less personalisation. A limb is individualised, personalised only when it is an instrument and formation of the soul consciousness, the psychic being. And the vital is not easily amenable to such a role. For, it is the dynamic element, the effective power of life and it has acquired a strong nature and a definite function in its earthly relations. Naturally, there is a secret drive and an occult inspiration behind over-riding or guiding all immediate and apparent forces and happenings: in and through these the shape of things to come is being built up. In the meanwhile, however, actually the vital is an executive agent of the lower consciousness: it is an anonymous force of universal nature canalised into a temporary figure that is the normal individual man. The individualisation of the vital being would mean an immortal formulation of an immortal soul as energy consciousness with a specific role for the Divine to play. It maintains its identity, its personality independent of the vicissitudes of the physical body: it continues to function as a divine being, a godhead, to work for mankind and the world. The popular legend has imaged this phenomenon in the mystic figure of an immortal Aswatthama and Vibhishana still wandering in earth's atmosphere.
Finally, it is the turn of the body to become individualised, personalised, that is to say, when it takes up the disposition and configurationof the psychic person and individual. The first stage is that of a subtle body individualised, a radiant form of etherealised elements consisting of the concentrated light particles of the divine consciousness of the Psyche. This too is an immortalisation of the personal identity which can be achieved and is achieved by the gnostic man who is to come, who will wholly psychicise and divinise his personality. The second stage is the reorganisation and individualisation of the material sheath itself. The very cells of the body are impregnated with the radiant substance of the supreme spiritual consciousness; they live the life of the spiritual individual, the personal divine embodied in the individual. When the whole process is gone through and the work clone, the individual body, physically too, shares in and attains the immortality of the soul. The body is firm enough to maintain its physical identity and yet plastic enough to change in the manner and to the degree demanded of it at any time.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Positivists are those who swear by facts. Facts to them mean naturally facts attested in the end by sense-experience. To a positivist the only question that matters and that needs to be answered and can be answered is whether a thing is or is not physically: other questions are otiose, irrelevant, misleading. So problems of the Good, of the Beautiful, of God are meaningless. When one says this is good, that is bad, well, it is a proposition that cannot be related to any fact, it is a subjective personal valuation. In the objective world a thing simply is or is not, one cannot say it is good or it is bad. The thing called good by one is called bad by another, the same thing that is good to you now will appear bad at another time. This is a region absolutely of personal and variable idiosyncrasy. The same with regard to the concept of beauty. That a thing is beautiful or ugly is a subjective judgment; it is not and cannot be an objective statement. Beauty is a formula in your mind and imagination, it is a changing mode of your apprehension. The concept of God too fares no better. God exists: it is a judgment based upon no fact or facts of sense-experience. However we may analyse it, it is found to have no direct or even indirect but inevitable rapport with the field of actual reality. There is between the two an unbridgeable hiatus. This is a position restated in a modern style, familiar to the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason.
There are two ways off acing the problem. First, the Kantian way which cuts the Gordian knot. We say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason, viz.,the Practical Reason; while the realities given by the senses and the judgments of the logical mind are of another section. It may be said one is physical, the other metaphysical. The positivists limit their field of enquiry and knowledge to the physical: they seek to keep the other domain quite apart as something imaginary, illusory, often unnecessary and not unoften harmful to true human interest.
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Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws purporting to govern the physical bases of life claim recognition, but they stand on precarious grounds. The laws of natural selection, of heredity or genetics are applicable within a very restricted frame of facts. The variety of material substances revolves upon the gamut of 92 elements based upon 4 or 5 ultimate types of electric unitand that is sufficient to make us wonder. But the variety in life-play is simply incalculablefrom the amoeba or virus cell to man, what a bewildering kaleidoscope and each individual in each group is unique in its way! The few chromosomes that seem to be the basis of all diversity do not explain the mystery the mystery becomes doubly mysterious: how does a tiny seed contain the thing that is to become a banyan tree, how does a speck of plasma bring forth from within an object of Hamletian dimensions! What then is this energy or substance of life welling out irrepressively into multitudinous forms and modes? The chemical elements composing an organic body do not wholly exhaust its composition; there is something else besides. At least in one field, the life element has received recognition and been given an independent name and existence. I am obviously referring to the life element in food-stuff which has been called vitamin.
Life looks out of matter as a green sprout in the midst of a desert expanse. But is matter really so very different and distinct from life? Does Matter mean no Life? Certain facts and experiments have thrown great doubt upon that assumption. An Indian, a scientist of the first order in the European and modern sense, has adduced proofs that obliterate the hard and fast line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. He has demonstrated -the parallelism, if not the identity, of the responses of those two domains: we use the term fatigue in respect of living organisms only, but Jagadish Chandra Bose says and shows, that matter too, a piece of metal for instance, undergoes fatigue. Not only so, the graph, the periodicity of the reactions as shown by a living body under a heightened or diminished stimulus or the influence of poison or drug is repeated very closely by the so-called dead matter under the same treatment.
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Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards thought and consciousness is linked with the nervous system (of which the brain is an extension). Now the same Indian wizard who first, scientifically speaking, linked up the non-living with the living, has also demonstrated, if not absolutely, at least to a high degree of plausibility, that the plant also possesses a kind of rudimentary nervous system (although we accept more easily a respiratory system there). All this, however, one has to admit, is still a far cry from any intimation of consciousness in Matter. Yet if life is admitted to be involved in matter and consciousness is found to be involved in life, then the unavoidable conclusion is that Matter too must contain involved in it a form of consciousness. The real difficulty in the way of attri buting consciousness to Matter is our conception of consciousness which we usually identify with articulate thought, intelligence or reason. But these are various formations of consciousness, which in itself is something else and can exist in many other forms and formulations.
One remarkable thing in the material world that has always attracted and captivated man's attention, since almost the very dawn of his consciousness, is the existence of a pattern, of an artistic layout in the composition and movement of material things. When the Vedic Rishi sings out: "These countless stars that appear glistening night after night, where do they vanish during the day?" he is awed by the inviolable rhythm of the Universe, which other sages in other climes sang as the music of the spheres. The presence of Design in Nature has been in the eyes of Believers an incontrovertible proof of the existence of a Designer. What we want to say is not that a watch (if we regard the universe as a watch) presupposes the existence of a watch-maker: we say the pattern itself is the expression of an idea, it involves a conception not imposed or projected from outside but inherent in itself. The Greek view of the artist's mode of operation is very illuminating in this connection. The artist, according to this view, when he carves out a statue for example, does not impose upon the stone a figure that he has only in his mind, but that the stone itself contains the figure, the artist has the vision to see it, his chisel follows the lines he sees imbedded in the stone. It is why we say that the geometry in the structure of a crystal or an atom or an astronomical system, the balance and harmony, the symmetry and polarity that govern the composition of objects and their relations, the blend of colour schemes, the marshalling of lines and the building of volumes, in a word, the artistic make-up, perfect in detail and in the ensemble that characterise all nature's body and limbs and finally the mathematical laws that embrace and picture as it were Nature's movements, all point to the existence of a truth, a reality whose characteristic marks are or are very much like those of consciousness and Idea-Force. We fight shy of the wordconsciousness for it brings in a whole association of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy. But in our anxiety to avoid a ditch let us not fall over a precipice. If it is blindness to see nothing but the spirit, it is not vision to see nothing but Matter.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The principle of indeterminacy carries two revolutionary implications. First, that it is not possible to determine the movement of the ultimate particles of matter individually and severally, it is not possible even theoretically to follow up the chain of modulations of an electron from its birth to its dissolution (if such is the curve of its destiny), as Laplace considered it quite possible for his super-mathematician. One cannot trace the complete evolution of each and every or even one particular particle, not because of a limitation in the human capacity, but because of an inherent impossibility in the nature of things. In radioactive substances, for example, there is no ground or data from which one can determine which particle will go off or not, whether it will go off the chance that seems to reign here. In radiation too, there is no formula, and no formula can be framed for determining the course of a photon in relation to a half-reflecting surface, whether it will pass through or be reflected. In this field of infinitesimals what we know is the total behaviour of an assemblage of particles, and the laws of nature are only laws of average computation. Statistics has ousted the more exact and rigid arithmetics. And statistics, we know, is a precarious science: the knowledge it gives is contingent, contingent upon the particular way of arranging and classifying the data. However, the certainty of classical mechanistic knowledge is gone, gone too the principle of uniformity of nature.
The second element brought in in the indeterminacy picture is the restoration of the "subject" to its honoured or even more than the honoured place it had in the Mediaeval Ages, and from which it was pulled down by young arrogant Science. A fundamental question is now raised in the very methodology of the scientific apparatus. For Science, needless to say, is first and foremost observation. Now it is observed that the very fact of observation affects and changes the observed fact. The path of an electron, for example, has to be observed; one has then to throw a ray of lighthurl a photonupon it: the impact is sufficient to deflect the electron from the original path. If it is suggested that by correction and computation, by a backward calculation we can deduce the previous position, that too is not possible. For we cannot fix any position or point that is not vitiated by the observer's interference. How to feel or note the consistency of a thing, if the touch itself, the temperature of the finger, were sufficient to change the consistency? The trouble is, as the popular Indian saying goes, the very amulet that is to exorcise the ghost is possessed by the ghost itself.
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Einstein's was, perhaps, the most radical and revolutionary solution ever proposed. Indeed, it meant the reversal of the whole scientific outlook, but something of the kind was an imperative need in order to save Science from inconsistencies that seemed to be inherent in it. The scientific outlook was vitiated, Einstein said, because we started from wrong premises; two assumptions mainly were responsible for the bank-ruptcy which befell latter-day Science. First, it was assumed that a push and pulla force (a gravitational or, more generally, a causal force) existed and that acted upon isolated and independent particles strewn about; and secondly, they were strewn about in an independently existing time and an independently existing space. Einstein has demonstrated, it seems, successfully that there is no Time and no Space actually, but times and spaces (this reminds one of a parallel conception in Sankhya and Patanjali) , that time is not independent of space (nor space of time) but that time is another co-ordinate or dimension necessary for all observation in addition to the three usual co-ordinates (or dimensions). This was the explanation he found of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect any difference in the velocity of light whether it moved with or against a moving object, which is an inconsistency according to the mechanistic view. 1 The absolute dependence of time and space upon each other was further demonstrated by the fact that it was absolutely impossible to synchronise two distant clocks (moving with different speeds and thus forming different systems) with perfect accuracy, or determine exactly whether two events happened simultaneously or not. In the final account of things, this relative element that varies according to varying particulars had to be eliminated, sublated. In order to make a law applicable to all fieldsfrom the astronomical through the normal down to the microscopic or sub-atomicin an equally valid manner, the law had to divest itself of all local colour. Thus, a scientific law became a sheer 'mathematical formula; it was no longer an objective law that governed the behaviour of things, but merely a mental rule or mnemonics to string together as many diverse things as possible in order to be able to memorise them easily.
Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics, i.e., move in the line of least distance). Space is not a plain surface, smooth and uniform, but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely geometrical and science in the end resolves itself into geometry: the laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and psychological factors.
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The constancy of the velocity of light, it must be noted, is not altogether an objective fact: it is a supposition by which Einstein tried to explain certain anomalies in previous theories. It is really, as some have pointed out (e.g. Hans ReichenbachAtom and Cosmosp 136), a mental formula, part of a built-in structure, arbitrary to a certain extent which is so arranged that the speed becomes constant and equal for systems in different states of motion.
Physics and Philosophy, by Sir James Jeans.
05.08 - An Age of Revolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The search for a universal principle of Nature is a meta-physical as well as a scientific preoccupation. In ancient days, fo example, we had the Water of Thales or the Fire of Heraclitus as the one original unifying principle of this kind. With the coming of the Renascence and the New Illumination we laughed them out and installed instead the mysterious Ether. For a long time this universalreigned supreme and now that too has gone the way of its predecessors. We thought for a time that we had found in Electric Energy the one sovereign principle in Nature. At a time when we had a few elementsdiscrete, different, fundamental units that in their varying combinations built up the composite structure of Nature, apart from the fact that they reposed finally on the ultimate unifying principle of Ether, it was found also that they all behaved in a uniform and identical and therefore predictable manner. The time and the place (and the mass) being given, everything went according to a pattern and a formula, definite, fixed, mathematically rigid. Even the discovery of one element after another till the number reached the famous figure 92 (itself following a line of mathematically precise and inevitable development) did not materially alter the situation and caused no tribulation. For on further scrutiny a closer unity revealed itself: the supposed disparity in the substance of the various elements was found to be an illusion, for they all appeared now as different organisations or dispositions of the same electric energy (although the identity of electric energy with radiant energy was not always very clear). Thus we could conclude that as the substance was the same, its mode of working also would be' uniform and patterned. In other words, the mechanistic conception still ruled our view' of Nature. That means, the ultimate units, the particles (of energy) that compose Nature are like sea-sands or water-drops, each one is fundamentally similar to any other and all behave similarly, reacting uniformly to the same forces that act upon them.
Well, it is now found that they do not do so. However same or similar constitutionally, each unit is sui generisand its movement cannot be predicted. That movement does not depend upon its mass or store of energy or its position in a pattern, as a wholly mechanistic conception would demand: it is something incalculable, one should say even, erratic. In a radioactive substance, the particle that is shot out, becomes active, cannot be predetermined by any calculation, even if that is due to a definitely and precisely arranged bombardment. So we have come to posit a principle of uncertainty, as a very fundamental law of Nature. It practically declares that the ultimate particle is an autonomou unit, it is an' individual, almost a personality, and seems to have a will of its own. A material unit acts very much like a biological unit: it does not obey mechanically, answer mechanically as an automaton, but seems to possess a capacity for choice, for assent or refusal, for a free determination. The mechanistic view presented is due to an average functioning. The phenomenon has been explained by a very apt image. It is like an army. A group of soldiers, when they are on parade, look all similar and geometrically patterned: each is just like another and all move and march in the same identical manner. But that' is when you look at the whole, the collectivity, but looked individually, each one regains his separate distinct personality, each having his own nature and character, his own unique history: there no two are alike, each is non pareil and behaves differently, incalculably.
05.09 - The Changed Scientific Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Science has not spiritualised (or idealised or mentalised) the world; it has not spiritualised itself. Agreed. But what it has done is remarkable. First, with its new outlook it has cut away the ground from where it was wont to give battle to religion and spirituality, it has abjured its cast-iron strait-jacket mentality which considered that senses and syllogism encompass all knowledge and objects of knowledge. It has learnt humility and admits of the possibility of more things there being in heaven and earth which are not amenable to its fixed co-ordinates. Secondly, it has gone at times even beyond this attitude of benevolent neutrality. For certain of its conclusions, certain ways of formulation seem to echo other truths, other manners. That is to say, if Science by itself is unable to reach or envisage the spiritual outlook, yet the position it has reached, the vistas it envisages seem to be not perhaps exactly one with, but in line with what our vision (of the scientific world) would be like if once we possess the spiritual eye. Matter, Science says today, is energy and forms of matter, objects, are various vibrations of this one energy. What is this energy? According to science, it is electrical, radiant, ethereal (Einstein replaces "ether" by "field")biological science would venture to call it life energy. You have only to move one step farther and arrive at the greater and deeper generalisationMatter is a mode of the energy of consciousness, all forms of Matter are vibrations of consciousness.
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05.10 - Knowledge by Identity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In seeking to disvalue the principle of identity as a fundamental element in knowing, Prof. Das brings in to witness on his side the logical copula. Some logicians, of course, assert a parallelism if not identity between the laws of thought and the laws of language, language being conceived as the very imagea photographof thought, but the truth of the matter is that it is and it is not so, as in many other things. However, here when it is stated that the copula disjoining the subject and the predicate is the very pattern of all process of knowledge, one mistakes, we are afraid, a scheme or a formula, for the thing itself, a way of understanding a fact for the fact itself. Such a formula for understanding, however it may be valid for more or less analytical languages, those of later growth, need not and did not have the same propriety in respect of other older languages. We know the evolution of language has been in the direction of more and more disjunction of its component limbs even like the progression of the human mind and intellect. The modern analytical languages with their army of independent prepositions have taken the place of the classical languages which were predominantly inflexional. The Greek and Latin started the independent prepositional forms in the form of a fundamentally inflexional structure. Still further back, in Sanskrit for example, the inflexional form reigns supreme. Prefixes and affixes served the role of prepositions. And if we move further backward, the synthetic movement is so complete that the logical components (the subject, the copula, the predicate) are fused together into one symbol (the Chinese ideogram). We are here nearer to the original nature and pattern of knowledgea single homogeneous movement of apperception. There is no sanctity or absoluteness in the logical disposition of thought structure; the Aristotelian makes it a triplicity, the Indian Nyaya would extend the dissection to five or seven limbs. But whatever the logical presentation, the original psychological movement is a single indivisible lan and the Vedantic fusion of the knower, the knowledge and the known in identity remains the fundamental fact.
Calcutta Review, 1948 August-September.
05.11 - The Soul of a Nation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not believe that India was ever completely dead or hopelessly moribund: her soul, although not always in front, was ever present as a living force, presiding over and guiding her destiny. That is why there is a perennial capacity for renewal in her and the capacity to go through dire ordeals. And to live up to her genius, she too must know how to march with the time, that is to say, not to cling to old and past formsto be faithful to the ancient soul does not mean eternising the external frames and formulas that expressed that soul one time or another. Indeed the soul becomes alive and vigorous when it finds a new disposition of the life plan which can embody and translate a fresh creative activity, a new fulfilment emanating from the depths of the soul.
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05.12 - The Revealer and the Revelation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
One knows the Revealer for one becomes it. Knowledge by identity is the characteristic of spiritual knowledge. If one keeps oneself separate and seeks to apprehend the Divine as an object outside, the Divine escapes or is caught only by the trail it leaves, its echoes and shadows, its apparent qualities and attributes. But one with the Divine, the being realises and possesses it in full consciousness, the Revealer reveals himself as such (vute tanum swm) and not merely in or as his phenomenal formulations.
WhoSri Aurobindo
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We may try to illustrate by examples, although it is a rather dangerous game and may tend to put into a too rigid and' mathematical formula something that is living and variable. Still it will serve to give a clearer picture of the matter. Napoleon, evidently was a child of Mahakali; and Caesar seems to have been fashioned largely by the principle of Maheshwari; while Christ or Chaitanya are clearly emanations in the line of Mahalakshmi. Constructive geniuses, on the other hand, like the great statesman Colbert, for example, or Louis XIV, Ie grand monarque, himself belong to a family (or gotra, as we say in India) that originated from Mahasaraswati. Poets and artists again, although generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the godhead that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, LoveMahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and our Kalidasa. Michael Angelo in his fury of inspirations seems to have been impelled by Mahakali, while Mahalakshmi sheds her genial favour upon Raphael and Titian; and the meticulous care and the detailed surety in a Tintoretto makes us think of Mahasaraswati's grace. Mahasaraswati too seems to have especially favoured Leonardo da Vinci, although a brooding presence of Maheshwari also seems to be intermixed there.
For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is another concept in Whitehead which seems to be moulded after a parallel concept in Sri Aurobindo: it is with regard to the working out of the process of creation, the mechanism of its dynamism. It is almost a glimpse into the occult functioning of the world forces. Whitehead speaks of two principles that guide the world process, first, the principle of limitation, and second, the principle of ingress. The first one Sri Aurobindo calls the principle of concentration (and of exclusive concentration) by which the infinite and the eternal limits himself, makes himself finite and temporal and infinitesimal, the universal transforms itself into the individual and the particular. The second is the principle of descent, which is almost the corner-stone in Sri Aurobindo's system. There are layers of reality: the higher forces and formulations enter into the lower, work upon it and bring about a change and transformation, purification and redemption. All progress and evolution is due to this influx of the higher, the deeper into , the lower and superficial plane of existence.
There is one concept in Whitehead which seems rather strange to us; it is surely a product of the brain-mind. God, according to him, is not the creator: he is only the Redeemer, he is a shaper but not the source and origin of things. That is because he thinks that if God is made the creator of the world, he would be held responsible for the evil there. This difficulty comes when one thinks of God too much in the popular anthropomorphic way, like someone seated above the world and passing judgment upon a world which is not his doing. God is perhaps a lover of the world, but not its Mastera certain Christian outlook says. According to Sri Aurobindo, God is a triple reality in his transcendental, cosmic and individual aspect. In creating the world, God creates, that is to say, manifests himself. And Evil is an evolute in the process of God's self-creation through self-limitation: it proceeds to self-annihilation and even self-transmutation in a farther process of God's self-unfoldment in world and Nature.
05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has his being; according to others, the same may lead to a very different consummation, to Nothingness, the Great Void, Nihil. All existence is bounded by something unknown and intangible which differs according to your luck or taste,one would almost say to your line of approach, put philosophically, according either to the positive pole or the negative, God or Non-existence. The second alternative seems to be an inevitable corollary of the particular conception of the individual that is entertained by some, viz.,the individual existing only in relation to individuals. Indeed the leader of the French school, Jean-Paul Sartrenot a negligible playwright and novelistseems to conceive the individual as nothing more than the image formed in other individuals with whom he comes in contact. Existence literally means standing out or outside (ex+sistet), coming out of one-self and living in other's consciousnessas one sees one's exact image in another's eye. It is not however the old-world mystic experience of finding one's self in other selves. For here we have an exclusively level or horizontal view of the human personality. The personality is not seen in depth or height, but in line with the normal phenomenal formation. It looks as though, to save personality from the impersonal dissolution to which all monistic idealism leads, the present conception seeks to hinge all personalities upon each other so that they may stand by and confirm each other. But the actual result seems to have been not less calamitous. When we form and fashion each other, we are not building with anything more substantial than sand. Personalities are thus mere eddies in the swirl of cosmic life, they rise up and die down, separate and melt into each other and have no consistency and no reality in the end. The freedom too which is ascribed to such individuals, even when they feel it so, is only a sham and a make-believe. Within Nature nothing is free, all is mechanical lawKarma is supreme. The Sankhya posits indeed many Purushas, free, lodged in the midst of Prakriti, but there the Purusha is hardly an active agent, it is only an inactive, passive, almost impotent, witness. The Existentialist, on the contrary, seeks to make of the individual an active agent; he is not merely being, imbedded or merged in the original Dasein, mere existence, but becoming, the entity that has come out, stood out in its will and consciousness, articulated itself in name and form and act. But the person that stands out as part and parcel of Prakriti, the cosmic movement, is, as we have said, only an instrument, a mode of that universal Nature. The true person that informs that apparent formulation is something else. .
To be a person, it is said, one must be apart from the crowd. A person is the "single one", one who has attained his singularity, his individual wholeness. And the life's work for each individual person is to make the crowd no longer a crowd, but an association of single ones. But how can this be done? It is not simply by separating oneself from the crowd, by dwelling upon oneself that one can develop into one's true person. The individuals, even when perfect single ones, do not exist by themselves or in and through one another. The mystic or spiritual perception posits the Spirit or God, the All-self as the background and substance of all the selves. Indeed, it is only when one finds and is identified with the Divine in oneself that one is in a position to attain one's true selfhood and find oneself in other selves. And the re-creation of a crowd into such divine individuals is a cosmic work in which the individual is at best a collaborator, not the master and dispenser. Anyway, one has to come out of the human relationship, rise above the give-and-take of human individualshowever completely individual each one may beand establish oneself in the Divine's consciousness which is the golden thread upon which is strung all the assembly of individuals. It is only in and through the Divine, the Spiritual Reality and Person, that one enters into true relation and dynamic harmony with others.
The truth of the personality is not to be found in its horizontal, but vertical dimension. The Existentialist speaks of the existence (standing out) of the human person as a transcendence. But real transcendence is not so much in coming out as in going up and beyond. To be outside oneself is not always to transcend oneself: to be above oneself is the real transcendence. Man is a true and free person only when he is lord of Prakriti, dominating and commanding Nature, when he is identified with Ishwara, the supreme Person, the Master, and becomes an incarnate will and consciousness of His. The soul in ignorance and in ignorant relation with others must rise and envisage its archetype in the Supreme Divine, as a free formulation of an Idea-Force of the Infinite.
If we do not keep in view this vertical transcendence and confuse it with immanence, we are likely to arrive at queer conclusions, as for example, one Existentialist says: polarity being an essential truth of the reality, the law of day and night is an eternal and immutable law and therefore, God cannot subsist as pure love; there must be also anger in him. In fact, God too is a becoming God as the human being. The limitation of such a view, characteristically Germanic and intellectual, is evident.
05.17 - Evolution or Special Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
According to the Yogic or occult view of things, however, the two conceptions that human mind sets against each other need not be and are not contradictory. Indeed both are true and both are factors working out the progress of life. Evolution is a movement upward, the urge of consciousness to grow and expand and rise to a higher and greater articulation: the change follows a scale of degrees. But there comes a point in the progressive march when a change of degree means a change of kind and the phenomenon presents itself as a sudden, unforeseen mutation. This is due to the fact that there happens at the moment, in answer to a last call as it were from below, a descent of consciousness from the higher into the lower. All the grades of being or consciousness are always there in the cosmic infinity, only it is a matter of gradual manifestation in the physical world. The higher scales are kept in the background,the march of life starts from the lowest, the material rung. One by one they manifest or descend, formulate themselvesin the lower as these grow and rise and get ready to receive the descent. The gap or missing link means the irruptionof a new principle or mode of consciousness, the bursting of the cocoon, as it were, at the end of the period of gestation in the previous mode. Thus we can say that in the beginning there was only Matter and Matter was being churned until a point of tension or saturation was reached when Life precipitated and became embodied and evident in Matter. In the same way, out of a concentrated incubation that Life underwent,it brought down Mind from the hidden mind-plane and the vegetable kingdom gave birth to the animal. Latterly when Intelligence and self-consciousness descended, it was Man that appeared on earth.
Looked at from below, as the lower marches forward and upward, the scene presents itself as Evolution, growth, Nature's gradual unfolding of herself: looked at from above, as the higher seems poised and descends when the time and occasion are ready, creation appears as a series of special intervention. Both movements are facts of Nature and implement each other.
05.21 - Being or Becoming and Having, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, in this ceaseless continuity of progression it is indeed not necessary at all to stop a while or somewhere and become something for one's perfection or fulfilment. The normal ideal that is placed before man or which he himself seeks is that he should become something, a definite pattern of some particular achievement, and possess something in the sense of an acquisition. An ordinary man must have an occupation and even an extraordinary man, the saint or the sage, must embody, that is to say, enchain himself in the name and form of a particular realisationa siddhnta or a siddhi. A man has to be -a soldier, a merchant, a politician or a poet, a philosopher: even so he has to be a bhaktaor a jni, a maunior a vksiddha. Each human being should have a ticket and a roll number, an identity card. Now, for the soul of man none of these or other adjuncts are necessary: its progress and its growth are independent of such auxiliaries or correlates. A soul can be and even express itself perfectly at the highest point of its being without formulating itself, binding itself in a scheme of some external achievement or functioning. The soul need not possess any of the gloriesaiwaryasto realise itself, in order to be the abode of the Divine. Its very existence is full to the brim of the substance of the truth and its simple living marks the law or rhythm of that Truth.
A soulful man, whatever he says, thinks, feels or acts, always embodies wholly the Divine. Not that because he says, acts, thinks or feels in a certain manner that he has attained perfection or is in dynamic union with the summit a d integral consciousness. As the Mother brings out the distinction, although in a somewhat different context, the perfect soul-existence .cannot be judged by the forms it takes, the forms themselves have to be judged by the soul-existence.
05.26 - The Soul in Anguish, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In his quest for Brahman, Bhrigu came in contact first of all with the material existence and so took Matter to be the ultimate Reality. He was asked to move on and at the next step he met Life and considered that as Brahman. He was asked to move farther on and at the third stage he found Mind which then appeared to him as the Reality. He had to proceed farther and enter and pass through other higher formulations till finally he entered the highest expanse (parame vyoman). Now applying the parable to the situation today and the modern quest we can say that Science like Bhrigu is at the first stepand, for some, stuck there contented like the Asura Virochana of another Upanishadic parable, although it has become fidgety and somewhat uncertain in recent times: some others the "vitalist" scientists and philosophersare in the second stage. And yet there is a third category, the idealist philosophers generally, who are emerging from the second into the third.
It seems that the School of Anguish is on the borderl and between the second and the third stage, that is to say, the vital rising into the mental or the mental still carrying an impress of the vital consciousness. It is the emergence of the Purusha consciousness, the individual being in its heart of hearts, in its pure status: for it is that that truly evolves, progresses from level to level, deploying and marshalling according to its stress and scheme the play of its outward nature. Now the Purusha consciousness, as separate from the outward nature, has certain marked characteristics which have been fairly observed and comprehended by the exponents of the school we are dealing with. Sartre, for example, characterises this beingtre en soi, as distinguished from tre pour soi which is something like dynamic purusha or purusha identified or associated with prakrtias composed of the sense of absolute freedom, of full responsibility, of unhindered choice and initiation. Indeed, Purusha is freedom, for in its own status it means liberation from all obligations to Prakriti. But such freedom brings in its train, not necessarily always but under certain conditions, a terrible sense of being all alone, of infinite loneliness. One is oneself, naked and face to face with one's singleness and unbreakable, unsharable individual unity. The others come as a product or corollary to this original sui generisentity. Along with the sense of freedom and choice or responsibility and loneness, there is added and gets ingrained into it the sense of fear and anxiety the anguish (Angst). The burden that freedom and loneliness brings seems to be too great. The Purusha that has risen completely into the mental zone becomes wholly a witness, as the Sankhyans discovered, and all the movements of his nature appear outside, as if foreign: an absolute calm and unperturbed tranquillity or indifference is his character. But it is not so with regard to the being that has still one foot imbedded in the lower region of the vital consciousness; for that indeed is the proper region of anguish, of fear and apprehension, and it is there that the soul becoming conscious of itself and separate from others feels lone, lonely, companionless, without support, as it were. The mentalised vital Purusha suffers from this peculiar night of the soul. Sartre's outlook is shot through with very many experiences of this intermediary zone of consciousness.
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A Magician's formulas have made Matter's laws
And while they last, all things by them are bound;
06.04 - The Conscious Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The original consciousness is one and indivisible and at its highest potential. But when it gets devolved and divided, i.e., individualised, it gets at the same time diffracted and minimised, like the reflections in a rough mirror. What we normally understand by consciousness is this diminished degree of it in the individual. But although diminished and diffracted in many forms and modes, the basic consciousness is still the divine consciousness which is there behind and at the origin of all the partial formulations. It is through this core of Divine Presencewhich is nothing else than the psychic that the individual maintains and develops its contact with the Divine, grows into the fullness of the divine consciousness even as an individual and earthly embodiment.
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06.27 - To Learn and to Understand, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is one thing to learn (apprendre), quite another to understand (comprendre). In learning you take in a thing by your surface mind and it is a thing that comes in from outside like a foreign body; it is put into you, almost driven and thrust into you. You do not absorb it, make it wholly your own. If you are not mindful, leave it aside for sometime, it goes clean out of your memory. Understanding a thing, on the other hand, means, you absorb it, get it into the stuff of your being, you live it in your consciousness within. When you have understood a thing you never forget it; it has become an element of your consciousness. Years and years might have passed, yet the thing would be as clear and vivid as it was on the first day. Why do you forget so easily the lessons that you learnwith pain and difficultyfrom books or at school from teachers? It is because you simply learn, but do not understand. You retain in your brain the words, the outer formula or forms, you note down the information; but what they stand for, their import and inner law, the living truth escape you totally. You read Einstein, read over and over again his formulas and equations and even commit them to memorylearn by rote; but after a time, if you lose touch with them, they vanish from your mind or become very vague and misty and you have to start again. That is because you learnt Einstein simply as a lesson, whereas if you entered into the perceptions these forms embody, the inner principles that determine them, if the Einsteinian consciousness became in some way your consciousness, then you would have understood and never forgotten. It would not be a lesson but an experience. What is needed, then, is this inner awakening by which you live a thing, identify yourself with it, become one with it and not simply meet or make a mere nodding acquaintance with it. Unless there is this awakening or openness, as we say, in the consciousness, however much a lesson is thrust into you, it will not enter deeply enough. You may learn, like a parrot, but you will not understand, it will pass over your head and soon be forgotten.
Indeed it was not very much necessary for the ancient sages and occultists to try to hide their knowledge in an obscure language, in codes and symbols and ciphers for fear of misuse by the common uninitiate; even if they had expressed their knowledge in ordinary language, ordinary people would not have understood it at all. It would be like my speaking to you in Chinese-, you would not make out anything of it. One comprehends only what one already possesses, that is to say, you must have within you something at least of what you want to know and understand, something corresponding to it, similar in nature and vibration. That is what I mean when I say that you should be open, your mind and consciousness should be turned and attuned to the object it wishes to seize; it must have some light in it in order to receive the light outside and beyond. If it is mere obscurity, the light does not light; even if it manages to come it departs soon or is engulfed in the darkness.
07.02 - The Parable of the Search for the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He scattered formulas of omnipotence.
Thus man in his little house made of earth's dust
07.03 - This Expanding Universe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The universe is a manifestation, that is to say, the unfolding of infinite possibilities. The unfolding has not stopped, it is continuing and will continue, throwing out or bringing into physical expression all that lies behind and latent. The universe may be considered as a sphere or a globe, a totality or assemblage containing everything that exists here and is being manifested. Beyond and outside, as it were, this circle of creation lies the transcendent, the Supreme Divine, in his own status. The transcendent means the unmanifest. It does not mean, however, the void; for it contains all that is to be manifested, each and everything in its potentiality, its essence, in a seed form. All is there as a latent possibility, a fundamental truth of beingall is there not simply as a general idea, but in every detail, though as it were on a microscopic scale, something like the chromosomes in life plasm. The transcendent is beyond time and space. Manifestation or creation begins with the formulation of time and space, the frame in which what lay latent is gradually brought out and displayed. The transcendent is consciousness absorbed in itself, identified with itself; manifestation is consciousness waking and looking at itself as its object (La prise de conscience objective de soi).
Now, one can be seated or fixed exclusively in the status of the unmanifest; to such a one the infinite and eternal is an ever-present reality, there is nothing like past or future, every-thing is. One knows and is in the presence of a fixed actuality; whatever happened, whatever will happenas it seems to us all are there realised on the same plane and at the same moment (although the terms plane and moment do not quite apply there). It is the world or status of the absolutely determined. Free choice or indeterminacy, the unexpected and the unforeseen have no place here.
07.11 - The Problem of Evil, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But in reality these questions cannot be adequately answered in that way. It is a problem to which mental answersof which the mental formulations evenonly serve to diminish the dimensions of the problem; the question itself reduces the problem to a more or less elementary formula corresponding only vaguely and superficially and incompletely to the reality of things.
To be able to understand you must become. If you want to understand the why and the how of the universe you must identify yourself with the universe. And that is not easy.
07.25 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are many kinds of prayers. There is one external and physical, that is to say, simply words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much. It has usually one result, however, making you quiet. If you go on repeating a few words or sounds for some time, it puts you into a state of calmness in the end. There is another kind which is the natural expression of a wish; you want a particular thing and you express it clearly. You can pray for an, object or for a circumstance, you can pray also for a person or for yourself. There is still another kind in which the prayer borders on aspiration and the two meet: it is the spontaneous formulation of a living experience; it shoots out of the depth of your being, it is the utterance of something lived within: it wants to express gratitude for the experience, asks for its continuation or seeks an explanation. It is then, what I said, almost an aspiration. Aspiration, however, does not necessarily formulate itself in words; if it uses words at all, it makes of them a kind of invocation. Thus, you wish to be in a certain condition. You have, for example, found in you something which is not in harmony with your ideal, a movement of obscurity or ignorance or even bad will. You wish to see it changed. You do not express the thing in so many words, but it rises up in you like a flame, an ardent offering of the experience itself which seeks increase and greatening to be made more clear and precise. It is true all this is capable of being expressed in words, if one tries to recall and note down the experience. But the experience, the aspiration itself is, as I say, like a flame shooting up and contains within it the very thing it asks for. I say asks for, but the movement is not at all that of a desire; it is truly a flame, the flame of purifying will carrying at its centre the very object which it wished to be realised. The discovery of a fault in you impels you to make it an occasion for more progress, for greater self-discipline, for further ascension towards the Divine. It opens out a door upon your future, which you wish to be clearer, truer, intenser; all that gathers in you like a concentrated force and tosses you up in a movement of ascension. It needs no expression in words. It is indeed a flame that leaps up. Such is true aspiration. Prayer usually is something much more external; it is about a very precise object. It is always formulated; for the formulation itself makes what a prayer is. You may have an aspiration and you can transcribe it into a prayer, but the aspiration itself exceeds the prayer. It is something much more intimate, much more self-forgetful, living only in the object it wishes to be or the thing to do, almost identified with it. A prayer can be of a very high quality. Instead of being a request for a fulfilment of your particular desire, it may express your thankfulness and gratefulness for what the Divine has done and is doing for you. You are not busy with your little self and its egoistic interests, you ask for the Divine's ways in you and in the world. This leads you to the border of aspiration. For aspiration too has many degrees and it is expressed on many levels. But the core of aspiration is in the psychic being, it is there at its purest, for there is its origin and source. Prayers come from the other, the lower or secondary levels of being. That is to say, there are physical or material prayers, asking for physical or material things, vital prayers, mental prayers; there are psychic prayers and spiritual prayers too. Each has its own character and its own value. I say again there is a certain type of prayer which is so spontaneous and so disinterested, more like an appeal or a call, generally not for one's own sake, but acting sometimes like an intercession with the Divine on behalf of others. Such a prayer is extremely powerful. I have seen innumerable cases where such a prayer had brought about its immediate fulfilment. It means a great faith, a great fervour, a great sincerity and also a great simplicity of heart, something which does not calculate, which does not bargain or barter, does not give with the idea of receiving. The majority of prayers are precisely made with the idea of giving so that one may receive. But I was speaking of the rarer variety which also does exist, which is a kind of thanksgiving, a canticle or a hymn.
To sum up then it can be said that a prayer is always formed of words. Words have different values, according to the state of consciousness of the person when he formulates it. But always prayer is a formulated thing. But one can aspire without formulating. And then, prayer needs a person to whom one prays. There is, of course, a certain class of people whose conception of the universe is such that there is no room in it for the Divine (the famous French scientist Laplace, for example). Such people are not likely to favour the existence of any being superior to themselves to whom they can appeal or look up for guidance and help. There is no question of prayer for them. But even they, though they may not pray, may aspire. They may not believe in God, but they may believe, for example, in progress. They may conceive of the world as a progressive movement, that it is becoming better and better, rising higher and higher, growing constantly to a nobler fulfilment. They can ask for, will for, aspire for such progress; they need not look for the Divine. Aspiration requires faith, certainly, but not faith necessarily in a personal God. But prayer is always addressed to a person, a person who hears and grants it. There lies the great difference between the two. Intellectual people admit aspiration, but prayer they consider as something inferior, fit for unintellectual persons. The mystics say, aspiration is quite all right, but if your aspiration is to be heard and fulfilled, you must also pray, know how to pray and to whomwho else but the Divine? The aspiration need not be towards any person; the aspiration is not for a person, but for a state of consciousness, a knowledge, a realisation. Prayer adds to it the relation to a person. Prayer is a personal thing addressed to a person for a thing which he alone can grant.
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08.06 - A Sign and a Symbol, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It means that you must be able to formulate your aspiration during the time the star is visible, that is to say, a very short time. Now, if an aspiration can be formed and formulated in such a short time, it shows that the aspiration is there all the while quite at the front of your consciousness. Of course, the thing is true of the spiritual aspiration only: it is not applicable to matters of ordinary life. So I say that if you are capable of articulating your aspiration in a split second, it means that the object of your aspiration lies in front and dominates your consciousness. And necessarily whatever dominates your consciousness is likely to be quickly realised.
I had the occasion to make the experiment and have had the experience. It happened exactly as you say. I saw a shooting star and as it passed, at the precise moment, leaped out of my consciousness the words: To realise for my body union with the Divine. And before the year ended, it was done.
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It was because I was wholly concentrated upon the aspiration that I could formulate it in the twinkling of an eye that the passage of the star representsnot as a mere vague impression but in clear precise words: To realise for the body union with the Divine. What is important is not the star, but the aspiration.
There is no need of a shooting star to be there in order to have the experience quickly, what is needed is that the whole being must concentrate its will upon one point.
08.08 - The Mind s Bazaar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is nothing like an idea belonging to oneself and an idea belonging to others. No one has an idea exclusively his own. There is an immensity out of which one can draw according to one's personal affinity. Ideas are a collective possession, a joint property. Only there are different stages. There is the most common or commonplace stage where all of us have our brain sunk in a crowded mass of impersonal notions. It is the stage of Mr. Everybody. The next stage is a little higher, that of thinkers, as they are called. There are other stages further up, many others, some beyond the domain of words, others still within the domain of ideas. Those who can mount sufficiently high are able to catch something that looks like light and bring it down with its packet of ideas or its bundle of thoughts. An idea brought down from a higher region organises itself, crystallises itself into a variety of thoughts that are capable of expressing the idea in different ways. Then, if you are a writer, a poet or an artist and bring it further down into more concrete forms, then you can have all kinds of expressions, infinite ways of presenting a single idea, a single small idea perhaps, but coming down from a great height. If you can do that, you know also how to distinguish between the pure idea and the manner of expressing it. If you are unable to do it by yourself, you can take the help of others, you can learn from persons and books. You can, for example, note how one particular idea has been given so many different forms by different poets. There is the pure or essential idea, then there is the typal or generic idea and then the many formulations.
You can exercise your mind in this way, teach it suppleness, subtlety, strength and other virtues.
In fact, if you wish to be truly intelligent, you must learn a bit of mental gymnastics, even as you have to do physical gymnastics if you wish to have a strong powerful body. People who have never done mental gymnastics have a small elementary brain; all their life they think like children. Mental exercise means that you must know how to do it and do it seriously. First of all, it means that you must not have fixed convictions, namely, that this idea is right and that one is wrong, this formulation is correct, the other one is inexact or that this religion is true, the other is false and so on. If you go on in that train you become very soon stupid, a blockhead. What you have to do, say, in the matter of religion, is to take up all the religions one by one and see how all have expressed the same human aspiration for the Absolute of some kind. You can compare and contrast, understand, weigh and balance, the game will be extremely interesting. Now, when you have mastered all the ideas, seized all the modes of expression, you can try to go beyond, look at them and smile at the eternal wranglings mankind indulges in. You are then master of your mind and no longer subject to what seems to be the commonest habit of mankindgetting into a fury simply because someone else does not happen to think like you.
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08.13 - Thought and Imagination, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
First of all, you must know how to get beyond the terrestrial manifestation, in order to be able to imagine a new thing in it. And (or how many millions of years has earth existed! What has been the output of new things there? Countless, for no two things upon earth are exactly the same, although they may be very similar. It is not easy with your mind to get out of the earthly atmosphere. But if you have succeeded in doing that, you have to get out of the universal life. To enter into contact with all that has been here upon earth since the beginning of its appearance till the present day and then to enter into contact with the universal of which the earth forms only a tiny particle from its beginning to its formulation todaythis is not sufficient. You have still to go beyond, beyond the universal, into the transcendent, the unmanifest. Then you can think of imagining and bringing down something new into the manifestation and upon earth. Not that one cannot do this. But it is not so easy.
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08.20 - Are Not The Ascetic Means Helpful At Times?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than that you have ordinarily. You live in a certain state and you do not even know what it is like. That is the ordinary consciousness. Suddenly you become conscious within you of something very different and much superior that is a spiritual experience, whatever it may be. You may formulate it in a mental idea or you might not, you may explain it or you may not, it may last or it may not, it may be quite momentary. But if there is this difference in the essential quality of the consciousness, signifying something coming from above, from a greater height, something pure and true, purer and truer than anything you normally experience, that I call spiritual experience, although there are a thousand things that belong to that category.
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08.28 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All theories are mere theories, that is to say, mental conceptions which are only representations or images of the reality, they are not the reality at all. When you say "determinism" or liberty, you utter only words. All that is a very incomplete, a very feeble description of That which Is, in truth, within you, around you, everywhere. And if you are even to begin to understand what the universe is like, you must come out of these mental formulas; otherwise you will never understand.
Indeed, if you live just for a minute only by this absolutely sincere aspiration, this adequately intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for long hours.
09.01 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also.
Or you may pray to express your gratitude to the Divine for what He has done for you, for what you see in Him, for what you wish to do for Him in thankfulness. Evidently it is the highest kind of prayer, for it is not exclusively concerned with one's own self. It is of a great order, this prayer of thanksgiving.
It is the meeting ground of prayer and aspiration. Such prayers are the spontaneous formulation of an experience that has been lived; it pours out from within the being, as the expression of a deep realisation, a yearning to sing praises for this experience that has been granted, a desire that the experience may continue or be explained. All this is very near to aspiration.
Again there is a prayer, spontaneous and disinterested, a great call as it were, a call for divine intercession. It is a very powerful thing. I have had innumerable examples of things being fulfilled instantaneously by prayers of this kind. It means a great faith, a great fervour, a great sincerity, also a great simplicity of heart something that does not calculate, that does not arrange, that does not bargain, that does not give with the idea of a return.
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Prayer is a thing much more external than aspiration. It concerns generally a definite object and it is always formulated, for it is the formula itself that is the prayer. One can have an aspiration and transcribe it in a prayer, but if it is formulated in words, ids almost a movement of invocation.
Aspiration goes beyond prayer on all sides. It is much more self-forgetful, living only in the thing that one wills to do or become, in the offering that one seeks to make to the Divine. Aspiration may come from any plane, but the centre lies in the psychic.
--
You aspire for a certain state of being. You have, for example, discovered within you something which does not agree with your ideal, a movement of obscurity or ignorance, even perhaps a bad will, something which goes against what you want to realise. You do not formulate a vow in words but something rises up in you like a flame, an offering made of a living experience which asks for a greater, larger being, a being more and more clear and precise. The thing can be reproduced in words later on, when one tries to remember and note down the experience.
Aspiration bursts forth like a mounting flame bearing in itself the thing that one desires to become, to do or to have. I said "desires", but "aspires" is the right word, for it has neither the quality nor the form of a desire. It is truly a great flame of purifying will and it bears in its core what seeks to realise itself.
--
Then, the thing gathers like a force and rushes forth, mounts like a great ascending movement, sometimes without being formulated in the least, without words, without expression, but like a flame.
That is true aspiration. That can happen a hundred times, a thousand times every day, if you are in the state when you want to progress constantly, become more true, more integrally in harmony with what the Divine Will wants of you.
09.04 - The Divine Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If you want a precise thing, if you have a special reason for invoking the Grace, you must formulate your prayer exactly and clearly. Naturally, if you are in a state of complete surrender, if you are giving yourself, offering yourself wholly, simply to the Grace and you let it work as it wants, there is nothing to say, it is all right. But after a time you must not begin to question about what it has done, you must not say, "I did that with the idea of getting this". Indeed if you have in you the idea of getting something then it is better to formulate the thing sincerely and simply, just as you see it. Thereafter it is for the Grace to choose, whether it will do or not do as you want. In any case, you have clearly formulated your desire and there is nothing bad in that. It becomes bad only when it is not granted and you revolt. You must understand at that moment that the desire or the aspiration that one has may not be very enlightened and that one might ask for a thing that is not exactly good for oneself. So one must be wise and say, "Let Thy Will be done".
But so long as you have an inner perception and a choice of your own, there is no harm in formulating it. It is quite a natural movement. For example, if you have committed a fault and wish sincerely not to repeat it, I do not see any harm in asking for it. On the contrary, if you ask for it with a true inner sincerity, there is a great chance of its being granted. You must not believe that the Divine likes to contradict you. He is not at all particular about it. Only He may know better what exactly is good for you. He contradicts your aspiration only when it is absolutely indispensable. Otherwise he is always ready to grant you what you want.
If you have a very powerful imagination, and you build up a formation of your desire in all details and if the structure is well made, complete and existing by itself, then you may be sure that if you live long enough the thing will be realised. What is not put at the disposal of men is the time it takes: it may be tomorrow, it may be the next moment, or it may take years and even centuries, but it will be realised.
09.11 - The Supramental Manifestation and World Change, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Each time a new element is introduced into the sum total of possible combinations, it is as it were a tearing of its limits; the introduction of something that effaces the past limits, brings in new possibilities into play, multiplies indefinitely the old possibilities. You had, for example, a world as the ancient knowledge found it, with twelve layers of depth or successive dimensions. Now suppose in this world of twelve dimensions suddenly other dimensions were precipitated; all the old formulas would be changed immediately and the whole possibility according to the old unfolding would be, one cannot say increased, but supplemented by an almost infinite number of new possibilities, and that in such a manner that all the old logic would become illogical in the presence of the new logic.
I do not speak at all of what the human mind has made of the universe, because that is a reduction to its own dimension. I speak of the fact as it is, of the sum total of combinations that realise themselves successively according to an order and a choice which evidently escape wholly the human consciousness, a sum total to which man has somewhat adapted himself and has at last succeeded in giving an expression that links itself to something tangible, after a great effort of study made through the centuries.
100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
they explore and arrive at new objective formulations, they rely __ spontaneously
and strategically __ only upon their own memory of relevant experiences. With
1.001 - The Aim of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All our knowledge is insufficient, inadequate, temporal, empirical ultimately useless. It does not touch the core of life. Therefore, we will find that any learned person, whatever be the depth of his learning, whatever be the greatness of his scholarship, is miserable in the end. The reason is that life is different from this kind of knowledge. It is an all-comprehensive organic being in which the knowing individual is unfortunately included, a fact which misses the attention of every person. It is not possible for anyone to observe or see or know anything, inasmuch as the conditions which describe the object of observation also condition the subject of observation. The Veda points this out in a mystical formula:tam eva viditv atimtyum eti nnya panth vidyate ayanya. Now, when it is said, by knowing 'That', every problem is solved, the Veda does not mean knowing this object or that object, or this person or that person, or this thing or that thing, or this subject or that subject it is nothing of that kind. It is a 'That' with a capital 'T', which means to say, the true object of knowledge. The true object of knowledge is to be known, and when 'That' is known, all problems are solved.
What are problems? A problem is a situation that has arisen on account of the irreconcilability of one person, or one thing, with the status and condition of another person, or another thing. I cannot reconcile my position with your position; this is a problem. You cannot reconcile your position with mine; this is a problem. Why should there be such a condition? How is it that it is not possible for me to reconcile myself with you? It is not possible because there is no clear perception of my relationship with you. I have a misconceived idea of my relationship with you and, therefore, there is a misconceived adjustment of my personality with yours, and a misconception cannot solve a problem. The problem is nothing but this misconception nothing else. The irreconcilability of one thing with another arises on account of the basic difficulty I mentioned, that the person who wishes to bring about this reconciliation, or establish a proper relationship, misses the point of one's own vital connection underline the word 'vital' with the object or the person with which, or with whom, this reconciliation is to be effected. Inasmuch as this kind of knowledge is beyond the purview or capacity of the ordinary human intellect, the knowledge of the Veda is regarded as supernormal, superhuman: apaurusheya not created or manufactured by an individual. This is not knowledge that has come out of reading books. This is not ordinary educational knowledge. It is a knowledge which is vitally and organically related to the fact of life. I am as much connected with the fact of life as you are, and so in my observation and study and understanding of you, in my relationship with you, I cannot forget this fact. The moment I disconnect myself from this fact of life which is unanimously present in you as well as in me, I miss the point, and my effort becomes purposeless.
10.02 - Beyond Vedanta, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Tantra comes next in the scale. Tantra does not consider Prakriti as absolutely separate from Purusha and opposite in character. Prakriti is not unconsciousness (Achit); it is instinct with consciousness. Indeed Prakriti as conceived by Sankhya or Mayavada is only a lower formulation, an inferior aspect of the higher Prakriti which is one with the higher Purusha, Purushottama. Tantra worships the higher Prakriti as Parashakti, the Divine Mother who holds in herself the supreme Purusha. The world is created and exists not by the power of Maya but by the formative power of the Mother, which was the original meaning of the word 'maya', the Divine Maya. The Divine Mother creates the world and maintains the world in the Delight of her Conscious Existence. She is the Supreme Consciousness (Chinmayee), she is the Power of Delight (Hladini Shakti).
The whole bifurcation between Tantra and Vedanta hinges upon one point. The Vedanta overlooked one term of the Truth and missed thereby a whole world of experience and reality. The central term of Vedanta is taken as Consciousness, Consciousness pure and simple. It omitted the fact that Consciousness is also Energy. That Chit is Tapas is the central principle in Tantra. The exclusive stress on Chit, Pure Consciousness, led to the realisation of the Pure Purusha as mere Witness, Observer, a passive consciousness. Subsequently it was also added that the Purusha is not merely a Witness, (sk), but the Upholder (bhart), even Enjoyer (bhokt) of the world and creation; finally it was added also that the Purusha may be a creator also (kart), but all this is somewhat outside the pale of orthodox Vedanta, Mayavada. Tantra equated Consciousness with Energy; for it Conscious Energy or Consciousness-Energy is the indivisible Mother-Reality.
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By whim the formulas of Necessity,
Founded on the hollow ground of the Inane
10.04 - Transfiguration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Vedantin's negation of the world for the realisation of the Brahman, the Supreme Consciousness, is an effective way so far as it goes but it does not really negate the world. One only turns one's back to the world and says, "It is not there". We face the Sun and cast our shadow behind. The real solution is not to cut away or wipe off the shadow but instead of an obscure formulation, to make of it a luminous radiant image. The world is not abolished or eclipsed by the Sun but IS made luminous, in every particle a radiant and glorious body.
This transfiguration is possible, nay, inevitable, because the higher realities, the truth-expressions of the Supreme Consciousness are there always self-existent in their total purity and pressing down upon earth and displacing the lower mayic shadow-realities. We need not seek to pull down what is already descending of itself. One must be open and receptive and welcoming in tranquillity the descending Godheads.
10.07 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Coming next to Mind, the unity here too, is quite marked, clearly discernible. There is only one Mind that rules the myriad mentalities of this world. Thoughts and ideas are not in reality personal creations, they are various formulations of the one universal Mind; they enter into and possess individual minds as receptacles, and no doubt in the process undergo particular modifications in their general character. It is a very common experience to see the same or very similar ideas and thoughts expressed by individuals (or groups) living far from each other, having practically no mutual contact. We have known of "independent discoveries" of the same truth or fact and innumerable instances of this kind has history provided for us. It is not a freak of nature that we find Socrates and Buddha and Confucius as contemporaries. Contemporaries also were India's Akbar, England's Elizabeth and Italy's Leo X. Also the year 1905 has been known as Annus Mirabilis, a year of seminal importance the sowing of the seed of a new earth-lifesignificant for the whole human race, for the East and for the West, particularly for India, for Japan, for Russia and even for England. And today's world has indeed become a world of compact unity in human achievement and also alas, in human distress!
Now if one goes to the very source, the very root of the matter, the cardinal fact of unity is that of the supreme Consciousness, the original oneness of the one Divine Existence. It is the Ultimate One, inviolate, inviolableekam sat. That unity is transferred or translated or imaged on all the levels and strands of creation. That is the basic reality that holds together all tiered multiplicities. True, there has been side by side a movement of aberration, denial, disjunction in the multiple formulations and translations of the One. A reunion remains to be achieved conveying and embodying the basic unity.
The disturbing factor in the universal sway of unity is the sense of individualisation, the sense of ego. That is the dark ray that cuts across the radiant harmony and produces the apparent discordance and disunion with all its attendant and consequent evil and bale.
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
P.S. Please study this letter, and these explanatory figures and meditate upon them until you have fully assimilate not only the matter under immediate consideration, but the general method of Qabalistic research and construction. Note how new cognate ideas arise to enrich the formula.
666
--
My dear, dear, dear sister, a name is a formula of power. How can you talk of "anachronism" when the Being is eternal? For the type of energy is eternal.
Every name is a number: and "Every number is infinite; there is no difference." (AL I, 4). But one Name, or system of Names, may be more convenient either (a) to you personally or (b) to the work you are at. E.g. I have very little sympathy with Jewish Theology or ritual; but the Qabalah is so handy and congenial that I use it more than almost any or all the others together for daily use and work. The Egyptian Theogony is the noblest, the most truly magical, the most bound to me (or rather I to it) by some inmost instinct, and by the memory of my incarnation as Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, that I use it (with its Grco-Phoenician child) for all work of supreme import. Why stamp my vitals, madam! The Abramelin Operation itself turned into this form before I could so much as set to work on it! Like the Duchess' baby (excuse this enthusiasm; but you have aroused the British Lion-Serpent.)
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
As we have been told, and as is generally recognised, the effect of heat in matter is to produce that activity which we call rotary, or the revolution of the spheres. Some of the ancient books, and among them a few that are not yet accessible in the occident, have taught that the entire vault of heaven is a vast sphere, revolving slowly like a stupendous wheel, and carrying with it, in its revolution, the entire number of constellations and of universes contained within it. This is a statement unverifiable by the finite mind of man at his present stage, and with his present scientific accessories, but (like all occult statements) it contains within it the seed of thought, the germ of truths, and the clue to the mystery of the universe. Suffice it here to say, that the rotation of the spheres within the solar periphery is a recognized occult fact, and indications are available to prove that science itself likewise formulates the hypothesis that the solar ring-pass-not similarly rotates in its appointed place among the constellations. But at this juncture we will not deal with this angle of the subject, but will study the rotary action of the spheres of the system, and of its contentall the lesser spheres of every degreeremembering ever to keep the distinction clearly in mind that we are dealing now simply with the inherent characteristic of matter itself, and not with matter in co-operation with [152] its opposite, Spirit, which co-operation brings about spiral-cyclic movement.
II. THE EFFECTS OF ROTARY MOTION
1.00g - Foreword, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Crowley did not keep copies of his early letters to the above-mentioned lady, so was unable to include them in the collection that he planned to publish. Fortunately they have been preserved and are now included in the introduction to this book. Their original form has been retained with the opening and closing formulae which Crowley used in all his letters.
Crowley at first intended to call the book "ALEISTER EXPLAINS EVERYTHING", and sent the following circular to his friends and disciples asking them to suggest subjects for inclusion.
1.00 - Preface, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Since the question of Magick has been slightly dealt with in the last chapter of this book, it is perhaps advisable here to state that the interpretations given to certain doctrines and to some of the Hebrew letters border very closely on magical formulae. I have purposely refrained, however, from entering into a deeper consideration of the Practical Qabalah, although several hints of value may be discovered in the explanation of the Tetragrammaton, for example, which may prove of no inconsiderable service. As I have previously remarked, this book is primarily intended as an elementary textbook of the Qabalah, interpreted as a new system for philosophical classification. This must consti- tute my sole excuse for what may appear to be a refusal to deal more adequately with methods of Attainment.
- Israel Regardie.
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
my beliefs (even my faith in beliefs), and the plans I had formulated, as a consequence of these beliefs. I
could no longer tell who was good and who was bad, so to speak I no longer knew who to support, or
--
was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that feigned individuality.3 Adoption of such
a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us and those around us to believe that we were au thentic.
10.15 - The Evolution of Language, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man began to possess, to acquire intuitions and inspirations, that is to say, movements of consciousness that lie beyond the frame given by the sense-mind. These new perceptions could naturally be expressed with difficulty through what one may call the earth-nurtured or earth-bound language. The aerial luminous character of the mystic consciousness is always said to be beyond speech, beyond even mental formulation.
And yet poets, mystic poets have always sought to express themselves, to express something of their experience and illumination through the word, the human tongue. It is extremely interesting to see how a material, constructed or formed to satisfy the requirements of an ordinary physical life is being turned into an instrument for luminous and effective communication and expression of other truths and realities in the hands of these seer-creators (kavi-kratu). They take the materials from ordinary normal life, familiar objects and happenings but use them as images and allegories putting into them a new sense and a new light. Also they give a new, unfamiliar turn to their utterance, a new syntax, sometimes uncommon construction and novel vocabulary to the language itself so that it has even the appearance of something very irregular and twisted and obscure. Indeed obscurity itself in the expression, in the form of the language has often been taken as the very sign of the higher and hidden experience and illumination.
The Vedic rishis speak of the different levels of speech the human language is only one form of speech, its lowest, in fact the crudest formulation. There are other forms of speech that are subtler and subtler as one rises in the scale of consciousness. The highest formulation of language, the supreme Word vkis 'OM'ndaabda-brahma. That is the supreme speech-vibration, the rhythmic articulation of the Supreme Consciousness Sachchidananda; the expression there is nearest to silence, almost merges into silence.
Our human language cannot expect to attain that supreme height of felicity of expression but wherever something of the vibration has been communicated to it by the magic hand of the creative poet, we have the 'mantra', the supreme, the mantric poetry.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
wisdom traditions and has integrated them in the formula-
tion of his experience. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindos
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
changed into conscious formulae taught according to tradition,
generally in the form of esoteric teaching. This last is a typical
--
ference between the archetype and the historical formula that
has evolved. Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching
--
we had a religious formula for everything psychic and one that
is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate expe-
--
it formulates a tremendous and dangerously decisive psychic
experience, fittingly called an "experience of the Divine," in a
--
Cusanus, whose formula of the "complexio oppositorum" actu-
ally anticipated the schism that was imminent. Not long after-
--
tian formula of Father and Son and embody it speculatively in
his view of the world which, though Gnostic, was in all essen-
--
lateral formulation impossible. Besides this, they are in prin-
ciple paradoxical, just as for the alchemists the spirit was
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As
Chapman sings,
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The preoccupation of the Mystics was with self-knowledge and a profounder world-knowledge; they found out that in man there was a deeper self and inner being behind the surface of the outward physical man, which it was his highest business to discover and know. "Know thyself" was their great precept, just as in India to know the Self, the Atman became the great spiritual need, the highest thing for the human being. They found also a Truth, a Reality behind the outward aspects of the universe and to discover, follow, realise this Truth was their great aspiration. They discovered secrets and powers of Nature which were not those of the physical world but which could bring occult mastery over the physical world and physical things and to systematise this occult knowledge and power was also one of their strong preoccupations. But all this could only be safely done by a difficult and careful training, discipline, purification of the nature; it could not be done by the ordinary man. If men entered into these things without a severe test and training it would be dangerous to themselves and others; this knowledge, these powers could be misused, misinterpreted, turned from truth to falsehood, from good to evil. A strict secrecy was therefore maintained, the knowledge handed down behind a veil from master to disciple. A veil of symbols was created behind which these mysteries could shelter, formulas of speech also which could be understood by the initiated but were either not known by others or were taken by them in an outward sense which carefully covered their true meaning and secret. This was the substance of Mysticism everywhere.
It has been the tradition in India from the earliest times that the Rishis, the poet-seers of the Veda, were men of this type, men with a great spiritual and occult knowledge not shared by ordinary human beings, men who handed down this knowledge and their powers by a secret initiation to their descendants and chosen disciples. It is a gratuitous assumption to suppose that this tradition was wholly unfounded, a superstition that arose suddenly or slowly formed in a void, with nothing whatever to support it; some foundation there must have been however small or however swelled by legend and the accretions of centuries. But if it is true, then inevitably the poet-seers must have expressed something of their secret knowledge, their mystic lore in their writings and such an element must be present, however well-concealed by an occult language or behind a technique of symbols, and if it is there it must be to some extent discoverable.
--
rest is a sacrificial liturgy, formulas of prayer and praise to the
Gods meant to induce them to shower on the sacrificers material
--
But where is this body of esoteric meaning in the Veda? It is only discoverable if we give a constant and straightforward meaning to the words and formulas employed by the Rishis, especially to the key-words which bear as keystones the whole structure of their doctrine. One such word is the great word, Ritam, Truth; Truth was the central object of the seeking of the mystics, a spiritual or inner Truth, a truth of ourselves, a truth of things, a truth of the world and of the gods, a truth behind all we are and all that things are. In the ritualistic interpretation this master word of the Vedic knowledge has been interpreted in all kinds of senses according to the convenience or fancy of the interpreter, "truth", "sacrifice", "water", "one who has gone", even "food", not to speak of a number of other meanings; if we do that, there can be no certitude in our dealings with the Veda. But let us consistently give it the same master sense and a strange but clear result emerges. If we apply the same treatment to other standing terms of the Veda, if we give them their ordinary, natural and straightforward meaning and give it constantly and consistently, not monkeying about with their sense or turning them into purely ritualistic expressions, if we allow to certain important words, such as sravas, kratu, the psychological meaning of which they are capable and which they undoubtedly bear in certain passages as when the Veda describes Agni as kratur hr.di, then this result becomes all the more clear, extended, pervasive. If in addition we follow the indications which abound, sometimes the explicit statement of the Rishis about the inner sense of their symbols, interpret in the same sense the significant legends and figures on which they constantly return, the conquest over Vritra and the battle with the Vritras, his powers, the recovery of the Sun, the Waters, the Cows, from the Panis or other Dasyus, the whole Rig Veda reveals itself as a body of doctrine and practice, esoteric, occult, spiritual, such as might have been given by the mystics in any ancient country but which actually survives for us only in theVeda. It is there deliberately hidden by a veil, but the veil is not so thick as we first imagine; we have only to use our eyes and the veil vanishes; the body of the Word, the Truth stands out before us.
Many of the lines, many whole hymns even of the Veda bear on their face a mystic meaning; they are evidently an occult form of speech, have an inner meaning. When the seer speaks of Agni as "the luminous guardian of the Truth shining out in his own home", or of Mitra and Varuna or other gods as "in touch with the Truth and making the Truth grow" or as "born in the Truth", these are words of a mystic poet, who is thinking of that inner Truth behind things of which the early sages were the seekers.
--
the great formula of the Upanishad, "He am I", corresponds
to That One, tad ekam, of the Rig Vedic verse; the "standing
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
subqueries, which might be formulated as follows:
1) what is? what is the nature (meaning, the significance) of the current state of experience?
--
We answer the question what should be? by formulating an image of the desired future.
We cannot conceive of that future, except in relationship to the (interpreted) present and it is our
1.01 - MAXIMS AND MISSILES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
The formula of my happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, _goal...._
[1] This is a reference to Seume's poem "_Die Gesnge"_ the first verse
1.01 - Meeting the Master - Authors first meeting, December 1918, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
But, though I had seen him from a distance and felt an unaccountable familiarity with him, still I had not yet met him personally. When the question of putting into execution the revolutionary plan which Sri Aurobindo had given to my brother, the late C. B. Purani, at Baroda in 1907, arose, I thought it better to obtain Sri Aurobindo's consent to it. Barindra, his brother, had given the formula for preparing bombs to my brother, and I was also very impatient to begin the work. But still we thought it necessary to consult the great leader who had given us the inspiration, as the lives of many young men were involved in the plan.
I had an introduction to Sj. V. V. S. Aiyar who was then staying at Pondicherry. It was in December 1918 that I reached Pondicherry. I did not stay long with Mr. Aiyar. I took up my bundle of books mainly the Arya and went to No. 41, Rue Franois Martin, the Arya office, which was also Sri Aurobindo's residence. The house looked a little queer, on the right side, as one entered, were a few plantain trees and by their side a heap of broken tiles. On the left, at the edge of the open courtyard, four doors giving entrance to four rooms were seen. The verandah outside was wide. It was about eight in the morning. The time for meeting Sri Aurobindo was fixed at three o'clock in the afternoon. I waited all the time in the house, occasionally chatting with the two inmates who were there.
1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scripture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate precisely the spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we think we may derive from it that is of value to humanity and its future. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternal which we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by the light of which all other truth finds its right place, explanation and relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for that reason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it is not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearings in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and for ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar. Nor has it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitates the intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems; for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannot appreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one and eternal, expresses itself in Time and through the mind of man; therefore every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, in the statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the system and arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, the precise expression used must be largely subject to the mutations of Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellect modifies itself always; continually dividing and putting together it is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrange its syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol for new or, if it uses the old, it so changes its connotation or at least
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
system. This, perhaps the most modern, formulation of the
psycho therapeutic relation between physician and patient is clearly very
--
arrive at the dialectical formulation which tells us precisely that psychic
influence is the reciprocal reaction of two psychic systems. Since the
--
define; one might even call them hazy. Cramping intellectual formulae rob
them of their natural amplitude. They are not scientific concepts which
1.01 - Soul and God, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
57. In the 1925 seminar, Jung explained his thoughts at this time: These ideas about the anima and animus led me ever further afield into metaphysical problems, and more things crept up for reexamination. At that time I was on the Kantian basis that there were things that could never be solved and that therefore should not be speculated about, but it seemed to me that if I could find such definite ideas about the anima, it was quite worthwhile to try to formulate a conception of God. But I could arrive at nothing satisfactory and thought for a time that perhaps the anima figure was the deity I said to myself that perhaps men had had a female God
Soul and God
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the present section we shall confine our attention to but a single feature of this traditional psychology the most important, the most emphatically insisted upon by all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy and, we may add, the least psychological. For the doctrine that is to be illustrated in this section belongs to autology rather than psychologyto the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground. Based upon the direct experience of those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions of such knowledge, this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (That art thou); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is.
The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without.
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In the Taoist formulations of the Perennial Philosophy there is an insistence, no less forcible than in the Upanishads, the Gita and the writings of Shankara, upon the universal immanence of the transcendent spiritual Ground of all existence. What follows is an extract from one of the great classics of Taoist literature, the Book of Chuang Tzu, most of which seems to have been written around the turn of the fourth and third centuries B. C.
Do not ask whether the Principle is in this or in that; it is in all beings. It is on this account that we apply to it the epithets of supreme, universal, total. It has ordained that all things should be limited, but is Itself unlimited, infinite. As to what pertains to manifestation, the Principle causes the succession of its phases, but is not this succession. It is the author of causes and effects, but is not the causes and effects. It is the author of condensations and dissipations (birth and death, changes of state), but is not itself condensations and dissipations. All proceeds from It and is under its influence. It is in all things, but is not identical with beings, for it is neither differentiated nor limited.
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I am not competent, nor is this the place to discuss the doctrinal differences between Buddhism and Hinduism. Let it suffice to point out that, when he insisted that human beings are by nature non-Atman, the Buddha was evidently speaking about the personal self and not the universal Self. The Brahman controversialists, who appear in certain of the Pali scriptures, never so much as mention the Vedanta doctrine of the identity of Atman and Godhead and the non-identity of ego and Atman. What they maintain and Gautama denies is the substantial nature and eternal persistence of the individual psyche. As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed). About the existence of the Atman that is Brahman, as about most other metaphysical matters, the Buddha declines to speak, on the ground that such discussions do not tend to edification or spiritual progress among the members of a monastic order, such as he had founded. But though it has its dangers, though it may become the most absorbing, because the most serious and noblest, of distractions, metaphysical thinking is unavoidable and finally necessary. Even the Hinayanists found this, and the later Mahayanists were to develop, in connection with the practice of their religion, a splendid and imposing system of cosmological, ethical and psychological thought. This system was based upon the postulates of a strict idealism and professed to dispense with the idea of God. But moral and spiritual experience was too strong for philosophical theory, and under the inspiration of direct experience, the writers of the Mahayana sutras found themselves using all their ingenuity to explain why the Tathagata and the Bodhisattvas display an infinite charity towards beings that do not really exist. At the same time they stretched the framework of subjective idealism so as to make room for Universal Mind; qualified the idea of soullessness with the doctrine that, if purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind or Buddha-womb; and, while maintaining godlessness, asserted that this realizable Universal Mind is the inner consciousness of the eternal Buddha and that the Buddha-mind is associated with a great compassionate heart which desires the liberation of every sentient being and bestows divine grace on all who make a serious effort to achieve mans final end. In a word, despite their inauspicious vocabulary, the best of the Mahayana sutras contain an au thentic formulation of the Perennial Philosophya formulation which in some respects (as we shall see when we come to the section, God in the World) is more complete than any other.
In India, as in Persia, Mohammedan thought came to be enriched by the doctrine that God is immanent as well as transcendent, while to Mohammedan practice were added the moral disciplines and spiritual exercises, by means of which the soul is prepared for contemplation or the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. It is a significant historical fact that the poet-saint Kabir is claimed as a co-religionist both by Moslems and Hindus. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.
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The doctrine of the Inner Light achieved a clearer formulation in the writings of the second generation of Quakers. There is, wrote William Penn, something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come. And a little later Robert Barclay sought to explain the direct experience of tat tvam asi in terms of an Augustinian theology that had, of course, to be considerably stretched and trimmed before it could fit the facts. Man, he declared in his famous theses, is a fallen being, incapable of good, unless united to the Divine Light. This Divine Light is Christ within the human soul, and is as universal as the seed of sin. All men, hea then as well as Christian, are endowed with the Inward Light, even though they may know nothing of the outward history of Christs life. Justification is for those who do not resist the Inner Light and so permit of a new birth of holiness within them.
Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived.
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Crude formulations of some of the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy are to be found in the thought-systems of the uncivilized and so-called primitive peoples of the world. Among the Maoris, for example, every human being is regarded as a compound of four elementsa divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. Among the Oglala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and niya, or vital soul. After death the sican is reunited with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.
In regard to no twentieth-century primitive society can we rule out the possibility of influence by, or borrowing from, some higher culture. Consequently, we have no right to argue from the present to the past. Because many contemporary savages have an esoteric philosophy that is monotheistic with a monotheism that is sometimes of the That art thou variety, we are not entitled to infer offh and that neolithic or palaeolithic men held similar views.
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All this sheds some lightdim, it is true, and merely inferentialon the problem of the perennialness of the Perennial Philosophy. In India the scriptures were regarded, not as revelations made at some given moment of history, but as eternal gospels, existent from everlasting to everlasting, inasmuch as coeval with man, or for that matter with any other kind of corporeal or incorporeal being possessed of reason. A similar point of view is expressed by Aristotle, who regards the fundamental truths of religion as everlasting and indestructible. There have been ascents and falls, periods (literally roads around or cycles) of progress and regress; but the great fact of God as the First Mover of a universe which partakes of His divinity has always been recognized. In the light of what we know about prehistoric man (and what we know amounts to nothing more than a few chipped stones, some paintings, drawings and sculptures) and of what we may legitimately infer from other, better documented fields of knowledge, what are we to think of these traditional doctrines? My own view is that they may be true. We know that born contemplatives in the realm both of analytic and of integral thought have turned up in fair numbers and at frequent intervals during recorded history. There is therefore every reason to suppose that they turned up before history was recorded. That many of these people died young or were unable to exercise their talents is certain. But a few of them must have survived. In this context it is highly significant that, among many contemporary primitives, two thought-patterns are foundan exoteric pattern for the unphilosophic many and an esoteric pattern (often monotheistic, with a belief in a God not merely of power, but of goodness and wisdom) for the initiated few. There is no reason to suppose that circumstances were any harder for prehistoric men than they are for many contemporary savages. But if an esoteric monotheism of the kind that seems to come natural to the born thinker is possible in modern savage societies, the majority of whose members accept the sort of polytheistic philosophy that seems to come natural to men of action, a similar esoteric doctrine might have been current in prehistoric societies. True, the modern esoteric doctrines may have been derived from higher cultures. But the significant fact remains that, if so derived, they yet had a meaning for certain members of the primitive society and were considered valuable enough to be carefully preserved. We have seen that many thoughts are unthinkable apart from an appropriate vocabulary and frame of reference. But the fundamental ideas of the Perennial Philosophy can be formulated in a very simple vocabulary, and the experiences to which the ideas refer can and indeed must be had immediately and apart from any vocabulary whatsoever. Strange openings and theophanies are granted to quite small children, who are often profoundly and permanently affected by these experiences. We have no reason to suppose that what happens now to persons with small vocabularies did not happen in remote antiquity. In the modern world (as Vaughan and Traherne and Wordsworth, among others, have told us) the child tends to grow out of his direct awareness of the one Ground of things; for the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral thinking, whether on the psychic or the spiritual level. Psychic preoccupations may be and often are a major obstacle in the way of genuine spirituality. In primitive societies now (and, presumably, in the remote past) there is much preoccupation with, and a widespread talent for, psychic thinking. But a few people may have worked their way through psychic into genuinely spiritual experiencejust as, even in modern industrialized societies, a few people work their way out of the prevailing preoccupation with matter and through the prevailing habits of analytical thought into the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things.
Such, then, very briefly are the reasons for supposing that the historical traditions of oriental and our own classical antiquity may be true. It is interesting to find that at least one distinguished contemporary ethnologist is in agreement with Aristotle and the Vedantists. Orthodox ethnology, writes Dr. Paul Radin in his Primitive Man as Philosopher, has been nothing but an enthusiastic and quite uncritical attempt to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution to the facts of social experience. And he adds that no progress in ethnology will be achieved until scholars rid themselves once and for all of the curious notion that everything possesses a history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man, as a social being, as specific physiological reactions are ultimate for him, as a biological being. Among these ultimate concepts, in Dr. Radins view, is that of monotheism. Such monotheism is often no more than the recognition of a single dark and numinous Power ruling the world. But it may sometimes be genuinely ethical and spiritual.
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Recently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a first psychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an original intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classified and organised phenomena much more successfully than it explained them. Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth while following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience.
The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving. But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the Western thinkers own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if we examine their intrinsic sense and value, may yet throw some light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be most useful to investigate.
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For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great swallowers of formulas, who, rejecting robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.
It is at least doubtful. The Brahmin class at first seem to have exercised all sorts of economic functions and not to have confined themselves to those of the priesthood.
1.01 - The Ego, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
fronted me with facts which required the formulation of new
concepts. One of these concepts is the self. The entity so denoted
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8:Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
9:An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be bound by any written or traditional Shastra; for while it embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise it anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not of a pilgrim following the highroad to his destination, but, to that extent at least, of a path-finder hewing his way through a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of our Vedic forefa thers, are far away from us, expressed in terms which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved forward on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be approached from a new starting-point.
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32:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, -- these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
33:The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character, which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the Sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:THE EARLIEST preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
2:These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.
1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We do not believe that our political salvation can be attained by enlargement of Councils, introduction of the elective principle, colonial self-government or any other formula of European politics. We do not deny the use of some of these things as instruments, as weapons in a political struggle, but we deny their sufficiency whether as instruments or ideals and look beyond to an end which they do not serve except in a trifling degree. They might be sufficient if it were our ultimate destiny to be an outlying province of the British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish.
We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work out her own independent life and civilisation, to stand in the forefront of the world and solve the political, social, economical and moral problems which Europe has failed to solve, yet the pursuit of whose solution and the feverish passage in that pursuit from experiment to experiment, from failure to failure she calls her progress. Our means must be as great as our ends and the strength to discover and use the means so as to attain the end can only be found by seeking the eternal source of strength in ourselves.
1.01 - The Science of Living, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
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
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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
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
precise formulation of a capacity for action or, more exactly, for
interaction. Energy is the measure of that which passes from one
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us here, that from its most distant formulations matter reveals
itself to us in a state of genesis or becoming this genesis allowing
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in the precision of formulae dependent on measurement. Indeed,
we owe our knowledge of the macro-structure and micro-
1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
It is these truths that are expressed in the formulae of the
one Unmoving that is swifter than Mind, That which moves
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and formulating what it regards. Chit is a power not only of
knowledge, but of expressive will, not only of receptive vision,
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conscious Being. It is a formula symbolically expressive of the
Unknowable, - so arranged that every level of consciousness
10.22 - Short Notes - 5- Consciousness and Dimensions of View, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But physical consciousness, the consciousness that plays through the senses is only one form of it the lowest, the most material formation. For there is a ladder of consciousness and in it we rise rung by rung to other what are known as higher formulations.
As we rise we find that the dimensions increase in number. Our consciousness, our being becomes more and more multiple. In the physical and material, our perception is limited to the four dimensions because of two factorsone, things are spaced out that is to say, they are separate and discrete from one another. We know the law of material space that two things cannot occupy the same space. Secondly, things or events are separated in time, that is to say, there is the law of succession. But in the higher regions, higher or subtler regions, this separation due to time and space loses much of its exclusive force. Things tend to coalesce, even to get identified with each other. The obstructions that time and space offer to intercommunication are minimised more and more as our consciousness or being soars up or dives down into deeper and deeper and higher and higher regions. The dimensions increase in number; that means we begin to apprehend things from many angles and sides at the same time, we have more and more a simultaneous view of the total or global reality of an object. So instead of a four-fold view of things we may have a fivefold, sixfold, tenfold, hundredfold view of things depending on our status of consciousness. In the highest status,we call it Sachchidananda, the infinite and eternal consciousness things attain infinite dimensions, all merged in the Ultimate's unitary consciousness.
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
who is Master and Enjoyer of all He becomes. And the Upanishad proceeds to formulate the nature and manner, the general
law of that becoming of God which we call the world. For on
1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
of its own work and formulates itself in the result of its work.
By this Will, Tapas or Chit-Shakti, the worlds are created.
1.02.4.2 - Action and the Divine Will, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
Both consciousness and life are included in the formula
of Immortality; Knowledge is incomplete without action. Chit
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The Life-principle is not formed and dissolved in the formulation
and dissolution of the body; if that were so, there could be no
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mans refusal of the Divine Grace has been depicted very beautifully and graphically in a perfect dramatic form by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri. The refusal comes one by one from the three constituent parts of the human being. First of all man is a material being, a bodily creature, as such he is a being of ignorance and misery, of brutish blindness. He does not know that there is something other than his present state of misfortune and dark fate. He is not even aware that there may be anything higher or nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she is one with this world of sorrows, she has in effect become it in her infinite pity and love so that this material body of hers may become conscious of its divine substance and manifest her true form. But the human being individualised and separated in egoistic consciousness has lost the sense of its inner reality and is vocal only in regard to its outward formulation. It is natural for physical man therefore to reject and deny the physical Godhead in him, he even curses it and wants to continue as he is. He yells therefore in ignorance and anguish:
I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he
10.25 - How to Read Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Do we read for the sake of study? to know things? to acquire knowledge? That is a secondary aspect, a profit gained by the way. The real purpose of coming in contact with the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is to become conscious, to acquire consciousness, to be more and more conscious, increase more and more the consciousness. To understand, that is to say, to seize by the mind, to grasp intellectually the writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is rather difficult. The easier, the more right way would be to enter into the atmosphere of the world that they have created with their words, to feel the vibration that the words emanate. For the words that they have uttered are not mere words taken or found in the dictionaries, they are not mere sounds, dead syllables, they are living entities, symbols of consciousness, the consciousness of which I have just spoken. These symbols, being symbols of consciousness are luminous, they shed light all along, they are full of power and extend power all along, they have life and they are full of delight. It is this inner world that is behind the outer world of words that one has to be in touch with, be aware of, in the first instance, before one can have a mental understanding; in other words you must cultivate the right attitude, a turn of your consciousness in tune with the consciousness that has worked out the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. You have to take a plunge, as it were, dip into the waters, and be soaked in the caress of that element, to come in the living touch of the substance of words, go behind the meaning, if necessary, avoiding it even. You must contact the living sap, the rasa, that has poured itself out in the creation. If you have tasted of that, then It has its own light that will suffuse you automatically with its radiance; the delight of bathing in the living spring will formulate itself in rhythms of knowledge and true understanding.
At least such should be the basis of approach to the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. You may have possessed a rich intellectual apparatus, you may have all the information that sciences and philosophies have gathered, you may have perused the whole story of the evolution of human knowledge up to the present time, all these are lesser lights, they do not illuminate the light before which you stand. That light is shown and recognised by its own reflection or emanation in you, the little light that is in you, your soul.
10.27 - Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Love in the mind, love in the heart, love in the vital, love in the physical, love human and animal are not negations of the Divine love, it is not that you have to reject, cut off these so-called inferior formulations of love, these do not necessarily deny or reject the Divine love in their heart of hearts; even there in their true reality, glows the pure Divine love. To reach the Divine love, to enjoy its divine nanda, it is not necessary to make a bonfire of these earthly goods and go beyond into the transcendent. Even here in this earthly mould the Divine love in its full purity can be established for it is already there behind and needs only earnest evocation.
Consciousness essentially is always and everywhere the same. Its own quality is unvarying but in its expression there is growth and development, an increase in intensity and amplitude. The light that your candle gives and the light that comes from the sun are not different in quality but they differ in expression or manifestation, because of the receptacle, the seat or abode of the light. The Vedic fire was lighted on a sacred altar, that is the seat for the God from where to manifest himself. There was a regular ceremony for the preparation of the seat (Barhi) and the value and the success of the sacrifice depended largely on a proper preparation of the seat. The seat, the basic status also indicates that there is an ascending movement of the sacrifice. The sacrifice symbolises consciousness and radiant energy, mounting and travelling upward and forward; the progress or ascent of consciousness means bringing out its inherent potential strength that is behind and within and placing it in front as power of expression. As I have said, if consciousness in matter is like a light of single candle power, on the level of life it becomes a light of multiple candle power and in the mind this multiple power is again multiplied. In this way the consciousness finally attains its solar incandescence on the highest height of the being.
When we speak of the dimensions of consciousness, it means these different levels or status of ascending expression. They also form according to the mode of expression each one a world of its own. We may compare the mounting consciousness to a growing tree, it is the same sap-substance that appears at the outset as a seed, then as the seed opens out and develops it appears or throws up a stem or trunk and as it proceeds it throws up branches and higher up leaves and then flowers and fruit. Apparently however different and diverse these formulations, they are but expressions of the same sap-substance in the original seed. Even so an original seed-consciousness is the basis and essential reality of all the forms in the material universe.
It must now be apparent that consciousness is not merely consciousness, simple awareness, it is also power or energy. The Vedic word is cit-tapas, consciousness-energy. It is one indivisible, entity: consciousness is energy. It is not however in the sense as when we say knowledge is power: It does not mean consciousness has power or gives power, but consciousness is power. The nearer analogy would be with light-energy. Light, we know today, thanks to modern science, does not merely illumine, it energises, activises, moves things, that is to say, matter and material objects. The ray of light, we know now, acts even more effectively than the surgeon's knife. The inherent quality of light is energy. This energy has been discovered to be electro-magnetic energy, a photon (unit-light or light-unit) is, as we have said, an electro-magnetic quantum.
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Indeed, in the final account, we come back to the supreme mantra formulating the mystery of ultimate reality given by the ancients that we all know and repeat so oftensachchidnanda.
Such then is the ultimate Truth or Reality: there is the Being or pure Existence with its norms or modes or functions or self- formulations as Consciousness-Force and as Delight. This triune entity is absolutely one and the same. What exists declares the Vedic Rishi, is one; it is called variously as Light and Infinity and Harmony and Delight.
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
expressed itself in the formula "By the Ignorance having crossed
over death by the Knowledge one enjoys Immortality" that Life
--
order in the parallel formula "By dissolution having crossed
over death by birth one enjoys Immortality", and thus makes
10.29 - Gods Debt, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sacrifice going up to the gods as offered by man means the sadhana, the inner discipline that he follows by which he lifts up his being with its mental and vital and physical formulations to their higher and higher potencies upon earth. The dedication of the normal powers and faculties to the gods means purification and release from the bondages of ignorance and egoism. This serves to make the gods living to us, bring them near to our terrestrial life, to our normal consciousness. This is what is meant by increasing the godsman's duty or debt to the gods. In answer there is a corresponding gesture from the gods, with their immortalising reality they dwell in us and fill our being with their godlike qualities, their light, their energy, their delight, their very immortality. Man increases the gods and the gods increase man and by their mutual increasing they attain the supreme increment, the Divine status, so says the Gita.
Now, we go beyond the gods, to the very origin, God himself, the Supreme. What is the debt that God, the Supreme, the Divine, owes to us human beings? We owe to God everything, our life, our very existence, our soul and substance given to us by him, then how is he indebted to us? What kind of debt he has incurred which he has to pay to his creature, the human being? Primarily because he is the Divine Father, he has to take charge of his own creation, see to its growth and fruition and fulfilment. Indeed that is the role of the Divine in us (and above us and around us): that is his work, the Divine Work. Since he has put us out of his consciousness (for a special experience of growth and development), it is also his work (and duty) to bring us back to him: after a process of self-separation a process of self-integration. Man, so long as he is a separate consciousness has to dedicate, lift up and unify this separative conscious being to the whole being and consciousness. This is how he discharges his debt to the Divine, and the answering grace of the Divine is the clearing of the debt which He owes to His creatures.
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
In the beginning God. So runs the first word of all our occidental theology, using the formulas of the traditional conception which it has borrowed from the Hebrew Genesis.
And by God when it emerges at all from its puerile anthropomorphic notions, that theology understands the first Unity, the pure Essence which is preexistent of all multiplicity. But by this conception it erects before it, in its very first affirmation, the most insoluble of problems. For out of absolute unity nothing at all can issue.
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And wherever Philosophy has made itself, according to the ecclesiastical formula, the handmaid of Theology, it has ended by arriving at the entire negation of the Principle which Religion has abased.
Thus the rigid cult of the male Principle, formulated in the adoration of a masculine and celibate God, has given birth to an exaggerated dogma of spirituality which translates its contempt for nature and for life into an ascetic mysticism.
In the social order this tendency of thought has had for its corollary the institution of an autocratic regime and the despotic domination of man over woman and of the Sovereign over the State. For so great is the influence of religious and philosophical ideas on the life of a people and the practical forms in which it is embodied that on the rectitude of its notions about God depends its respect or its contempt for the rights of the masses and the rights of women. And, on the other hand, it is on this respect or contempt that by a projection of life into the domain of thought, depends the formulation of its notions about the origin of things and its concept of the Godhead.
But there is always a tendency towards equilibrium in things and all excess brings as its result a contrary excess. Therefore we see this extreme spiritualising trend in human thought bring about by reaction against itself its own opposite in the form of a strait and exclusive materialism.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
in the 1950s. By the early 60s, this work had advanced to the point where he could formulate the
following key propositions first:
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blocks away. You formulate provisional plans of behavior designed to get you there on time. You estimate
travel time at fifteen minutes.
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meeting is imagined a representation of the desired outcome is formulated, and a plan of behavior
designed to bring about that outcome is elaborated and played out. The imagined meeting is fantasy, but
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The plans we formulate are mechanisms designed to bring the envisioned perfect future into being. Once
formulated, plans govern our behavior until we make a mistake. A mistake, which is the appearance of a
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It is difficult for us to formulate a clear picture of the subjective effects of the systems that dominate our
initial response to the truly unpredictable, because we strive with all our might to ensure that everything
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conducted in its presence, what other things or situations it brings to mind) might be rapidly formulated.
The right hemisphere appears integrally involved in the initial stages of analysis of the unexpected or novel
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is, in part, the image of our adaptive action, as formulated by imagination, before its explicit containment in
abstract language; myth is the intermediary between action, and abstract linguistic representation of that
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portrayed in drama and narrative, that it becomes accessible to conscious verbal formulation (procedural
knowledge is not representational, in its basic form) and to (potential) modification, in abstraction.
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help us initially formulate our stories. Figure 16: Nested Stories, Processes of Generation, and Multiple
Memory Systems helps explain the idea of this unconscious the broadest span stories, which are
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to consciousness that is, to explicit verbal/semantic formulation and communication. The higherlevel stories that cover a broader expanse of spatial-temporal territory are increasingly complex and,
therefore, cannot be as simply formulated. Myth steps in to fill the breach.
What Should Be:
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that he should always reign supreme. The formulation of this hypothesis was a work of unsurpassed
genius, and a decisive move in the history of the Western mind.
--
During this time the people sought for Marduk, supposed to be shut up in the mountain (a formula
indicating the death of a divinity)... [in consequence of a descent] far from the sun and light.
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they are sufficiently developed to be explicitly comprehensible. We acted out and provisionally formulated
complete, impressionistic models of the world of experience (which was the world we always had to
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primordial representation of himself later, formulates a more abstracted model of his own actions. Thus
the subject is created from the information generated in the course of exploratory activity.
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which has not yet been understood. This is the attempt to formulate a conception of the category of all asof-yet uncategorized things, so that a useful stance might be adopted, with regards to that category.
The novel ceaselessly inspires thought, and allows itself to be entangled, yet inevitably transcends all
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exploration and the generation of new information. Desire to formulate a representation of that which
supersedes final classification and remains eternally motivating might well be understood as a prepotent
--
The living symbol formulates an essential unconscious factor, and the more widespread this factor is,
the more general is the effect of the symbol, for it touches a corresponding chord in every psyche. Since,
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It is no simple manner for the limited subject to formulate an accurate representation of the unlimited
unknown, of nature, the ground of existence. The unknown is the matrix of everything, the source of all
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embodiments of adaptive strategies formulated as a consequence of past exploratory behavior as adaptive
strategies invented and constructed by the heroes of the past, unconsciously mimicked and duplicated by
1.02 - On the Service of the Soul, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
68. Matthew 21:18-20 : Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! In 1944 Jung wrote: "The ChristianmyChristianknows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus (Why I have not adopted the Catholic truth? CW 18, 1468).
69. The Draft continues: They may serve your redemption (p.34)
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Jung had given a presentation to the Zrich Psychoanalytical Society on formulations on the psychology of the unconscious.
The Red Book
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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
The Seven Habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psyche-up formulas. In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity
Continuum from dependence to interdependence.
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
Pondering such things awakens something in us like a priestly attitude in education. Until this priestly feeling for the first years of childhood has become a part of education as a whole, educa- tion wont find the conditions that bring it to life. If we merely try to understand the requirements of education intellectually, or try rationally to design a method of education based on external observations of a childs nature, at best we accomplish a quarter education. A complete educational method cant be formulated by the intellect alone; rather, it has to flow from the whole of human naturenot merely from the part that observes externally in a rational way, but the whole that deeply and inwardly experi- ences the secrets of the universe.
Few things have a more wonderful effect on the human heart than seeing inner spirit and soul elements released day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, during the first period of childhood. We see how, beginning with chaotic limb movements, the glance filled with rapture by outer experiences, the play of expressions that dont yet seem to belong to the child, something develops and impresses itself on the surface of the human form that arises from the center of the human constitution, where the divine spiritual being is unfolding in its descent from pre-earthly life. If we can make this divine office of education a concern of the heart, we understand these things in such a way that we say: Here the Godhead Who has guided a human being until birth is revealed again in the impression of the human organism; the living Godhead is there to see; God is gazing into us. This will lead, out of the teachers own individuality, not to something learned by rote, but to a living method of education and instruction, a method that springs from our souls and spirits.
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
Soon, in 1912-13, Sri Aurobindo started formulating his
Thoughts and Aphorisms in a students notebook that was deci-
--
relevance of these concise formulations, and of the Thoughts
and Glimpses, is that they provide an insight into the gigan-
--
the Yogin is that he should leave all conventional formulas
of belief and action, all fixed and external rules of conduct,
--
in which his vision was formulated filled the notebooks
whose contents are only now becoming accessible to the
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
What Eckhart describes as the pure One, the absolute not-God in whom we must sink from nothingness to nothingness is called in Mahayana Buddhism the Clear Light of the Void. What follows is part of a formula addressed by the Tibetan priest to a person in the act of death.
O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state (the intermediate state immediately following death, in which the soul is judgedor rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after-life it shall have). In this Bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or centre. At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state. I too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.
--
So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about. Consider, for example, those negative definitions of the transcendent and immanent Ground of being. In statements such as Eckharts, God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact; for God is certainly no thing. In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena God is not a what; He is a That. In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the thou from the That.
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
" The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulre and the phenomena they describe, is not a step towards, but a step away from, reality. . . In brief, a mathematical formula can never tell us what a thing is, but only how it behaves; it can only specify an object through its properties."
The Qabalist, therefore, is in no fear of attack from hostile sources because of his use of symbols, for the real basis of the Holy Qabalah, the tcn Sephiros and the twentytwo Paths, is mathematically sound and definite. We can easily discard the theological and dogmatic interpretations of the ancient Rabbanim as useless, and not affecting this real basis itself, and refcr everything in the universe to the fundamental system of pure Number. Its symbols will be intelligible to all rational minds in an identical sense, since the relations obtaining between these symbols are fixed by nature.
1.02 - THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
happiness. To be obliged to fight the instincts--this is the formula of
degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
In the third decade of the fifteenth century, CenninoCennini wrote his celebrated Trattatadellapittura, the first theoretical treatise an art. The various investigations that had preceded his work, notably those by the friars of MountAthos, Heraclius and Theophilus, had been mere formularies. But Cennini, proceeding from a defense of Giotto's style, offers advice on techniques, suggestions for differentiating man from space, and instructions an rendering mountains and space by the use of gradations and shadings of color, thereby anticipating in principle the "aerial and colorperspectivity" of Leonardo da Vinci.
About the same time, the brothers van Eyck began to bring increasing clarity and force to the perspectival technique of their painting, while a plethora of attempts at perspective by various other masters points up the need for spatializationon the one hand, and the difficulty of rendering it on the other. Numerous works by these frequently overlooked minor masters bear witness to the unprecedented inner struggle that occurred in artists of that generation of the fifteenth century during their attempts to master space. Their struggle is apparent from the perplexed and chaotic ventures into a perspectival technique which are replete with reversed, truncated, or partial perspective and other unsuccessful experiments. Such examples by the minor masters offer a trenchant example of the decisive process manifest by an increased spatial awareness: the artist's inner compulsion to render space which is only incompletely grasped and only gradually emerges out of his soul toward awareness and clear objectivation and his tenacity in the face of this problem because, however dimly, he has already perceived space.
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The early years of the Renaissance, which one might even characterize as being dramatic, are the source of further writings in the wake of Cennini's treatise. Of equally epochal importance are the three volumes of Leon Battista Alberti'sDellapittura of 1436,which, besides a theory of proportions and anatomy based anVitruvius, contain a first systematic attempt at a theory of perspectival construction (the chapter "Della prospettiva"). Earlier, Brunelleschi had achieved a perspectival construction in his dome for the cathedral of Florence, and Manetti justifiably calls him the "founder of perspectival drawing." But it was Alberti who first formulated an epistemological description of the new manner of depiction, stated, still in very general terms, in the words: "Accordingly, the painting is a slice through the visual pyramid corresponding to a particular space or interval with its Center and specific hues rendered an a given surface by lines and colors." What Vitruvius in his Architettura still designated as "scenografia" has become for Alberti a "prospettiva", a clearly depicted visual pyramid.
Some dozen years later, the three Commentarii of Lorenzo Ghiberti also treat of this same perspective; but despite his attempt to remain within the tradition, his treatises describe in a novel way not only perspective but also anatomy and a theory of drawing (teorica del disegno). It is significant that he corrects his principal model, Vitruvius, by inserting a chapter an "perspective" where Vitruvius would have included a chapter an the "knowledge of rules," and consequently intentionally 'elevates perspectivity to a basic axiom of his time.
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Every body, to the extent that it is conceived spatially, is nothing but solidified, crystallized, substantivated, and materialized time that requires the formation and solidification of space in order to unfold. Space represents a field of tension; and because of its latent energy, it is an agent of the critical or acute energy of time. Thus both energetic principles, the latency of space as well as the acuteness of time, are mutually dependent. When we formulate this thought in advance of our discussion, it is to emphasize the basic import that we accord to the present, for both space and time exist for the perceptual capacities of our body only in the present via presentiation. The presentiation or making present evident in Picassos drawing was possible only after he was able to actualize, that is, bring to consciousness, all of the temporal structures of the past latent in himself (and in each of us) during the course of his preceding thirty years of painting in a variety of earlier styles.
This process was unique and original with Picasso. By drawing on his primitive, magic inheritance (his Negroid period), his mythical heritage (his Hellenistic-archaistic period), and his classicistic, rationally-accentuated formalist phase (his Ingres period), Picasso was able to achieve the concretion of time (or as we would like to designate this new style which he and his contemporaries introduced in painting, "temporic concretion"). Such temporic concretion is not just a basic characteristic of this particular drawing, but is in fact generally valid: Only where time emerges as pure present and is no longer divided into its three phases of past, present and future, is it concrete. To the extent that Picasso from the outset reached out beyond the present, incorporating the future into the present of his work, he was able to "presentiate" or make present the past. Picasso brought to the awareness of the present everything once relegated to the dormancy of forgetfulness, as well as everything still latent as something yet to come; and this temporal wholeness realized in spatiality and rendered visible and transparent in a depiction of a human form, is the unique achievement of this temporic artist.
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The works cited here embody the full creative force of the two most powerful painters of our era, and even our brief discussion should suggest the extent to which the concretion of time and the attempts to formulate it, dominate contemporary forms of expression. The emergent transparency of the time characteristic of the portraits can also be observed in the landscape painting of Picasso mentioned above. Since there is, so far as we know, only a single and virtually inaccessible reproduction of this work, we shall venture a description.
I visited Picasso after his return from Britanny to Paris in the autumn of 1938 at his studio, located at that time in the Latin Quarter, where he had done his Guernica the work that almost abolished spatiality. As I recall, he showed me on this occasion the new oils he had completed during the summer of that year. I was especially attracted to one small picture representing a landscape of village roofs as seen from a window; the painting was nearly devoid of depth and any central point of illumination. The entire picture showed nothing but layers of almost flat, multifariously colored roofs suggesting at first glance a mere aggregation of rectangular planes. I felt attracted to it at first, or so I thought, by its abundance of color, until the true reason for my interest finally emerged: its lack of any spatial localization of time.
1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:A premiss so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away all that vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, denying or disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or obscurely or at worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate supraphysical phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and its movements and conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces. As soon as we begin to investigate the operations of mind and of supermind, in themselves and without the prejudgment that is determined from the beginning to see in them only a subordinate term of Matter, we come into contact with a mass of phenomena which escape entirely from the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist formula. And the moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels us to recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses, - that outer shell of our true and complete existence, - the premiss of materialistic Agnosticism disappears. We are ready for a large statement and an ever-developing inquiry.
10:But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
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14:A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
15:The Unknown is not the Unknowable;4 it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, "Forth now and push forward also in other fields."5
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17:Not only in the one final conception, but in the great line of its general results Knowledge, by whatever path it is followed, tends to become one. Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the Vedanta, - the original Vedanta, not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the discoveries of modern Science, - for instance, that Vedantic expression which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the universal Energy in multitudinous forms.6 Significant, especially, is the drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings. Even if the dualistic appearance of Matter and Force be insisted on, it does not really stand in the way of this Monism. For it will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses and only, like the Pradhana of the Sankhyas, a conceptual form of substance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy.
18:Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some unknown Force. Life, too, that yet unfathomed mystery, begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers. Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as the mother of Mind. The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a result.
19:What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana,7 the visvamanava8 as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine? "That which is immortal in mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers."9 It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities and labours subconsciously to fulfil.
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
God is not any particular thing. He is the most general of all beings, satta samanya, as He is called, the universal substratum or the greatest common factor present in every conceivable thing, anywhere. Therefore, the designation of God should be possessed of similar characteristics namely, it should be very comprehensive. That is, when the name of God is chanted, it is not that any particular finite idea is generated in the mind, but a vaster and more comprehensive notion is generated, which works in such a way that it removes the finitude of consciousness in our mind. Tajjapa tadarthabhvanam (I.28) 'japa' is the word used here in this sutra. Japa is a holy recitation, a constant hammering into the mind of a particular formula, an idea, or a name, in order that the same idea may be allowed to originate in the mind, and nothing else is allowed. The mind is made in such a way that it cannot think one and the same thing continuously and, therefore, it is necessary to repeat the designation or formula of a particular given object again and again, without any remission or gap, so that the mind reconstitutes itself into the form of that object, and there is a new type of vyapti or pervasion taking place in the mind, which is our intention in the recitation of the mantra.
The mystic formulas, known as mantras, have some peculiar features. A mantra, in its spiritual connotation, is not an ordinary name like John, Jack, or Rama, Krishna, Govinda, Gopala, etc., as we have in respect of ordinary human beings. It is a specialised combination of vibrations which are packed into a very concentrated form, so that when they are repeated, what happens is not merely the generation of an idea in the mind in the sense of any abstract notion, but a positive vibration, though it may be invisible. When we take a powerful homeopathic dose, for instance, we cannot see the vibration, but it has its own effect. Words are really symbols of vibration. They are charged with the force of which they are supposed to be the external shape or the form. The mind, which itself is charged with consciousness, is associated with the meaning of the word with which it connects itself, and so sympathetically there is an effect produced in consciousness itself on merely hearing the word uttered. The word-symbol is a concentrated energy presented to us, which can be thrust into our system and made part of our nature.
In Indian tradition, we have the mantras which are also associated with certain factors other than merely a combination of words, one aspect of which is what is known as chandas. This a peculiar feature of the formation of a mantra. A chandas is a particular method of combining words according to a rule called ghana shastra, which is known in mystical circles in India. A particular word, when it is combined with another particular word, produces a particular effect. Rhetoricians are well acquainted with this subject. Great novelists and poets in India, especially those endowed with special genius and charged with divine power, such as Kalidasa, followed this technique of ghana shastra, and knowing the power of words, composed their poems or their works in such a way that they follow the rules of accepted rhetoric. Ordinary literature is not acquainted with this secret of Sanskrit literature. The greatness of a poet can be judged from the way he starts the work. How does he start the work? What is the word that he uses in the beginning? It is the belief among great writers in India that the initial phrases at the commencement of the work tell upon the nature of the entire work that is to follow.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The movement of freeing the consciousness from the hold of sense-perceptions has continued and has attained an unprecedented success. Rational mind, in order to find its autonomy has abstracted itself so much from the data of life experiences that it has become almost an esoteric domain. Mathematical logic of today has brought forth a language that has almost no kinship with either the popular or the aristocratic tongue. Modern science has so much sublimated the facts of life, the contents of experience, that it has become only a system of geometrical formulae.
The recoil from the brute facts of life, the concrete living realities has affected even the world of artistic creation. We are very much familiar with what has been called abstract art, that is to say, art denuded of all content. The supreme art today is this sketch of bare skeletoneven a skeleton, not in its organised form but merely dismembered bits strewn about. Even poetry, the art that is perhaps most bound to the sense pattern, as no other, so indissolubly married to sense-life, seems to be giving way to the new impact and inspiration. A poetry devoid of all thought-content, pure of all sentiment and understandable imagery is being worked out in the laboratory, as it were, a new poetry made of a bizarre combination of tones and syllables with a changed form too in regard to arrangement of lines and phrases. It is the pure form that is aimed at the very essence, it is said, what is quintessential!
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The recoil from the normal, the rich and lush physico-mental expression of human consciousness and experience has been so radical and complete that it has catapulted us into an opposite extreme of bareness and nudity, at the most into a world of pure signs and symbols of notches and blotches, the disjointed mimics and inarticulate groans of a deaf and dumb man. The process of abstraction has gone so far that it has now been reduced to an absurdity. It has its parallel in the movement that led man away from the world of Maya to the Transcendent featureless Brahman. In either case the reason is that the link that joins the two ends could not be founda living truth that is of the Transcendent, yet denying not, but affirming in a new manner the mayic existence. That is because man till now sought to create from a level of consciousness, by a force of consciousness that is not adequate to the task; for it belongs still to the mental region, to this inferior hemisphere although at present it seems to be the acme and topmost hemisphere in the scale. It is not an extension or intensification of the mind and its capacities that will solve the problem: a radical change in the very nature of the mind, a reversal of the mental consciousnessa turning of it inside out as it were, an opening out and up is needed to discover the true source of the Light. Therefore it has been said that man must transcend himself, find a new status in the other hemisphere. In fact there is a domain, a status of being and consciousness, a master-force which when revealed and made active will remould inevitably and spontaneously human creation and expression as a reality embodying the Highest. It is the world of Idea-Force which Sri Aurobindo has named Supermind: it is beyond the mind, even the highest mind: it is the typal concentration of the Supreme Consciousness. It is the fulcrum for the Supreme Consciousness to create and express a new formulation of the Truth in the world of matter. The mind, the highest mind, in its attempt to grasp the Supreme Reality is prone to reject, annul and efface the Cosmic Reality. The Supermind has no need to do that. It links the two ends in a supreme and miraculous synthesis negating neither, giving the full value to each, for the two are united, concentrated in its substance. Thus is found the golden bridge uniting earth and heaven.
The physical mind, with its satellite, the human speech, must indeed be rescued from the thraldom of the animal life, the life of the ordinary senses. They should be put under the regimen of the new consciousness, the status of the Idea-Force. The action of that consciousness will create its own norm and pattern adequate for expressing and embodying suprasensuous realities. It will not have to depend upon allegories and parables, symbols and signs seized from ordinary life. What exactly this will be is difficult to say at present. Evidently there is likely to be an intermediary creationa passage leading from the sensuous to the supra-sensuous, the higher not totally rejecting the lower or primitive formula, the lower not altogether englobing and swallowing the higher.
The mantra of Savitri wields a language and expresses a physical mind that already shows how the alchemy will be done or is being done: the transmutation of the ordinary experience into a supra-sensuous or the supra-sensuous embodying itself in the sensuous. The process is still in a state of transition, and as a sample of the process in action and a prefigure or for taste of the achievement, may be recognisable in the famous sonnet of Sri Aurobindo which I quote here in full and conclude.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
determination defy all formulation through concepts (even the firmest concept is, compared with them,
not free of fluctuation, multiplicity and ambiguity).
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be formulated, before any action or interpretation an take place. Time merely makes eternal nonsense of the
offer of fixed structure as solution fixed structure, that is, as opposed to process (in this case, the
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structure, encoded in behavior, is too complex to completely consciously formulate. Nevertheless, that
structure remains an integrated system (essentially, a historically-determined personality, and
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
chemical formula. Hence the psychic factor must, ex hypothesi,
be regarded for the present as an autonomous reality of enig-
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
to laws which the human mind can find out and formulate.
The scientific culture that arose in Western Europe, of
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into a single formula; it is the infinite and opens before you
an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is
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Mothers mantric formulas which we find already in her
Prayers and Meditations.)pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
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limiting and thereby fixing it through a mental formulation
or interpretation. This is one of many examples how she
1.03 - .REASON. IN PHILOSOPHY, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
hitherto than the error of Being, as it was formulated by the Eleatics
for instance: in its favour are every word and every sentence that we
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These are the conditions of our effort and they point to an ideal which can be expressed in these or in equivalent formulae.
To live in God and not in the ego; to move, vastly founded, not in the little egoistic consciousness, but in the consciousness of the All-Soul and the Transcendent.
1.03 - The Desert, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
Let me bring only one complaint before you: I suffer from scorn, my own scorn. But my soul said to me, "Do you think little of yourself?" I do not believe so. My soul answered, Then listen, do you think little of me? Do you still not know that you are not writing a book to feed your vanity, but that you are speaking with me? How can you suffer from scorn if you address me with those words that I give you? Do you know, then, who I am? Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula? Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you? Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones. Your truth is hard. I want to lay down my vanity before you, since it blinds me.
See, that is why I also believed my hands were empty when I came to you today. I did not consider that it is you who fills empty hands if only they want to stretch out, yet they do not want to. I did not know that I am your vessel, empty without you but brimming over with you.
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
itself is something that overflows any formula; yet it is in terms of
this inexpressible that a whole expressible world is interpreted and
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Yod * of the Tetragrammaton YHVH, a formula which will be more fully explained later. The Yod also has attri buted to it the Four Kings of the Tarot. The attribu- tions of the Tetragrammaton should be very carefully followed, for much of Zoharic speculation devolves upon them.
III. Bin ah
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Thunder. His Greek equivalent would be Zeus armed with thunder and lightning, the shaking of whose segis produces storm and tempest. The Hindu attri bution is Indra, lord of fire and lightning. Amoun is the Egyptian God, and Thor, with the thunderbolt in his hand, is the Scandinavian cor- respondence. JEger, the God of the Sea, in the Norse Sagas, might also be placed in this category ; and the legends imply that he was skilled also in magick. U , then, we find is the planet governing that operation of practical Magick called the formula of Tetragrammaton.
Its Angels are said to be the " Brilliant Ones ", and its
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be
resolved into algebraic equations.
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the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity,
15
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:Constantly asserted by human experience and belief since the origins of thought, this truth, now that the necessity of an exclusive preoccupation with the secrets of the material world no longer exists, begins to be justified by new-born forms of scientific research. The increasing evidences, of which only the most obvious and outward are established under the name of telepathy with its cognate phenomena, cannot long be resisted except by minds shut up in the brilliant shell of the past, by intellects limited in spite of their acuteness through the limitation of their field of experience and inquiry, or by those who confuse enlightenment and reason with the faithful repetition of the formulas left to us from a bygone century and the jealous conservation of dead or dying intellectual dogmas.
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.
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19:We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, "One without a second", has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula equally imperative, "All this is the Brahman". The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.
1.03 - Time Series, Information, and Communication, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
and we shall take this quantity as the precise formula for the
amount of information and its definition.
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motion has many important variants. The key formulae are Eqs.
3.88 and 3.914 and Expression 3.922, together, of course, with
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
Blue Cliff Record, Case 55). q These are some of the eighteen types of questions Zen students are said to ask their teachers. This is a formulation by Fen-yang (947-1024) in The Eye of Men and Gods. r Free up the cicada's wings . Although a similar expression is used in the Book of Latter Han to describe a lord showing great partiality to a favorite, here it refers to the statement made earlier about a teacher ruining a student's chances by stepping in to help the student prematurely. s Two of eight difficult places or situations (hachinan) in which it is difficult for people to encounter a Buddha, hear him preach the Dharma, and attain liberation: Uttarakuru, the continent to the north of
Mount Sumeru, because inhabitants enjoy lives of interminable pleasure; and being enthralled in the worldly wisdom and skillful words (sechibens) of secular life. Dried buds and dead seeds (shge haishu) is a term of reproach directed at followers of the Two Vehicles, who are said to have no possibility for attaining complete enlightenment. t In the system of koan study that developed in later Hakuin Zen, hosshin or Dharmakaya koans are used in the beginning stages of practice (see Zen Dust, 46-50). The lines Hakuin quotes here are not found in the Poems of Han-shan (Han-shan shih). They are attributed to Han-shan in Compendium of the Five Lamps (ch. 15, chapter on Tung-shan Mu-ts'ung): "The master ascended the teaching seat and said, 'Han-shan said that "Red dust dances at the bottom of the well. / White waves rise on the mountain peaks. / The stone woman gives birth to a stone child. / Fur on the tortoise grows longer by the day." If you want to know the Bodhi-mind, all you have to do is to behold these sights.'" The lines are included in a Japanese edition of the work published during Hakuin's lifetime. u The Ten Ox-herding Pictures are a series of illustrations, accompanied by verses, showing the Zen student's progress to final enlightenment. The Five Ranks, comprising five modes of the particular and universal, are a teaching device formulated by Tung-shan of the Sto tradition. v Records of the Lamp, ch. 10. w Liu Hsiu (first century) was a descendant of Western Han royalty who defeated the usurper Wang
Mang and established the Eastern Han dynasty. Emperor Su Tsung (eighth century) regained the throne that his father had occupied before being been driven from power. x Wang Mang (c. 45 BC-23 AD) , a powerful official of the Western Han dynasty, and rebellious
1.03 - Yama and Niyama, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
10:We may then dismiss Yama and Niyama with this advice: let the student decide for himself what form of life, what moral code, will least tend to excite his mind; but once he has formulated it, let him stick to it, avoiding opportunism; and let him be very careful to take no credit for what he does or refrains from doing - it is a purely practical code, of no value in itself.
11:The cleanliness which assists the surgeon in his work would prevent the engineer from doing his at all.
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is in the Indian and Far Eastern formulations of the Perennial Philosophy that this subject is most systematically treated. What is prescribed is a process of conscious discrimination between the personal self and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the Buddha-womb or Universal Mind. The result of this discrimination is a more or less sudden and complete revulsion of consciousness, and the realization of a state of no-mind, which may be described as the freedom from perceptual and intellectual attachment to the ego-principle. This state of no-mind exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit. When no-mind is sought after by a mind, says Huang Po, that is making it a particular object of thought. There is only testimony of silence; it goes beyond thinking. In other words, we, as separate individuals, must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it. Similarly, in the Diamond Sutra we read that if a Bodhisattva, in his attempt to realize Suchness, retains the thought of an ego, a person, a separate being, or a soul, he is no longer a Bodhisattva. Al Ghazzali, the philosopher of Sufism, also stresses the need for intellectual humbleness and docility. If the thought that he is effaced from self occurs to one who is in fana (a term roughly corresponding to Zens no-mind, or mushin), that is a defect. The highest state is to be effaced from effacement. There is an ecstatic effacement-from-effacement in the interior heights of the Atman-Brahman; and there is another, more comprehensive effacement-from-effacement, not only in the inner heights, but also in and through the world, in the waking, everyday knowledge of God in his fulness.
A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfill the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.
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In this delicately comic parable Chaos is Nature in the state of wu-weinon-assertion or equilibrium. Shu and Hu are the living images of those busy persons who thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; who proudly proclaimed the Conquest of the Air, and then discovered that they had defeated civilization; who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda. In brief, Shu and Hu are devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you, and in the future. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, like all good Taoists, has no desire to bully Nature into subserving ill-considered temporal ends, at variance with the final end of men as formulated in the Perennial Philosophy. His wish is to work with Nature, so as to produce material and social conditions in which individuals may realize Tao on every level from the physiological up to the spiritual.
Compared with that of the Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude towards Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to exploit for their own ends. Like landscape painting, the humanitarian movement in Europe was an almost completely secular affair. In the Far East both were essentially religious.
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.
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9:Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence. We give the name of Non-Being to a contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, - freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself, even from the most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them as a real expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the Being, even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but complementary to each other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-being as a reality and the Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible for the Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissantly in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth.
10:When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own opinions and partial experiences against the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.
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12:Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
13:If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony - and on what other can harmony be founded? - the various conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them representing a truth beyond conception, must be understood as far as possible in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual Maya. If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, - a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil, - an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure.
14:For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself, since no such thing exists. Nor can we suppose that It submits unwillingly to something partial within Itself which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradiction of an All and something other than the All. Even if we say that the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.
1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The spiritual spirit is not contrary to a religious feeling of adoration, devotion and consecration. But what is wrong in the religions is the fixity of the mind clinging to one formula as an exclusive truth. One must always remember that formulas are only a mental expression of the truth and that this truth can always be expressed in many other ways.
6 December 1964
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In the final analysis, formulated knowledge is only a language that gives the power to act upon the object of this knowledge.
(A sadhak wrote that devotees were performing ceremonies much like the worship of deities in front of the
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
subject to formulate sufficient provisional understanding of the unlimited experiential object (including the
subject).
--
do or think before. In this manner, heroic individuals create new assumptions and formulate new values.
The integration of these assumptions and values into the group, through the competitive process that begins
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elaborately complex evolutionary history, the depth of heroic endeavor necessary to their formulation, and
their extreme current potency. Sufficiently novel verbally-transmitted information may disturb semantic,
--
familiar individuals become possessed by novel behavioral notions, imagery or semantic formulations,
which present a challenge to presumptions deemed necessarily inviolable such as the (most dangerous,
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and formulate a complex self-representation, to conceive of him or herself in terms of the experience of
others that is, in terms of the experience of specific others, offering (and embodying) their defining
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This general change is incontestable; it is one of the capital phenomena of the tendencies of national and communal life at the present hour. The conception to which Ireland and India have been the first to give a definite formula, to be ourselves,so different from the impulse and ambition of dependent or unfortunate nations in the past which was rather to become like others,is now more and more a generally accepted motive of national life. It opens the way to great dangers and errors, but it is the essential condition for that which has now become the demand of the Time-Spirit on the human race, that it shall find subjectively, not only in the individual, but in the nation and in the unity of the human race itself, its deeper being, its inner law, its real self and live according to that and no longer by artificial standards. This tendency was preparing itself everywhere and partly coming to the surface before the War, but most prominently, as we have said, in new nations like Germany or in dependent nations like Ireland and India. The shock of the war brought about from its earliest moments an immediate and for the time being a militantemergence of the same deeper self-consciousness everywhere. Crude enough were most of its first manifestations, often of a really barbarous and reactionary crudeness. Especially, it tended to repeat the Teutonic lapse, preparing not only to be oneself, which is entirely right, but to live solely for and to oneself, which, if pushed beyond a certain point, becomes a disastrous error. For it is necessary, if the subjective age of humanity is to produce its best fruits, that the nations should become conscious not only of their own but of each others souls and learn to respect, to help and to profit, not only economically and intellectually but subjectively and spiritually, by each other.
The great determining force has been the example and the aggression of Germany; the example, because no other nation has so self-consciously, so methodically, so intelligently, and from the external point of view so successfully sought to find, to dynamise, to live itself and make the most of its own power of being; its aggression, because the very nature and declared watchwords of the attack have tended to arouse a defensive self-consciousness in the assailed and forced them to perceive what was the source of this tremendous strength and to perceive too that they themselves must seek consciously an answering strength in the same deeper sources. Germany was for the time the most remarkable present instance of a nation preparing for the subjective stage because it had, in the first place, a certain kind of visionunfortunately intellectual rather than illuminated and the courage to follow itunfortunately again a vital and intellectual rather than a spiritual hardihood,and, secondly, being master of its destinies, was able to order its own life so as to express its self-vision. We must not be misled by appearances into thinking that the strength of Germany was created by Bismarck or directed by the Kaiser Wilhelm II. Rather the appearance of Bismarck was in many respects a misfortune for the growing nation because his rude and powerful hand precipitated its subjectivity into form and action at too early a stage; a longer period of incubation might have produced results less disastrous to itself, if less violently stimulative to humanity. The real source of this great subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germanys statesmen and soldiers for the most part poor enough types of men but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music, is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of a subjective age.
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It may be said, indeed, that the last result of the something done the war, the collapse, the fierce reaction towards the rigid, armoured, aggressive, formidable Nazi State,is not only discouraging enough, but a clear warning to abandon that path and go back to older and safer ways. But the misuse of great powers is no argument against their right use. To go back is impossible; the attempt is always, indeed, an illusion; we have all to do the same thing which Germany has attempted, but to take care not to do it likewise. Therefore we must look beyond the red mist of blood of the War and the dark fuliginous confusion and chaos which now oppress the world to see why and where was the failure. For her failure which became evident by the turn her action took and was converted for the time being into total collapse, was clear even then to the dispassionate thinker who seeks only the truth. That befell her which sometimes befalls the seeker on the path of Yoga, the art of conscious self-finding,a path exposed to far profounder perils than beset ordinarily the average man,when he follows a false light to his spiritual ruin. She had mistaken her vital ego for herself; she had sought for her soul and found only her force. For she had said, like the Asura, I am my body, my life, my mind, my temperament, and become attached with a Titanic force to these; especially she had said, I am my life and body, and than that there can be no greater mistake for man or nation. The soul of man or nation is something more and diviner than that; it is greater than its instruments and cannot be shut up in a physical, a vital, a mental or a temperamental formula. So to confine it, even though the false formation be embodied in the armour-plated social body of a huge collective human dinosaurus, can only stifle the growth of the inner Reality and end in decay or the extinction that overtakes all that is unplastic and unadaptable.
It is evident that there is a false as well as a true subjectivism and the errors to which the subjective trend may be liable are as great as its possibilities and may well lead to capital disasters. This distinction must be clearly grasped if the road of this stage of social evolution is to be made safe for the human race.
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But all this triple labour is a work of great responsibility, minute research and an immense & meticulous industry. Meanwhile I hold myself justified in opening the way by a purely hypothetical entrance into the subject, suggesting possibilities for the present rather than seeking to enforce a settled opinion. There is a possible theory that may be proposed, certain provisional details of it that may be formulated. A few initial stones may be laid down to help in crossing by a convenient ford this great stream of the Veda.
The statement of a few principal details of the Vedic system according to the theory I wish to suggest, a simple enumeration without comments, may help the reader to find his way through the following pages.
(1) Vedic religion is based on an elaborate psychology & cosmology of which the keyword is the great Vedic formula OM, Bhur Bhuvah Swah; the three vyahritis and the Pranava. The three Vyahritis are the three lower principles ofMatter, Life & Mind, Annam, Prana & Manas of the Vedanta. OM is Brahman or Sacchidananda of whom these three are the expressions in the phenomenal world. OM & the vyahritis are connected by an intermediate principle, Mahas, Vijnanam of the Vedanta, ideal Truth which has arranged the lower worlds & on which amidst all their confusions they rest.
(2) Corresponding roughly to the vyahritis are three worlds, Bhurloka (Prana-Annam, the material world), Bhuvarloka (Prana-Manas, the lower subjective world), Swarloka (Manas- Buddhi, the higher subjective world). These are the tribhuvana of Hinduism.
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(11) The Yajna has two parts, mantra & tantrasubjective & objective; in the outer sacrifice the mantra is the Vedic hymn and the tantra the oblation; in the inner the mantra is the meditation or the sacred formula, the tantra the putting forth of the power generated by mantra to bring about some successful spiritual, intellectual, vital or mental activity of which the gods have their share.
(12) The mantra consists of gayatra, brahma and arka, the formulation of thought into rhythmic speech to bring about a spiritual force or result, the filling of the soul (brahma) with the idea & name of the god of the mantra, the use of the mantra for effectuation of the external object or the activity desired.
(13) The tantra is composed of neshtra, savanam, potra & hotra, the intensifying of the vasu or material (internal or external) so as to prepare it for activity, the production of it in a of it to the god or for action.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
an upraised wand. He points to the ground with his left hand, thus affirming the magical formula that " that which is above is like unto that which is below ". Above his head, as an aureole or nimbus, is , the mathematical sign of infinity. Since Mercury and Thoth are the Gods of Wisdom and Magick, it is plain that this card is a harmonious attri bution.
Mastic, Mace, and Storax are the perfumes of this twelfth Path ; the Agate is its jewel ; Vervain its sacred plant. The Ibis is its sacred bird, which ages ago was observed to have the curious habit of standing on one leg for long periods of time, and to the fertile imagination of the ancients this suggested the absorption in profound meditation. In Yoga practice there is a posture called the
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T-shaped gibbet by one foot, the other being bent behind the knee suggesting a cross. His arms are tied behind his back forming a triangle, base downwards. It is the formula of the " Saviour ", bringing light to the men of earth.
Mem has a final form c, value 600.
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Its magical formula is Regeneration through Putrefac- tion. The alchemists of old used this formula mainly. The first common matter of their operations was base, and had to pass through several stages of corruptions or putrefac- tion (or chemical change, as it would be styled to-day), when it was called the black dragon - but from this putrid stage, the pure gold was derived.
Another application of the same formula applies to that psychological state of which all mystics speak, viz. : the
Spiritual Dryness or " The Dark Night of the Soul ", wherein all one's powers are held temporarily in abeyance gathering, in reality, strength to shoot up and blossom forth in the light of the Spiritual Sun. Its sacred animal is, therefore, the Beetle, representing the Egyptian God
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This letter has, with the letter Caph, particular reference to a magical formula which is admirably suited to the grade of
Adeptus Major.
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All these symbols conceal, or relate to, a species of Magick which is allied to the application of the formula of Tetra- grammaton.
Jesus of Nazareth is sometimes termed the Piscean, and readers will recall early Christian amulets upon which were inscribed the Greek word " Ichthus," meaning Fish, and having reference to the personality recognized as the Son of
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to lifes hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.
This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine.
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There is another basic realisation, the most extreme of all, that yet comes sometimes as the first decisive opening or an early turn of the Yoga. It is the awakening to an ineffable high transcendent Unknowable above myself and above this world in which I seem to move, a timeless and spaceless condition or entity which is at once, in some way compelling and convincing to an essential consciousness in me, the one thing that is to it overwhelmingly real. This experience is usually accompanied by an equally compelling sense either of the dreamlike or shadowy illusoriness of all things here or else of their temporary, derivative and only half-real character. For a time at least all around me may seem to be a moving of cinematographic shadow forms or surface figures and my own action may appear as a fluid formulation from some Source ungrasped as yet and perhaps unseizable above or outside me. To remain in this consciousness, to carry out this initiation or follow out this first suggestion of the character of things would be to proceed towards the goal of dissolution of self and world in the Unknowable,Moksha, Nirvana. But this is not the only line of issue; it is possible, on the contrary, for me to wait till through the silence of this timeless unfilled liberation I begin to enter into relations with that yet ungrasped Source of myself and my actions; then the void begins to fill, there emerges out of it or there rushes into it all the manifold Truth of the Divine, all the aspects and manifestations and many levels of a dynamic Infinite. At first this experience imposes on the mind and then on all our being an absolute, a fathomless, almost an abysmal peace and silence. Overpowered and subjugated, stilled, liberated from itself, the mind accepts the Silence itself as the Supreme. But afterwards the seeker discovers that all is there for him contained or new-made in that silence or through it descends upon him from a greater concealed transcendent Existence. For this Transcendent, this Absolute is not a mere peace of signless emptiness; it has its own infinite contents and riches of which ours are debased and diminished values. If there were not that Source of all things, there could be no universe; all powers, all works and activities would be an illusion, all creation and manifestation would be impossible.
These are the three fundamental realisations, so fundamental that to the Yogin of the way of Knowledge they seem ultimate, sufficient in themselves, destined to overtop and replace all others. And yet for the integral seeker, whether accorded to him at an early stage suddenly and easily by a miraculous grace or achieved with difficulty after a long progress and endeavour, they are neither the sole truth nor the full and only clues to the integral truth of the Eternal, but rather the unfilled beginning, the vast foundation of a greater divine Knowledge. Other realisations there are that are imperatively needed and must be explored to the full limit of their possibilities; and if some of them appear to a first sight to cover only Divine Aspects that are instrumental to the activity of existence but not inherent in its essence, yet, when followed to their end through that activity to its everlasting Source, it is found that they lead to a disclosure of the Divine without which our knowledge of the Truth behind things would be left bare and incomplete. These seeming Instrumentals are the key to a secret without which the Fundamentals themselves would not unveil all their mystery. All the revelatory aspects of the Divine must be caught in the wide net of the integral Yoga.
1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
sonal and suprapersonal atman, etc., are all formulations that
can easily be mastered by the philosophic intellect. This is the
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
ing is eaten, this is the formula of the material world. 4
War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, war is
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In The Life Divine he formulates the problem as follows:
God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
To speak of Thought independently of the mechanism of the brain is not, then, less legitimate than to speak of Light independently of our different means of illumination. The only difference is that we have found a formula for the swiftness of Light, while we have not yet succeeded in finding in motion any such equation for Thought.
But just as the vibratory motion from which Light is horn, can give rise in Nature to many and diverse phenomena without any relation to our visual perceptions, so also the principle of Thought may be at work under different forms and lend itself to manifestations that have no relation to the phenomena of our intellectuality.
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But there is another thing which prevents it from resolving the riddle of the world, and that is the arbitrary reduction of the whole formula of being into the terms of mental knowledge. For the domain of mind, intelligence, thought, is only one domain of the universal; its reality represents only one of the forms, one of the aspects of existence. The fact of existence is not exhausted by the idea; therefore its principle cannot be defined from the sole point of view of Mind.
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.
1.04 - Yoga and Human Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kraa to skma, from skma to sthla, and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. It is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due. Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijna-vijmbhitni, developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward.
The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Aany mtyu, Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primary emotions connected with the pra that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this animal state, according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the pra must be conquered, and as that conquest is more or less complete, the man is more or less evolved. The progress of mankind has been placed by many predominatingly in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual development is no doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body. The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehtmaka-buddhi, the sum of ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as ourself, by another set of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life, master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamour of the lower sensual desires. That animal ignorance which is engrossed with the cares and the pleasures of the body and the vital impulses, emotions and sensations is tamasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal and the lower forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation. This animal ignorance the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all-important place in human evolution.
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
manity, increasing beyond all proportions. He formulated
the analysis of his worries in Gaia: A New Look at Life on
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hypothesis and its formulations somewhat, turning it into
a proper scientific theory, Gaia became more respectable.
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Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and others formulated coherent
evolutionary theories before him, and Alfred Wallace at the
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Qabalists have another way of looking at the con- stitution of man - this time from a more practical point of view. It is based upon what is called the formula of Tetra- grammaton, or the attri buting of the four letters of YHVH mm to various parts of man.
The first Sephirah, Keser - the Crown, is not included generally in this particular method ; or when it is, is simply called God, or the goal of life to which a man aspires for union.
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I may add, merely in passing, that a highly puissant formula of magick derives from this classification.
There is another classification, a little more philosophical, which is preferred by many. It is essentially derived from
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be ones own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any projected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same capacity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil. All this has been summed up in Augustines formula: Love, and do what you like. Among the later elaborations of the Augustinian theme we may cite the following from the writings of John Everard, one of those spiritually minded seventeenth-century divines whose teachings fell on the deaf ears of warring factions and, when the revolution and the military dictatorship were at an end, on the even deafer ears of Restoration clergymen and their successors in the Augustan age. (Just how deaf those ears could be we may judge by what Swift wrote of his beloved and morally perfect Houyhnhnms. The subject matter of their conversations, as of their poetry, consisted of such things as friendship and benevolence, the visible operations of nature or ancient traditions; the bounds and limits of virtue, the unerring rules of reason. Never once do the ideas of God, or charity, or deliverance engage their minds. Which shows sufficiently clearly what the Dean of St. Patricks thought of the religion by which he made his money.)
Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can! Just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, You are at liberty to beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to.
1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
This formula expresses not only the psychological self but
also the dogmatic figure of Christ. As an historical personage
1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
ular cases without which we can scarcely formulate a general
theory. To some extent this has been done with the aid of very
1.05 - Hymns of Bharadwaja, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6. Missioned create that swiftly, O Fire. Force is thine, resist with thy force our confronters. When revealed by thy lights, thou art formulated by our words, rejoice in the far-sounding thought of thy adorer.
7. O Fire, may we possess in thy guard that high desire, - possess, O Lord of the treasures, that Treasure and its heroes, possess replenishing thee thy plenitude, possess, O ageless Fire, thy ageless light.
1.05 - Mental Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
1.05 - MORALITY AS THE ENEMY OF NATURE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
most famous formula for this stands in the New Testament, in that
Sermon on the Mount, where, let it be said incidentally, things are
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I will formulate a principle. All naturalism in morality--that is to
say, every sound morality is ruled by a life instinct,--any one of
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been understood hitherto--as it was finally formulated by Schopenhauer
in the words "The Denial of the Will to Life," is the instinct of
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
psychoanalysis also includes certain theoretical assumptions, formulated as
the Freudian theory of sexuality expressly insisted upon by its author. But,
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clothed in a thousand different formulae, according to the doctors beliefs.
One doctor believes in overcoming infantilism therefore he must first
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Truth & purity the Road, divine bliss the gate, the immortal nature the seat & kingdom, this is the formula of Vedic aspiration. Truth the roadPraskanwa the Knwa makes it clear enough in his hymn to the Aswins, the 46th of the MandalaMade was the road of Truth for our going to that other effectively fulfilling shore, seen was the wide-flowing stream of Heaven. It is the heaven of the pure mind of which he speaks; beyond, on its other shore, are the gates divine, the higher heaven, the realms of immortality.
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1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Every kind of solution has been offered from the entire abandonment of works and life, so far as that is physically possible, to the acceptance of life as it is but with a new spirit animating and uplifting its movements, in appearance the same as they were but changed in the spirit behind them and therefore in their inner significance. The extreme solution insisted on by the world-shunning ascetic or the inward-turned ecstatical and self-oblivious mystic is evidently foreign to the purpose of an integral Yoga; for if we are to realise the Divine in the world, it cannot be done by leaving aside the world-action and action itself altogether. At a less high pitch it was laid down by the religious mind in ancient times that one should keep only such actions as are in their nature part of the seeking, service or cult of the Divine and such others as are attached to these or, in addition, those that are indispensable to the ordinary setting of life but done in a religious spirit and according to the injunctions of traditional religion and Scripture. But this is too formalist a rule for the fulfilment of the free spirit in works, and it is besides professedly no more than a provisional solution for tiding over the transition from life in the world to a life in the Beyond which still remains the sole ultimate purpose. An integral Yoga must lean rather to the catholic injunction of the Gita that even the liberated soul, living in the Truth, should still do all the works of life so that the plan of the universal evolution under a secret divine leading may not languish or suffer. But if all works are to be done with the same forms and on the same lines as they are now done in the Ignorance, our gain is only inward and our life in danger of becoming the dubious and ambiguous formula of an inner Light doing the works of an outer Twilight, the perfect Spirit expressing itself in a mould of imperfection foreign to its own divine nature. If no better can be done for a time, -and during a long period of transition something like this does inevitably happen, -- then so it must remain till things are ready and the spirit within is powerful enough to impose its own forms on the life of the body and the world outside; but this can be accepted only as a transitional stage and not as our soul's ideal or the ultimate goal of the passage.
For the same reason the ethical solution is insufficient; for an ethical rule merely puts a bit in the mouth of the wild horses of Nature and exercises over them a difficult and partial control, but it has no power to transform Nature so that she may move in a secure freedom fulfilling the intuitions that proceed from a divine self-knowledge. At best its method is to lay down limits, to coerce the devil, to put the wall of a relative and very doubtful safety around us. This or some similar device of self-protection may be necessary for a time whether in ordinary life or in Yoga; but in Yoga it can only be the mark of a transition. A fundamental transformation and a pure wideness of spiritual life are the aim before us and, if we are to reach it, we must find a deeper solution, a surer supra-ethical dynamic principle. To be spiritual within, ethical in the outside life, this is the ordinary religious solution, but it is a compromise; the spiritualisation of both the inward being and the outward life and not a compromise between life and the spirit is the goal of which we are the seekers. Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the distinction between spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual element in our nature be of any use to us; for ethics is a mental control and the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and everluminous Spirit. It is equally impossible to accept the gospel that makes life the one aim, takes its elements fundamentally as they are and only calls in a half-spiritual or pseudo-spiritual light to flush and embellish it. Inadequate too is the very frequent attempt at a misalliance between the vital and the spiritual, a mystic experience within with an aestheticised intellectual and sensuous Paganism or exalted hedonism outside leaning upon it and satisfying itself in the glow of a spiritual sanction; for this too is a precarious and never successful compromise and it is as far from the divine Truth and its integrality as the puritanic opposite. These are all stumbling solutions of the fallible human mind groping for a transaction between the high spiritual summits and the lower pitch of the ordinary mind-motives and life-motives. Whatever partial truth may be hidden behind them, that truth can only be accepted when it has been raised to the spiritual level, tested in the supreme Truth-Consciousness and extricated from the soil and error of the Ignorance.
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A wider formula has been provided by the secular mind of mall of which the basis is the ethical sense; for it distinguishes between the emotions sanctioned by the ethical sense and those that are egoistic and selfishly common and mundane. It is the works of altruism, philanthropy, compassion, benevolence, humanitarianism, service, labour for the well-being of man and all creatures that are to be our Ideal; to shuffle off the coil of egoism and grow into a soul of self-abnegation that lives only or mainly for others or for humanity as a whole is the way of man's inner evolution according to this doctrine. Or if this is too secular and mental to satisfy the whole of our being, since there is a deeper religious and spiritual note there that is left out of account by the humanitarian formula, a religio-ethical foundation can be provided for it -and such was indeed its original basis. To the inner worship of the Divine or the Supreme by the devotion of the heart or to the pursuit of the Ineffable by the seeking of a highest knowledge can be added a worship through altruistic works or a preparation through acts of love, of benevolence, of service to mankind or to those around us. It is indeed by the religio-ethical sense that the law of universal goodwill or universal compassion or of love and service to the neighbour, the Vedantic, the Buddhistic, the Christian ideal, was created; only by a sort of secular refrigeration extinguishing the fervour of the religious element in it could the humanitarian ideal disengage itself and become the highest plane of a secular system of mental and moral ethics. For in the religious system this law of works is a means that ceases when its object is accomplished or a side issue; it is a part of the cult by which one adores and seeks the Divinity or it is a penultimate step of the excision of self in the passage to Nirvana. In the secular ideal it is promoted into an object in itself; it becomes a sign of the moral perfection of the human being, or else it is a condition for a happier state of man upon earth, a better society, a more united life of the race. But none of these things satisfy the demand of the soul that is placed before us by the integral Yoga.
Altruism, philanthropy, humanitarianism, service are flowers of the mental consciousness and are at best the mind's cold and pale imitation of the spiritual flame of universal Divine Love. Not truly liberative from ego-sense, they widen it at most and give it higher and larger satisfaction; impotent in practice to change mall's vital life and nature, they only modify and palliate its action and daub over its unchanged egoistic essence. Or if they are intensely followed with an entire sincerity of the will, it is by an exaggerated amplification of one side of our nature; in that exaggeration there can be no clue for the full and perfect divine evolution of the many sides of our individualised being towards the universal and transcendent Eternal. Nor can the religio-ethical ideal be a sufficient guide, -- for this is a compromise or compact of mutual concessions for mutual support between a religious urge which seeks to get a closer hold on earth by taking into itself the higher turns of ordinary human nature and an ethical urge which hopes to elevate itself out of its own mental hardness and dryness by some touch of a religious fervour. In making this compact religion lowers itself to the mental level and inherits the inherent imperfections of mind and its inability to convert and transform life. The mind is the sphere of the dualities and, just as it is impossible for it to achieve any absolute Truth but only truths relative or mixed with error, so it is impossible for it to achieve any absolute good; for moral good exists as a counterpart and corrective to evil and has evil always for its shadow, complement, almost its reason for existence. But the spiritual consciousness belongs to a higher than the mental plane and there the dualities cease; for there falsehood confronted with the truth by which it profited through a usurping falsification of it and evil faced by the good of which it was a perversion or a lurid substitute, are obliged to perish for want of sustenance and to cease. The integral Yoga, refusing to rely upon the fragile stuff of mental and moral ideals, puts its whole emphasis in this field on three central dynamic processes -- the development of the true soul or psychic being to take the place of the false soul of desire, the sublimation of human into divine love, the elevation of consciousness from its mental to its spiritual and supramental plane by whose power alone both the soul and the life-force can be utterly delivered from the veils and prevarications of the Ignorance.
1.05 - The Creative Principle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And, on the other hand, is not this formula of a creative God, which is the conclusion of the majority of the other theories, itself the most supremely agnostic of all formulas? Does it not unconsciously disguise in its appeal to the miracle, the mystery of the primal act, the very ignorance that the partisans of the Unknowable avow? Does not the affirmation of an eternal Being, creator of things, amount in fact to the statement of a principle of uncreated force or substance from which things must have arisen?
No doubt, in one of these points of view we find the elements of a psychological explanation of the world conceived as the result of a free act of will, of thought; in the other, on the contrary, are resumed all the data of a mechanical conception assuring the fact of evolution on the concrete base of a substantial realism, But, however contradictory all these theories may be in their form, they agree, in substance, in postulating as first fact an essential principle of existence, an absolute cause, personal or impersonal, a thing that is the mother of beings or a being that is the former of things.
They have, moreover, this feature in common that none of them explains how from this Absolute, whether thing or being, pure matter or pure spirit, there could have come into existence a world of relativities at once subjective and objective. Far from solving the problem each of them merely translates into its own particular formula one or other of these two mysterious terms.
It is, besides, a misunderstanding of the problem to suppose that it can once for all be eluded or elucidated by putting it back in the far distant and mysterious origin of things. It helps the mind not at all to resume the difficulties and relegate them in a block to the single fact of the beginning; for they return incessantly in detail in the constant fact of perpetual recommencement. At each instant and in each act of creative evolution the mind sees renewed before it the prodigy of creation. And these words, creation, evolution, over which the opposing doctrines have so long battled, tell us neither of them any thing very much more than the other. Already a certain religious philosophy attempts to reconcile them by consipering the creative act as the first act of evolution and evolution itself as a continuous creation. One may go even farther and show that these apparently hostile words can be reduced without difficulty to the same notion; for what is called creation is, not necessarily the first act of all, but only the first discernable act of the evolution made by its importance in this point of view to appear to us as if unique, essential and primordial, and what is called evolution is not only the uninterrupted reproduction of creative acts indiscernable by their continuity, but the very mode of their production and even more their procedure than their processus.
1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:But this unity is in its nature indefinable. When we seek to envisage it by the mind we are compelled to proceed through an infinite series of conceptions and experiences. And yet in the end we are obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive experiences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. We arrive at the formula of the Indian sages, neti neti, "It is not this, It is not that", there is no experience by which we can limit It, there is no conception by which It can be defined.
3:An Unknowable which appears to us in many states and attributes of being, in many forms of consciousness, in many activities of energy, this is what Mind can ultimately say about the existence which we ourselves are and which we see in all that is presented to our thought and senses. It is in and through those states, those forms, those activities that we have to approach and know the Unknowable. But if in our haste to arrive at a Unity that our mind can seize and hold, if in our insistence to confine the Infinite in our embrace we identify the Reality with any one definable state of being however pure and eternal, with any particular attri bute however general and comprehensive, with any fixed formulation of consciousness however vast in its scope, with any energy or activity however boundless its application, and if we exclude all the rest, then our thoughts sin against Its unknowableness and arrive not at a true unity but at a division of the Indivisible.
4:So strongly was this truth perceived in the ancient times that the Vedantic Seers, even after they had arrived at the crowning idea, the convincing experience of Sachchidananda as the highest positive expression of the Reality to our consciousness, erected in their speculations or went on in their perceptions to an Asat, a Non-Being beyond, which is not the ultimate existence, the pure consciousness, the infinite bliss of which all our experiences are the expression or the deformation. If at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception. Only, the positive and synthetic teaching of the Upanishads beheld Sat and Asat not as opposites destructive of each other, but as the last antinomy through which we look up to the Unknowable. And in the transactions of our positive consciousness, even Unity has to make its account with Multiplicity; for the Many also are Brahman. It is by Vidya, the Knowledge of the Oneness, that we know God; without it Avidya, the relative and multiple consciousness, is a night of darkness and a disorder of Ignorance. Yet if we exclude the field of that Ignorance, if we get rid of Avidya as if it were a thing non-existent and unreal, then Knowledge itself becomes a sort of obscurity and a source of imperfection. We become as men blinded by a light so that we can no longer see the field which that light illumines.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
can be altered. Piaget discusses the formulation of the rules of childrens games:
From the point of view of the practice or application of rules four successive stages can be
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showing man as both the one to be redeemed and the redeemer. The first formulation is Christian, the
second alchemical. In the first case man attri butes the need of redemption to himself and leaves the work of
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perfection of nature); in addition, they were contaminated with psychological formulations (the
redemption of corrupt matter). Insofar as the alchemical procedure was psychological that is, driven
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functions)]. The question in mind, implicit or explicitly formulated, determines in part the answer given
by the object. The object is always capable of superseding the constraint, in some unpredictable fashion.
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represented. It took thousands of years of cultural development to formulate the twin notions that empirical
reality existed (independently of the motivational significance of things) and that it should be
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therefore compelled to formulate his quasichemical facts metaphysically too.606
324
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The alchemist was an unredeemed, suffering man, in search of an inexpressible ideal. He formulated
that ideal, and its process of generation, using terms that referred to the physical world, at least from the
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Christian dogma, as historically formulated by the fathers of the Church. Questioning this authority meant
that the alchemist placed himself outside the protection of his cultural canon, in the psychological sense,
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is, the best possible formulation for still unknown or unconscious facts, which generally compensate the
content of consciousness or the conscious attitude. If we apply this basic rule to the alchemical arcanum,
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reference to the drinking bout (the imbibing of spirit, so to speak). I formulated an interpretation of the
dream an essentially unacceptable formulation immediately upon awakening. I knew that the word
spirit had been derived from the Greek pneuma which meant wind: the wind, for example, that moved
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There are (at least) two (major) alternative dogmatic formulations of Original Sin, in Christian tradition: (1) the
source of eternal guilt; (2) the fortunate error, which leads to the incarnation of Christ. Toni Wolff notes that:
1.05 - The Universe The 0 = 2 Equation, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
You should, however, remember most constantly that the equation of the Universe, however complex it may seem, inevitably reels out to Zero; for to accomplish this is the formula of your Work as a Mystic. To remind you, and to amplify certain points of the above, let me quote from Magick pp. 152-3 footnote 2.
All elements must at one time have been separate that would be the case with great heat. Now when atoms get to the sun, we get that immense extreme heat, and all the elements are themselves again. Imagine that each atom of each element possesses the memory of all his adventures in combination. By the way, that atom (fortified with that memory) would not be the same atom; yet it is, because it has gained nothing from anywhere except this memory. Therefore, by the lapse of time, and by virtue of memory, a thing could become something more than itself; thus a real development is possible. One can then see a reason for any element deciding to go through this series of incarnations, because so, and only so, can he go; and he suffers the lapse of memory which he has during these incarnations, because he knows he will come through un- changed.
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Every "act of love under will" has the dual result (1) the creation of a child combining the qualities of its parents, (2) the withdrawal by ecstasy into Nothingness. Please consult what I have elsewhere written on "The formula of Tetagrammaton;" the importance of this at the moment is to show how 0 and 2 appear constantly in Nature as the common Order of Events.
Love is the law, love under will.
1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The emphasis has somewhat shifted now and taken its stand more upon the crude vitalistic notions of blood, race, life-room, but the old idea is there giving more force to the later formulation.
"Nordic" is now the established term.
1.05 - Work and Teaching, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He represents for us something we formulate to ourselves with words which seem to us the most exact for expressing our experience. These words are evidently the best according to us for formulating our experience.
But if, in our enthusiasm, we were convinced that they are the only appropriate words to express correctly what Sri Aurobindo is and the experience he has given us, we would become dogmatic and be on the point of founding a religion.
He who has a spiritual experience and a faith, formulates it in the most appropriate words for himself.
But if he is convinced that this expression is the only correct and true one for this experience and faith, he becomes dogmatic and tends to create a religion.
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the utmost simplicity to the most curious richness. Or there are risings and fallings in the same hymn; it proceeds from the most ordinary conventions of the general symbol of sacrifice to a movement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others baffle us at first by their semblance of antique obscurity. But these differences of manner take nothing from the unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the fixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of
Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vasishtha's even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates.
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The defect of the translation is that we have had to employ one and the same word for satyam and r.tam whereas, as we see in the formula satyam r.tam br.hat, there was a distinction in the
Vedic mind between the precise significances of the two words.
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In the early Vedantic teaching of the Upanishads we come across a conception of the Truth which is often expressed by formulas taken from the hymns of the Veda, such as the expression already quoted, satyam r.tam br.hat, - the truth, the right, the vast. This Truth is spoken of in the Veda as a path leading to felicity, leading to immortality. In the Upanishads also it is by the path of the Truth that the sage or seer, Rishi or Kavi, passes beyond. He passes out of the falsehood, out of the mortal
Agni and the Truth
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
about matters outside their formulas or laboratories, mat
ters about which they know just as much or as little as any
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The history of the formulation of the laws of motion is
fascinating, if only because of the difficulties Galileo and
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in the composition of mathematical formulae.
5. The language of science is mathematics, based on meas-
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gist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had formulated one that was
fully worked out and coherent, although not fully justified
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sional (de)formation or historical formulation of any kind,
even scientific. For if the search for knowledge and truth is
1.06 - Incarnate Teachers and Incarnation, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
No man can really see God except through these human manifestations. If we try to see God otherwise, we make for ourselves a hideous caricature of Him and believe the caricature to be no worse than the original. There is a story of an ignorant man who was asked to make an image of the God Shiva, and who, after days of hard struggle, manufactured only the image of a monkey. So whenever we try to think of God as He is in His absolute perfection, we invariably meet with the most miserable failure, because as long as we are men, we cannot conceive Him as anything higher than man. The time will come when we shall transcend our human nature and know Him as He is; but as long as we are men, we must worship Him in man and as man. Talk as you may, try as you may, you cannot think of God except as a man. You may deliver great intellectual discourses on God and on all things under the sun, become great rationalists and prove to your satisfaction that all these accounts of the Avataras of God as man are nonsense. But let us come for a moment to practical common sense. What is there behind this kind of remarkable intellect? Zero, nothing, simply so much froth. When next you hear a man delivering a great intellectual lecture against this worship of the Avataras of God, get hold of him and ask what his idea of God is, what he understands by "omnipotence", "omnipresence", and all similar terms, beyond the spelling of the words. He really means nothing by them; he cannot formulate as their meaning any idea unaffected by his own human nature; he is no better off in this matter than the man in the street who has not read a single book. That man in the street, however, is quiet and does not disturb the peace of the world, while this big talker creates disturbance and misery among mankind.
Religion is, after all, realisation, and we must make the sharpest distinction between talk; and intuitive experience. What we experience in the depths of our souls is realisation. Nothing indeed is so uncommon as common sense in regard to this matter.
1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
12:Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality, - Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God, - yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night, - a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality.
13:And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknowable to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite, - and still mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to him; he cannot fathom their essential reality.
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18:We have seen that the Non-Being beyond may well be an inconceivable existence and perhaps an ineffable Bliss. At least the Nirvana of Buddhism which formulated one most luminous effort of man to reach and to rest in this highest Non-Existence, represents itself in the psychology of the liberated yet upon earth as an unspeakable peace and gladness; its practical effect is the extinction of all suffering through the disappearance of all egoistic idea or sensation and the nearest we can get to a positive conception of it is that it is some inexpressible Beatitude (if the name or any name can be applied to a peace so void of contents) into which even the notion of self-existence seems to be swallowed up and disappear. It is a Sachchidananda to which we dare no longer apply even the supreme terms of Sat, of Chit and of Ananda. For all terms are annulled and all cognitive experience is overpassed.
19:On the other hand, we have hazarded the suggestion that since all is one Reality, this inferior negation also, this other contradiction or non-existence of Sachchidananda is none other than Sachchidananda itself. It is capable of being conceived by the intellect, perceived in the vision, even received through the sensations as verily that which it seems to deny, and such would it always be to our conscious experience if things were not falsified by some great fundamental error, some possessing and compelling Ignorance, Maya or Avidya. In this sense a solution might be sought, not perhaps a satisfying metaphysical solution for the logical mind, - for we are standing on the border-line of the unknowable, the ineffable and straining our eyes beyond, - but a sufficient basis in experience for the practice of the divine life.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It has been found, as a matter of experience, that it is dangerous to lay down detailed and inflexible rules for right livelihooddangerous, because most people see no reason for being righteous overmuch and consequently respond to the imposition of too rigid a code by hypocrisy or open rebellion. In the Christian tradition, for example, a distinction is made between the precepts, which are binding on all and sundry, and the counsels of perfection, binding only upon those who feel drawn towards a total renunciation of the world. The precepts include the ordinary moral code and the commandment to love God with all ones heart, strength and mind, and ones neighbour as oneself. Some of those who make a serious effort to obey this last and greatest commandment find that they cannot do so whole-heartedly, unless they follow the counsels and sever all connections with the world. Nevertheless it is possible for men and women to achieve that perfection, which is deliverance into the unitive knowledge of God, without abandoning the married state and without selling all they have and giving the price to the poor. Effective poverty (possessing no money) is by no means always affective poverty (being indifferent to money). One man may be poor, but desperately concerned with what money can buy, full of cravings, envy and bitter self-pity. Another may have money, but no attachment to money or the things, powers and privileges that money can buy. Evangelical poverty is a combination of effective with affective poverty; but a genuine poverty of spirit is possible even in those who are not effectively poor. It will be seen, then, that the problems of right livelihood, in so far as they lie outside the jurisdiction of the common moral code, are strictly personal. The way in which any individual problem presents itself and the nature of the appropriate solution depend upon the degree of knowledge, moral sensibility and spiritual insight achieved by the individual concerned. For this reason no universally applicable rules can be formulated except in the most general terms. Here are my three treasures, says Lao Tzu. Guard and keep them! The first is pity, the second frugality, the third refusal to be foremost of all things under heaven. And when Jesus is asked by a stranger to settle a dispute between himself and his brother over an inheritance, he refuses (since he does not know the circumstances) to be a judge in the case and merely utters a general warning against covetousness.
Ga-San instructed his adherents one day: Those who speak against killing, and who desire to spare the lives of all conscious beings are right. It is good to protect even animals and insects. But what about those persons who kill time, what about those who destroy wealth, and those who murder the economy of their society? We should not overlook them. Again, what of the one who preaches without enlightenment? He is killing Buddhism.
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No infallible method for controlling the political manifestations of the lust for power has ever been devised. Since power is of its very essence indefinitely expansive, it cannot be checked except by colliding with another power. Hence, any society that values liberty, in the sense of government by law rather than by class interest or personal decree, must see to it that the power of its rulers is divided. National unity means national servitude to a single man and his supporting oligarchy. Organized and balanced disunity is the necessary condition of liberty. His Majestys Loyal Opposition is the loyalest, because the most genuinely useful section of any liberty-loving community. Furthermore, since the appetite for power is purely mental and therefore insatiable and impervious to disease or old age, no community that values liberty can afford to give its rulers long tenures of office. The Carthusian Order, which was never reformed because never deformed, owed its long immunity from corruption to the fact that its abbots were elected for periods of only a single year. In ancient Rome the amount of liberty under law was in inverse ratio to the length of the magistrates terms of office. These rules for controlling the lust for power are very easy to formulate, but very difficult, as history shows, to enforce in practice. They are particularly difficult to enforce at a period like the present, when time-hallowed political machinery is being rendered obsolete by rapid technological change and when the salutary principle of organized and balanced disunity requires to be embodied in new and more appropriate institutions.
Acton, the learned Catholic historian, was of opinion that all great men are bad; Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic, thought that to seek for union with God while occupying a throne was an undertaking hardly less senseless than looking for camels among the chimney pots. A slightly more optimistic note is sounded by St. Franois de Sales, whose views on the matter were recorded by his Boswellizing disciple, the young Bishop of Belley.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here we face the first difficulty to be overcome; if we want to be able to truly think, that is, to receive, formulate and form valid and viable thoughts, we must first of all empty our brain of all this vague and unruly mental agitation. And this is certainly not the easiest part of our task. We are dominated by this irrational cerebral activity, we do not dominate it.
Only one method is worth recommending: meditation. But as I was telling you last time, there are many ways of meditating; some are very effective, others less so.
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the
Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, - to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. It is not a mental quiet, aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a passivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these
1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And when we reach the utmost limit of all the steps which our thought can take, we should thus formulate the supreme causes of existence; The universe is but the sum of the manifestations by which all affirms and objectivises itself,all that having the power to be, wills to be.
***
1.06 - THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
"Religion" and "Morality." Every postulate formulated by religion and
morality contains it Priests and the promulgators of moral laws are the
--
manifestation, into his relations with men and things. In a formula:
his virtue is the consequence of his good constitution. Longevity
1.06 - The Literal Qabalah, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Force of the Primum Mobile, formulating cosmic dust into lihe spiral nebulae, & T is Si Leo, the Lion, with its Tarot attri bution of VIII - Strength. All these correspondences repeat the general meaning of strength and force, coinciding with Blavatsky's description of Fohat.
The above will go to show how the Qabalists proceed to discover the meaning of a word which, previously, was an unknown quantity.
1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
sword of Damocles. In the old formula for the Trinity, as
Joachim knew it, the dogmatic figure of the devil is lacking,
1.06 - The Three Schools of Magick 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
These Schools represent three perfectly distinct and contrary theories of the Universe, and, therefore, practices of spiritual science. The magical formula of each is as precise as a theorem of trigonometry. Each assumes as fundamental a certain law of Nature, and the subject is complicated by the fact that each School, in a certain sense, admits the formul of the other two. It merely regards them as in some way incomplete, secondary, or illusory. Now, as will be seen later, the Yellow School stand aloof from the other two by the nature of its postulates. But the Black School and the White are always more or less in active conflict; and it is because just at this moment that conflict is approaching a climax that it is necessary to write this essay. The adepts of the White School consider the present danger to mankind so great that they are prepared to abandon their traditional policy of silence, in order to enlist in their ranks the profane of every nation.
We are in possession of a certain mystical document*[AC13] which we may describe briefly, for convenience sake, as an Apocalypse of which we hold the keys, thanks to the intervention of the Master who has appeared at this grave conjuncture of Fate. This document consists of a series of visions, in which we hear the various Intelligences whose nature it would be hard to define, but who are at the very least endowed with knowledge and power far beyond anything that we are accustomed to regard as proper to the human race.
1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
tion with Sri Aurobindo once formulating their one divine
personality as mothersriaurobindo in writing and she
1.07 - Jnana Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
27. I am the All-pervading, Immortal Soul. I am Pure Consciousness. I am Satchidananda Svaroopa. I am witness or Sakshi.These are the formulas for constant meditation and assertion.
28. Equip yourself with the Four Means. Hear the Srutis, reflect and meditate. You will attain Self-realisation.
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
diagnosis aims at the diagnosis of complexes and hence at the formulation
of facts which are far more likely to be concealed than revealed by the
--
could be expanded to the formula psyche = ego-consciousness +
unconscious.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
13:The existence of a social law external to the individual is at different times a considerable advantage and a heavy disadvantage to the development of the divine in man. It is an advantage at first when man is crude and incapable of selfcontrol and self-finding, because it erects a power other than that of his personal egoism through which that egoism may be induced or compelled to moderate its savage demands, to discipline its irrational and often violent movements and even to lose itself sometimes in a larger and less personal egoism. It is a disadvantage to the adult spirit ready to transcend the human formula because it is an external standard which seeks to impose itself on him from outside, and the condition of his perfection is that he shall grow from within and in an increasing freedom, not by the suppression but by the transcendence of his perfected individuality, not any longer by a law imposed on him that trains and disciplines his members but by the soul from within breaking through all previous forms to possess with its light and transmute his members.
14:In the conflict of the claims of society with the claims of the individual two ideal and absolute solutions confront one another. There is the demand of the group that the individual should subordinate himself more or less completely or even lose his independent existence in the community, - the smaller must be immolated or self-offered to the larger unit. He must accept the need of the society as his own need, the desire of the society as his own desire; he must live not for himself but for the tribe, clan, commune or nation of which he is a member. The ideal and absolute solution from the individual's standpoint would be a society that existed not for itself, for its all-overriding collective purpose, but for the good of the individual and his fulfilment, for the greater and more perfect life of all its members. Representing as far as possible his best self and helping him to realise it, it would respect the freedom of each of its members and maintain itself not by law and force but by the free and spontaneous consent of its constituent persons. An ideal society of either kind does not exist anywhere and would be most difficult to create, more difficult still to keep in precarious existence so long as individual man clings to his egoism as the primary motive of existence. A general but not complete domination of the society over the individual is the easier way and it is the system that Nature from the first instinctively adopts and keeps in equilibrium by rigorous law, compelling custom and a careful indoctrination of the still subservient and ill-developed intelligence of the human creature.
--
20:No individual rises to these heights except in intense moments, no society yet created satisfies this ideal. And in the present state of morality and of human development none perhaps can or ought to satisfy it. Nature will not allow it, Nature knows that it should not be. The first reason is that our moral ideals are themselves for the most part ill-evolved, ignorant and arbitrary, mental constructions rather than transcriptions of the eternal truths of the spirit. Authoritative and dogmatic, they assert certain absolute standards in theory, but in practice every existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard to which the ideal pretends. If our ethical system is a compromise or a makeshift, it gives at once a principle of justification to the further sterilising compromises which society and the individual hasten to make with it. And if it insists on absolute love, justice, right with an uncompromising insistence, it soars above the head of human possibility and is professed with lip homage but ignored in practice. Even it is found that it ignores other elements in humanity which equally insist on survival but refuse to come within the moral formula. For just as the individual law of desire contains within it invaluable elements of the infinite whole which have to be protected against the tyranny of the absorbing social idea, the innate impulses too both of individual and of collective man contain in them invaluable elements which escape the limits of any ethical formula yet discovered and are yet necessary to the fullness and harmony of an eventual divine perfection.
21:Moreover, absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right reason in their present application by a bewildered and imperfect humanity come easily to be conflicting principles. Justice often demands what love abhors. Right reason dispassionately considering the facts of nature and human relations in search of a satisfying norm or rule is unable to admit without modification either any reign of absolute justice or any reign of absolute love. And in fact man's absolute justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign injustice; for his mind, one-sided and rigid in its constructions, puts forward a one-sided partial and rigorous scheme or figure and claims for it totality and absoluteness and an application that ignores the subtler truth of things and the plasticity of life. All our standards turned into action either waver on a flux of compromises or err by this partiality and unelastic structure. Humanity sways from one orientation to another; the race moves upon a zigzag path led by conflicting claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what Nature intends, but with much waste and suffering, rather than either what it desires or what it holds to be right or what the highest light from above demands from the embodied spirit.
22:The fact is that when we have reached the cult of absolute ethical qualities and erected the categorical imperative of an ideal law, we have not come to the end of our search or touched the truth that delivers. There is, no doubt, something here that helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man in us, an insistence that overpasses the individual and collective needs and desires of a humanity still bound to the living mud of Matter in which it took its roots, an aspiration that helps to develop the mental and moral being in us: this new sublimating element has been therefore an acquisition of great importance; its workings have marked a considerable step forward in the difficult evolution of terrestrial Nature. And behind the inadequacy of these ethical conceptions something too is concealed that does attach to a supreme Truth; there is here the glimmer of a light and power that are part of a yet unreached divine Nature. But the mental idea of these things is not that light and the moral formulation of them is not that power. These are only representative constructions of the mind that cannot embody the divine spirit which they vainly endeavour to imprison in their categorical formulas. Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental; for it is only through a large spiritual plane where the mind's formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct inner experience that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its constructions to the vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There alone can we touch the harmony of the divine powers that are poorly mispresented to our mind or framed into a false figure by the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law. There alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental Spirit which is at once the secret source and goal of our mind and life and body. There alone is there any possibility of an absolute justice, love and right - far other than that which we imagine - at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine knowledge. There alone can there be a reconciliation of the conflict between our members.
23:In other words there is, above society's external law and man's moral law and beyond them, though feebly and ignorantly aimed at by something within them, a larger truth of a vast unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both these blind and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that try to escape from the natural law of the animal to a more exalted light or universal rule. That divine standard, since the godhead in us is our spirit moving towards its own concealed perfection, must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature. Again, as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence and nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualised collective life and determines perfectly our relations with each being and all beings in Nature's varied oneness. It must be at the same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment the rhythm and exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine in the soul, mind, life, body of the individual creature.1 And we find in experience that this supreme light and force of action in its highest expression is at once an imperative law and an absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet at each moment and in each movement the absolute freedom of the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of our conscious and liberated nature.
24:The ethical idealist tries to discover this supreme law in his own moral data, in the inferior powers and factors that belong to the mental and ethical formula. And to sustain and organise them he selects a fundamental principle of conduct essentially unsound and constructed by the intellect - utility, hedonism, reason, intuitive conscience or any other generalised standard. All such efforts are foredoomed to failure. Our inner nature is the progressive expression of the eternal Spirit and too complex a power to be tied down by a single dominant mental or moral principle. Only the supramental consciousness can reveal to its differing and conflicting forces their spiritual truth and harmonise their divergences.
25:The later religions endeavour to fix the type of a supreme truth of conduct, erect a system and declare God's law through the mouth of Avatar or prophet. These systems, more powerful and dynamic than the dry ethical idea, are yet for the most part no more than idealistic glorifications of the moral principle sanctified by religious emotion and the label of a superhuman origin. Some, like the extreme Christian ethic, are rejected by Nature because they insist unworkably on an impracticable absolute rule. Others prove in the end to be evolutionary compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. The true divine law, unlike these mental counterfeits, cannot be a system of rigid ethical determinations that press into their cast-iron moulds all our life-movements. The Law divine is truth of life and truth of the spirit and must take up with a free living plasticity and inspire with the direct touch of its eternal light each step of our action and all the complexity of our life issues. It must act not as a rule and formula but as an enveloping and penetrating conscious presence that determines all our thoughts, activities, feelings, impulsions of will by its infallible power and knowledge.
26:The older religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta of Manu or Confucius, a complex Shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule and moral law with the declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the same ground as equally the expression of everlasting verities, sanatana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary and valid for a time, mental constructions, human readings of the will of the Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to certain social and moral formulas, had to share the fortunes of its forms. Either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable. The unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy and dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul's freedom by a fixed and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an inner death. Not this coercion or determination from outside, but the free discovery of his highest spirit and the truth of an eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
27:The higher ethical law is discovered by the individual in his mind and will and psychic sense and then extended to the race. The supreme law also must be discovered by the individual in his spirit. Then only, through a spiritual influence and not by the mental idea, can it be extended to others. A moral law can be imposed as a rule or an ideal on numbers of men who have not attained that level of consciousness or that fineness of mind and will and psychic sense in which it can become a reality to them and a living force. As an ideal it can be revered without any need of practice. As a rule it can be observed in its outsides even if the inner sense is missed altogether. The supramental and spiritual life cannot be mechanised in this way, it cannot be turned into a mental ideal or an external rule. It has its own great lines, but these must be made real, must be the workings of an active Power felt in the individual's consciousness and the transcriptions of an eternal Truth powerful to transform mind, life and body. And because it is thus real, effective, imperative, the generalisation of the supramental consciousness and the spiritual life is the sole force that can lead to individual and collective perfection in earth's highest creatures. Only by our coming into constant touch with the divine Consciousness and its absolute Truth can some form of the conscious Divine, the dynamic Absolute, take up our earth-existence and transform its strife, stumbling, sufferings and falsities into an image of the supreme Light, Power and Ananda.
--
32:In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance.
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:To Sachchidananda extended in all things in widest commonalty and impartial universality, death, suffering, evil and limitation can only be at the most reverse terms, shadow-forms of their luminous opposites. As these things are felt by us, they are notes of a discord. They formulate separation where there should be a unity, miscomprehension where there should be an understanding, an attempt to arrive at independent harmonies where there should be a self-adaptation to the orchestral whole. All totality, even if it be only in one scheme of the universal vibrations, even if it be only a totality of the physical consciousness without possession of all that is in movement beyond and behind, must be to that extent a reversion to harmony and a reconciliation of jarring opposites. On the other hand, to Sachchidananda transcendent of the forms of the universe the dual terms themselves, even so understood, can no longer be justly applicable. Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
3:At first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to the harmony of the totality. There it is necessary for us - otherwise there is no issue from the problem - to realise that the terms in which our present consciousness renders the values of the universe, though practically justified for the purposes of human experience and progress, are not the sole terms in which it is possible to render them and may not be the complete, the right, the ultimate formulas. Just as there may be sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity which see the physical world differently and it may well be better, because more completely, than our sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other mental and supramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own. States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
4:Certainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the dualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as the standard for ordinary life-experience until a larger harmony is ready into which they can enter and transform themselves without losing hold of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the sense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their right interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world's relativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis of the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at a higher foundation.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
1:I have been constantly emphasizing that each stage of evolution, in whatever domain, involves a new emergence and therefore a new depth, or a new interiority, whether that applies to molecules or to birds or to dolphins; and that each new within is also a going beyond, a transcendence, a higher and wider identity with a greater total embrace. The formula is: going within = going beyond = greater embrace. And I want to make very clear exactly what that means.
2:This is extremely important, I think, because the higher stages of development, the transrational and transpersonal and mystical stages, all involve a new going within, a new interiorness. And the charge has been circulating, for quite some time now, that endeavors such as meditation are somehow narcissistic and withdrawn. Environmentalists, in particular, often claim that meditation is somehow "escapist" or "egocentric," and that this "going within" simply ignores the "real" problems in the "real" world "out there."
--- Overview of noun formula
The noun formula has 7 senses (first 5 from tagged texts)
1. (8) formula, expression ::: (a group of symbols that make a mathematical statement)
2. (6) recipe, formula ::: (directions for making something)
3. (3) formula ::: (a conventionalized statement expressing some fundamental principle)
4. (1) formula, chemical formula ::: (a representation of a substance using symbols for its constituent elements)
5. (1) convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula ::: (something regarded as a normative example; "the convention of not naming the main character"; "violence is the rule not the exception"; "his formula for impressing visitors")
6. formula ::: (a liquid food for infants)
7. rule, formula ::: ((mathematics) a standard procedure for solving a class of mathematical problems; "he determined the upper bound with Descartes' rule of signs"; "he gave us a general formula for attacking polynomials")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun formula
7 senses of formula
Sense 1
formula, expression
=> mathematical statement
=> statement
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
recipe, formula
=> direction, instruction
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
formula
=> statement
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
formula, chemical formula
=> statement
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 5
convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula
=> practice
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
formula
=> milk
=> foodstuff, food product
=> food, nutrient
=> substance
=> matter
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 7
rule, formula
=> procedure, process
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun formula
4 of 7 senses of formula
Sense 1
formula, expression
=> sentential function
=> primitive
=> exponential expression
Sense 4
formula, chemical formula
=> molecular formula
=> empirical formula
Sense 5
convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula
=> mores
=> code of conduct, code of behavior
=> universal
Sense 7
rule, formula
=> metarule
=> algorithm, algorithmic rule, algorithmic program
=> heuristic, heuristic rule, heuristic program
=> recursion
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun formula
7 senses of formula
Sense 1
formula, expression
=> mathematical statement
Sense 2
recipe, formula
=> direction, instruction
Sense 3
formula
=> statement
Sense 4
formula, chemical formula
=> statement
Sense 5
convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula
=> practice
Sense 6
formula
=> milk
Sense 7
rule, formula
=> procedure, process
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun formula
7 senses of formula
Sense 1
formula, expression
-> mathematical statement
=> equation
=> formula, expression
Sense 2
recipe, formula
-> direction, instruction
=> rule
=> rule, prescript
=> rubric
=> misdirection
=> address, destination, name and address
=> markup
=> prescription
=> recipe, formula
=> rule
=> stage direction
=> style
=> system command
Sense 3
formula
-> statement
=> summary, sum-up
=> pleading
=> amendment
=> thing
=> truth, true statement
=> description, verbal description
=> declaration
=> announcement, proclamation, annunciation, declaration
=> Bill of Rights
=> formula
=> mathematical statement
=> bid, bidding
=> word
=> explanation, account
=> explicandum, explanandum
=> explanans
=> value statement
=> representation
=> solution, answer, result, resolution, solvent
=> answer, reply, response
=> announcement, promulgation
=> prediction, foretelling, forecasting, prognostication
=> proposition
=> quotation
=> falsehood, falsity, untruth
=> understatement
=> reservation, qualification
=> cautious statement
=> comment, commentary
=> remark, comment, input
=> rhetorical question
=> misstatement
=> restatement
=> agreement, understanding
=> condition, term
=> estimate
=> formula, chemical formula
=> representation
=> declaration
=> assurance
=> recital
=> negation
Sense 4
formula, chemical formula
-> statement
=> summary, sum-up
=> pleading
=> amendment
=> thing
=> truth, true statement
=> description, verbal description
=> declaration
=> announcement, proclamation, annunciation, declaration
=> Bill of Rights
=> formula
=> mathematical statement
=> bid, bidding
=> word
=> explanation, account
=> explicandum, explanandum
=> explanans
=> value statement
=> representation
=> solution, answer, result, resolution, solvent
=> answer, reply, response
=> announcement, promulgation
=> prediction, foretelling, forecasting, prognostication
=> proposition
=> quotation
=> falsehood, falsity, untruth
=> understatement
=> reservation, qualification
=> cautious statement
=> comment, commentary
=> remark, comment, input
=> rhetorical question
=> misstatement
=> restatement
=> agreement, understanding
=> condition, term
=> estimate
=> formula, chemical formula
=> representation
=> declaration
=> assurance
=> recital
=> negation
Sense 5
convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula
-> practice
=> custom, tradition
=> convention, normal, pattern, rule, formula
=> heritage
Sense 6
formula
-> milk
=> coconut milk, coconut water
=> coconut milk, coconut cream
=> soya milk, soybean milk, soymilk
=> formula
Sense 7
rule, formula
-> procedure, process
=> Bertillon system
=> fingerprinting
=> genetic profiling, genetic fingerprinting
=> diagnostic procedure, diagnostic technique
=> emergency procedure
=> experimental procedure
=> calculation, computation, computing
=> medical procedure
=> mapping, chromosome mapping
=> operating procedure
=> stiffening
=> indirection
=> rigmarole, rigamarole
=> routine, modus operandi
=> condition, experimental condition
=> rule, formula
--- Grep of noun formula
benzene formula
chemical formula
empirical formula
formula
formulary
formulation
kekule formula
molecular formula
structural formula
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Wikipedia - British American Racing -- Formula One motor racing team
Wikipedia - British Racing Motors -- Formula One team
Wikipedia - Bronshtein and Semendyayev -- handbook of mathematics and table of formulas originating from Russia
Wikipedia - Butyric acid -- carboxylic acid with chemical formula CH3CH2CH2CO2H
Wikipedia - C10H14N4O2 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C11H14O4 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C11H16BrNO2 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C11H17NO2S -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C12H12N4O3 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C12H16N2O3 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C12H18N2O3 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C12H19NO4 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C12H8Cl6O -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C13H21NO3S -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C15H11ClN2O2 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C20H27N -- Chemical formula for Alverine or Terodiline
Wikipedia - C23H27NO9 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C23H35NO2 -- List of chemical structure articles associated with the same molecular formula
Wikipedia - C4H9N3O2 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C6H14N2O3 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C6H5N3 -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C6H9NO -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - C8H17NO3 -- list of chemical structure articles associated with the same molecular formula
Wikipedia - C8H19NO -- Molecular formula
Wikipedia - Cadmium oxide -- An inorganic compound with the formula CdO
Wikipedia - Capelli's identity -- An analogue of the formula det(AB) equals det(A) det(B) for matrices with noncommuting entries
Wikipedia - Carbon dioxide -- Chemical compound with formula COM-bM-^BM-^B
Wikipedia - Case formulation
Wikipedia - Category:Formula editors
Wikipedia - Cauchy's integral formula -- Provides integral formulas for all derivatives of a holomorphic function
Wikipedia - Charlie Whiting -- Formula One race director
Wikipedia - Chasles-Cayley-Brill formula -- On the number of united points of a correspondence from an algebraic curve to itself
Wikipedia - Chemical formula -- Compact notation for chemical compounds
Wikipedia - Chemical substance -- Matter of constant composition best characterized by the entities (molecules, formula units, atoms) it is composed of
Wikipedia - Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy -- Statement formulated by more than 200 evangelical leaders in October 1978
Wikipedia - Chloroform -- Organic compound with the formula CHCl3
Wikipedia - Chowla-Selberg formula -- Evaluates a certain product of values of the Gamma function at rational values
Wikipedia - Chris Amon Racing -- New Zealand-British Formula One team
Wikipedia - Clairaut's relation -- A formula in classical differential geometry
Wikipedia - Clinical formulation
Wikipedia - Coca-Cola formula -- The Coca-Cola Company's secret recipe for Coca-Cola syrup
Wikipedia - Computer programming -- Process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable computer programs
Wikipedia - Connaught Engineering -- Formula One and sports car constructor from the United Kingdom
Wikipedia - Correspondence principle -- Physics principle that quantum theories reproduce classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers, formulated by Niels Bohr in 1920
Wikipedia - Covariant formulation of classical electromagnetism
Wikipedia - C. R. formula -- Proposal formulated by Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari to solve the political deadlock between the All India Muslim League and Indian National Congress on independence of India from the British
Wikipedia - Davide Rigon -- Formula and sportscar racing driver, two-time Superleague Formula champion
Wikipedia - Deformulation
Wikipedia - Derrington-Francis -- British Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Diriyah ePrix -- Formula E race in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia
Wikipedia - DJS Racing -- Indian formula-student racecar design team
Wikipedia - Donald Aronow -- American designer/builder/racer:famous Magnum Marine/Cigarette/Donzi/Formula speedboats
Wikipedia - Draft:Rxformula -- American cosmetics company
Wikipedia - Eisenacher Motorenwerk -- German automobile manufacturer and Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Embassy Hill -- British Formula One team/constructor
Wikipedia - Empirical formula
Wikipedia - Envision Virgin Racing -- British Formula E team
Wikipedia - Enzo Osella -- Formula One team owner
Wikipedia - Ethylene -- Unsaturated hydrocarbon with formula C2H4
Wikipedia - Euler's continued fraction formula -- Connects a very general infinite series with an infinite continued fraction.
Wikipedia - Euler's critical load -- Formula to quantify column buckling under a given load
Wikipedia - Euler's formula -- Expression of the complex exponential in terms of sine and cosine
Wikipedia - Euler's reflection formula
Wikipedia - Euler's summation formula
Wikipedia - Ewens's sampling formula
Wikipedia - Existence precedes essence -- Central claim of existentialism formulated by Sartre
Wikipedia - Exponential formula
Wikipedia - Expression (mathematics) -- Formula that represents a mathematical object
Wikipedia - F1 2017 (video game) -- 2017 video game on 2017 Formula One season
Wikipedia - Faa di Bruno's formula -- Theorem
Wikipedia - Falconer's formula -- Mathematical formula used to calculate heritability in twin studies
Wikipedia - Federal Bridge Gross Weight Formula -- Formula for estimating bridge weight limits
Wikipedia - Fermi's golden rule -- A formula that describes the transition rate from one energy eigenstate of a quantum system into other energy eigenstates
Wikipedia - Ferrari 156/85 -- Formula One car
Wikipedia - Ferrari SF1000 -- 2020-21 Ferrari Formula One car
Wikipedia - First variation of area formula -- Element in Riemannian geometry
Wikipedia - Floral formula -- Floral formula is a means to represent the structure of a flower using numbers, letters and various symbols, presenting substantial information about the flower in a compact form.
Wikipedia - Footwork Arrows -- Formula One motor racing team, competing during the mid-1990s
Wikipedia - Force India -- Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Formula 1 Debrief -- American television series
Wikipedia - Formula 4 -- Open-wheel racing car category intended for junior drivers
Wikipedia - Formula calculator
Wikipedia - Formula D (board game) -- Board game
Wikipedia - Formulae-as-types correspondence
Wikipedia - Formula editor
Wikipedia - Formula (Energylandia) -- steel launched roller coaster in Energylandia, Poland
Wikipedia - Formula E -- Electric motorsport series
Wikipedia - Formula fiction
Wikipedia - Formula Ford -- Race car class
Wikipedia - Formula for primes
Wikipedia - Formulaic language -- Utterances with fixed forms and often non-literal meaning
Wikipedia - Formula LGB Swift -- Racecar
Wikipedia - Formula (mathematical logic)
Wikipedia - Formula missae
Wikipedia - Formula of Concord
Wikipedia - Formula One 05 -- 2005 video game
Wikipedia - Formula One: Built to Win -- 1990 racing video game
Wikipedia - Formula One car -- Class of formula race car
Wikipedia - Formula One drivers from East Germany -- List of Formula One driver from East Germany
Wikipedia - Formula One drivers from Finland -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - Formula One drivers from New Zealand -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - Formula One drivers from the Netherlands -- Formula One drivers from the Netherlands
Wikipedia - Formula One drivers from Venezuela -- Formula One drivers from Venezuela
Wikipedia - Formula One engines -- History of Formula One engines
Wikipedia - Formula One Group -- Company
Wikipedia - Formula One regulations -- International motorsport rules
Wikipedia - Formula One video games -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - Formula One
Wikipedia - Formula racing -- Auto racing on circuits using open wheel cars built to specified formula
Wikipedia - Formulario mathematico -- Book by Giuseppe Peano
Wikipedia - Formula SAE
Wikipedia - Formulas
Wikipedia - Formula Three -- Race car class
Wikipedia - Formulation 1
Wikipedia - Formula Two -- Formula car racing class
Wikipedia - Formula -- concise way of expressing information symbolically
Wikipedia - Forti FG03 -- Formula One car
Wikipedia - Frank Williams Racing Cars -- Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Franz Tost -- Formula One team principal
Wikipedia - Fulton-Favreau formula -- Proposed formula of amendment of the Constitution of Canada
Wikipedia - Gabbay's separation theorem -- Any temporal logic formula can be rewritten in an equivalent "past M-bM-^FM-^R future" form
Wikipedia - Gabriele Rumi -- Formula One team owner
Wikipedia - Galilei-covariant tensor formulation -- A tensor formulation of non-relativistic physics
Wikipedia - Gauss's principle of least constraint -- A formulation in classical mechanics
Wikipedia - Gavin Ward (engineer) -- Canadian Formula One engineer
Wikipedia - Geoff Willis -- Formula One designer
Wikipedia - Giacomo Caliri -- Italian former Formula One engineer
Wikipedia - Glossary of chemical formulae -- Alphabetic list of common chemical compounds with chemical formulas and CAS numbers
Wikipedia - Glossary of chemical formulas
Wikipedia - Green's identities -- Vector calculus formulas relating the bulk with the boundary of a region
Wikipedia - Gross-Koblitz formula -- Expresses a Gauss sum using a product of values of the p-adic gamma function
Wikipedia - Grothendieck trace formula -- Expresses the number of points of a variety over a finite field
Wikipedia - Gustafson's law -- Theoretical speedup formula in computer architecture
Wikipedia - Haas F1 Team -- American Formula One team
Wikipedia - Haas VF-17 -- Haas Formula One car
Wikipedia - Haas VF-20 -- Haas F1 Team's 2020 Formula One racing car
Wikipedia - Hamilton-Jacobi equation -- A reformulation of Newton's laws of motion using the calculus of variations
Wikipedia - Hamilton-Rosberg rivalry -- Rivalry between Formula One drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg
Wikipedia - Hamilton's principle -- formulation of the principle of stationary action
Wikipedia - Harrop formula
Wikipedia - Haynsworth inertia additivity formula -- Counts positive, negative, and zero eigenvalues of a block partitioned Hermitian matrix
Wikipedia - Heisenberg picture -- Formulation of quantum mechanics in which observable operators evolve over time, while the state vector does not change
Wikipedia - Help:Displaying a formula
Wikipedia - Herbert Freundlich -- German chemist mostly known for the equation of the adsorption isotherm he formulated
Wikipedia - Heron's formula -- Gives the area of a triangle from the lengths of the 3 sides
Wikipedia - Hertz vector -- Formulation of electromagnetic potentials
Wikipedia - Hesketh Racing -- Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Higman-Sims asymptotic formula -- An asymptotic estimate in group theory
Wikipedia - Honda in Formula One -- Formula One activities of Honda
Wikipedia - HRT Formula 1 Team -- Formula 1 Team
Wikipedia - Hua's identity -- Formula relating pairs of elements in a division ring
Wikipedia - Hunt-Lauda rivalry -- Formula One rivalry
Wikipedia - Incantation -- Magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect
Wikipedia - Incense offering in rabbinic literature -- Rabbinic views on the incense formula used in Jewish ritual
Wikipedia - Integration using Euler's formula -- Use of complex numbers to evaluate integrals
Wikipedia - Iron(II) oxide -- Inorganic compound with the formula FeO
Wikipedia - ISIPCA -- French school for post-graduate studies in perfume, cosmetics products and food flavor formulation
Wikipedia - Jacobi's formula -- Formula for the derivative of a matrix determinant
Wikipedia - Jaguar Racing -- British Formula E team
Wikipedia - Jesus Prayer -- A short formulaic prayer esteemed and advocated especially within the Eastern churches
Wikipedia - John Owen (Formula One) -- British engineer
Wikipedia - Johnson's parabolic formula -- Formula to quantify column buckling under a given load
Wikipedia - Juche -- Political ideology formulated by Kim Il-sung
Wikipedia - Kawasaki's Riemann-Roch formula -- Computes the Euler characteristic of an orbifold
Wikipedia - Kingman's formula
Wikipedia - Kontsevich quantization formula
Wikipedia - Kubo formula
Wikipedia - Lagrange inversion theorem -- Formula for the Taylor series expansion of the inverse function of an analytic function
Wikipedia - Landauer formula -- Conductance formula in terms of the conductance quantum and transmission possibilities
Wikipedia - Landau prime ideal theorem -- Provides an asymptotic formula for counting the number of prime ideals of a number field
Wikipedia - Landau theory -- A theory that Lev Landau introduced in an attempt to formulate a general theory of continuous phase transitions
Wikipedia - Larmor formula -- Gives the total power radiated by an accelerating, non-relativistic point charge
Wikipedia - Legendre's constant -- The number 1, as occurring in a formula conjectured by Legendre
Wikipedia - Leibniz formula (determinant)
Wikipedia - Leibniz formula for determinants
Wikipedia - Leibniz integral rule -- Differentiation under the integral sign formula
Wikipedia - Lente insulin -- Historical formulation of insulin as medication
Wikipedia - Lie product formula -- formula of matrix exponentials
Wikipedia - Ligier JS37 -- Formula One car
Wikipedia - Ligier JS7 -- Formula One race care
Wikipedia - Liouville's formula -- On the determinant of a solution of a 1st-order system of homogeneous linear differential equations
Wikipedia - List of British Formula Three champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula 3 Euro Series drivers -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula E broadcasters -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula E drivers -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula E ePrix -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of formulae involving M-OM-^@ -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of formulae involving pi
Wikipedia - List of Formula One broadcasters -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One circuits -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One constructor records -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One constructors -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One driver numbers -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One driver records -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One drivers who set a fastest lap -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One drivers -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One engine manufacturers from France -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One fatalities -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One Grands Prix -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One polesitters -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One Promotional Trophy winners -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One race records -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One seasons -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One World Constructors' Champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula One World Drivers' Champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula Renault 2.0 champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula Renault 3.5 Series drivers -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Formula Renault cars -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of formulas in elementary geometry -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of formulas in Riemannian geometry -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Future GPX Cyber Formula episodes -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of German Formula Three champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of International Formula 3000 drivers -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Mexican Formula Two champions -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of price index formulas -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of red-flagged Formula One races -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of second-tier formula racing champions -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Superleague Formula broadcasters -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Superleague Formula circuits -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Superleague Formula drivers and teams -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Superleague Formula records -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Local trace formula -- On the character of the representation of a reductive algebraic group
Wikipedia - Lotus F1 -- Former Formula 1 team
Wikipedia - Lymphater's Formula
Wikipedia - Mahindra Racing -- Indian Formula E team
Wikipedia - Malonic acid -- Carboxylic acid with chemical formula CH2(COOH)2
Wikipedia - Manor Racing -- Formula One racing team based in the United Kingdom
Wikipedia - March Engineering -- Former Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Marussia F1 -- Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Mathematical formulae
Wikipedia - Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics
Wikipedia - Mathematical formulation of the Standard Model -- The mathematics of a particle physics model
Wikipedia - Mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics
Wikipedia - Mathematical formula
Wikipedia - MathML -- Format for expressing mathematical formulae
Wikipedia - Matrix mechanics -- Formulation of quantum mechanics
Wikipedia - Maurizio Arrivabene -- Formula One team principal
Wikipedia - McGuire (Formula One) -- Motorsport team
Wikipedia - McLaren MCL33 -- Formula 1 car built by McLaren in 2018
Wikipedia - McLaren MCL34 -- Formula 1 car built by McLaren in 2019
Wikipedia - McLaren MP4-21 -- Formula One car designed by Adrian Newey
Wikipedia - McLaren MP4-26 -- Formula One racing car
Wikipedia - McLaren -- British Formula One team
Wikipedia - Mean of a function -- Formula for the average value of a function over its domain
Wikipedia - Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains -- British Formula One engine manufacturer
Wikipedia - Mercedes-Benz in Formula One -- Auto racing team
Wikipedia - Metasilicic acid -- The hypothetical chemical compound with formula H2SiO3
Wikipedia - Methane -- saturated hydrocarbon with formula CH4
Wikipedia - Miaphysitism -- Christological formula of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, saying that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, in one ''physis''.
Wikipedia - Mike Elliott (Formula One) -- British aerodynamicist
Wikipedia - Minnesota-Wisconsin price -- Component of the basic formula price for farm milk formerly used in federal milk marketing orders until 1995
Wikipedia - Modena (racing team) -- Formula 1 racing team
Wikipedia - Molecular formula
Wikipedia - Multiplicity (mathematics) -- Number of times an object must be counted for making true a general formula
Wikipedia - Nakajima Racing -- Japanese Super Formula and Super GT team
Wikipedia - National Origins Formula
Wikipedia - Neil Martin (motorsport) -- English Formula One strategist
Wikipedia - Net tonnage -- Dimensionless index calculated from the total moulded volume of the ship's cargo spaces by using a mathematical formula
Wikipedia - New Coke -- 1985 reformulation of Coca-Cola
Wikipedia - NIO 333 FE Team -- Chinese Formula E team
Wikipedia - Nitric oxide -- Colorless gas with the formula NO
Wikipedia - Nitrous oxide -- Colourless gas with the formula N2O
Wikipedia - NPH insulin -- Intermediate acting insulin formulation
Wikipedia - Osella -- Italian racing car manufacturer and Formula One team
Wikipedia - Path integral formulation
Wikipedia - Patrick Head -- British Formula One team owner
Wikipedia - Peterson-Stein formula -- Describes the Spanier-Whitehead dual of a secondary cohomology operation
Wikipedia - Phase space formulation
Wikipedia - Phase-space formulation
Wikipedia - Pick's theorem -- Formula for the area of a polygon with integer coordinates
Wikipedia - Poisson summation formula
Wikipedia - Polarization identity -- Formula relating the norm and the inner product in a inner product space
Wikipedia - Pollaczek-Khinchine formula
Wikipedia - Porsche Formula E Team -- German Formula E team
Wikipedia - Portal:Formula One
Wikipedia - Post's inversion formula
Wikipedia - Pravega Racing -- Formula-SAE combustion team
Wikipedia - Predicate (mathematical logic) -- A formula that can be evaluated to true or false
Wikipedia - Process manufacturing -- Branch of manufacturing that is associated with formulas and manufacturing recipes
Wikipedia - Product rule -- Formula for the derivative of a product
Wikipedia - Profitability index -- Mathematical economic formula
Wikipedia - Proof of the Euler product formula for the Riemann zeta function -- Use of a Dirichlet series expansion to calculate the complex function
Wikipedia - Propionic acid -- Carboxylic acid with chemical formula CH3CH2CO2H
Wikipedia - Propositional formula
Wikipedia - Prost-Senna rivalry -- Formula One rivalry
Wikipedia - Pyrochlore -- Niobium mineral of A2B2O7 general formula
Wikipedia - Pythagorean expectation -- Sports formula
Wikipedia - Quadratic formula -- solution of the quadratic equation
Wikipedia - Racing Point F1 Team -- Formula One team and constructor
Wikipedia - Racing Point Force India -- Former Formula One team
Wikipedia - Radbruch formula
Wikipedia - Rajamandala -- Circles of friendly and enemy states surrounding the king's state, term formulated by Indian author Chanakya
Wikipedia - Rayleigh's Formula
Wikipedia - Readability test -- Formulae for evaluating the readability of text
Wikipedia - Red Bull Racing RB16 -- Red Bull Racing's 2020-2021 Formula One racing car
Wikipedia - Red Bull Racing -- Austrian Formula One racing team based in Milton Keynes, England
Wikipedia - Red Bull RB6 -- Formula One motor racing car
Wikipedia - Reflection formula -- Numerical computation of special functions
Wikipedia - Regular insulin -- Short-acting insulin formulation
Wikipedia - Relation between Schrodinger's equation and the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics -- Relationship between branches of physics
Wikipedia - Renault in Formula One -- Formula One activities of Renault
Wikipedia - Renault R24 -- Formula One racing car
Wikipedia - Renault R.S.20 -- Renault F1 Team's 2020 Formula One racing car
Wikipedia - Rome ePrix -- Formula E race in Rome, Italy
Wikipedia - Routhian mechanics -- Formulation of classical mechanics
Wikipedia - Rydberg formula
Wikipedia - Sam Michael -- Australian Formula One designer
Wikipedia - Sanya ePrix -- Formula E race in Sanya, China
Wikipedia - Schizoanalysis -- Practice formulated by Deleuze and Guattari focusing on the unconscious represented through abstract machines, bodies without organs, rhizomes and assemblages
Wikipedia - Schrodinger picture -- Formulation of quantum mechanics
Wikipedia - Scuderia AlphaTauri -- Italian Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Scuderia Ferrari -- Formula One team
Wikipedia - Scuderia Toro Rosso -- Italian Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Selberg trace formula -- Mathematical theorem
Wikipedia - Self-reference -- A sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself
Wikipedia - Semi-empirical mass formula
Wikipedia - Shannon Racing Cars -- British Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Siegel identity -- One of two formulae that are used in the resolution of Diophantine equations
Wikipedia - Siegel-Weil formula -- Expresses Eisenstein series as a weighted average of theta series of lattices in a genus
Wikipedia - Simons' formula -- Mathematical formula
Wikipedia - Simtek -- Engineering company and Formula One team
Wikipedia - Skeletal formula
Wikipedia - Sodium chloride -- Chemical compound with formula NaCl
Wikipedia - Sodium hydroxide -- Chemical compound with formula NaOH
Wikipedia - Special Code: Assignment Lost Formula -- 1966 Italian-Spanish-French Eurospy film by Pino Mercanti
Wikipedia - Structure (mathematical logic) -- Mapping of mathematical formulas to a particular meaning, in universal algebra and in model theory
Wikipedia - Super Aguri F1 -- Formula One team
Wikipedia - Superformula
Wikipedia - Superleague Formula round Germany -- Professional sports event in Germany
Wikipedia - Surtees -- British Formula One team
Wikipedia - Swiss ePrix -- Formula E race in Bern, Switzerland
Wikipedia - Tangent half-angle formula -- Relates the tangent of half of an angle to trigonometric functions of the entire angle
Wikipedia - Tautology (logic) -- Logical formula which is true in every possible interpretation
Wikipedia - Team Lotus (2010-11) -- Former Anglo-Malaysian Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Template:Molecular formula index -- list of chemical structure articles associated with the same molecular formula
Wikipedia - The Bruun Rule -- Formula for estimating the magnitude of shoreline retreat due to changes in sea level
Wikipedia - The Formula (1980 film) -- 1980 American-West German mystery film by John G. Avildsen
Wikipedia - Theodore Racing -- Formula One racing team
Wikipedia - Theologoumenon -- Theological statement which cannot be directly regarded as the official teaching of the Church; belief or clarification by theologians upon a theological matter not clearly formulated in the Scriptures or Church dogma
Wikipedia - Thomae's formula -- Relates theta constants to the branch points of a hyperelliptic curve
Wikipedia - Thomas Bayes -- British statistician accredited for formulating Bayes Theorem
Wikipedia - Three-self formula -- Missiological strategy to establish indigenous churches: self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation. First coined in the late-19th century by various missions theorists, and still used today in certain contexts.
Wikipedia - Thus have I heard -- Standard formula to introduce Buddhist discourses
Wikipedia - Token Racing -- Formula One team
Wikipedia - Toyota Racing (Formula One team) -- 2002-2009 Formula One team representing Toyota
Wikipedia - Triacontanol -- Straight-chain primary alcohol with formula C30H62O
Wikipedia - Triarchic theory of intelligence -- Theory of human intelligence formulated by Robert Sternberg
Wikipedia - Trinitarian formula
Wikipedia - Trioxidane -- Inorganic compound with formula H2O3
Wikipedia - Trulli GP -- Former Swiss Formula E team
Wikipedia - Tutte-Berge formula -- A characterization of the size of a maximum matching in a graph
Wikipedia - Tyrrell P34 -- Formula One race car campaigned 1976-1977
Wikipedia - Valeric acid -- Carboxylic acid with chemical formula CH3CH2CH2CH2CO2H
Wikipedia - Vanwall -- Formula one team and constructor
Wikipedia - Vector algebra relations -- Formulas about vectors in three-dimensional Euclidean space
Wikipedia - Velocity-addition formula -- Equation used in relativistic physics
Wikipedia - Venturi Racing -- Monacan Formula E team
Wikipedia - Vieta's formulas -- Relations between the coefficients and the roots of a polynomial
Wikipedia - Viete's formula -- Infinite product converging to the inverse of M-OM-^@
Wikipedia - Virgin Racing -- Former Anglo-Russian Formula One constructor
Wikipedia - Water -- Chemical compound with formula H<sub>2</sub>O
Wikipedia - Well-formed formula -- Finite sequence of symbols from a given alphabet that is part of a formal language
Wikipedia - Wigner's theorem -- Theorem in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics
Wikipedia - William Henry (chemist) -- British chemist who formulated the law on the solubility of gases into liquids
Wikipedia - Williams FW29 -- Formula One car
Wikipedia - Williams FW42 -- 2019 Formula One car
Wikipedia - Williams FW43 -- 2020 Formula One car
Wikipedia - Wolf WR1 -- Formula One car
Wikipedia - XEKAM-AM -- Radio Formula station in Tijuana
Wikipedia - XHAGR-FM -- Radio Formula station in Acapulco, Guerrero
Wikipedia - XHBON-FM -- Radio Formula station in Guadalajara
Wikipedia - XHE-FM -- Radio Formula station in Durango, Durango
Wikipedia - XHHGR-FM -- Radio Formula station in Villahermosa, Tabasco
Wikipedia - XHMON-FM -- Radio Formula station in Guadalupe-Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico
Wikipedia - XHNLT-FM -- Radio Formula station in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas
Wikipedia - Zurich ePrix -- Formula E race in Zurich, Switzerland
Ayrton Senna ::: Born: March 21, 1960; Died: May 1, 1994; Occupation: Formula 1 Driver;
Niki Lauda ::: Born: February 22, 1949; Occupation: Formula One driver;
Jackie Stewart ::: Born: June 11, 1939; Occupation: Formula One driver;
Lewis Hamilton ::: Born: January 7, 1985; Occupation: Formula One driver;
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_offering_formula
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Formula_of_Concord
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Formulary_controversy
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Formulations
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Three_Jewels#Refuge_formula
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Vestments_controversy#Formulations
Integral World - The Mathematical Universe, Science, and Euler's Formula, Elliot Benjamin
Integral World - The Remarkable Euler Formula, Part I: Limits of Interpretation, Peter Collins
Integral World - The Remarkable Euler Formula, Part 2. Where Mathematical and Spiritual Reality Meet, Peter Collins
Integral World - The Remarkable Euler Formula, Part 3. Concluding Remarks, Peter Collins
Integral World - The Formula of the Mentescope, Gerrit Teule
selforum - shakti formulation given to us by sri
selforum - these formulae of science do not
selforum - lacan was always reformulating
selforum - sri aurobindos formulation of evolution
selforum - feuerbach reformulated his view to make
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2015/06/magical-formula.html
dedroidify.blogspot - illuminati-formula-used-to-create
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-mathematical-formula-of-supramental.html
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/FutureGPXCyberFormula
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GiganticFormula
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Es/LeyesYFormulas
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FormulaWithATwist/AnimeAndManga
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FormulaWithATwist/VideoGames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/LawsAndFormulas
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/FormulaWithATwist
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FormulaForTheUnformulable
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FormulaicMagic
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FormulaWithATwist
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LawsAndFormulas
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReformulatedGame
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrictlyFormula
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHollywoodFormula
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Formula1DriveToSurvive
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/FormulaD
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/FormulaE
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/FormulaOne
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Usefulnotes/FormulaOne
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/Formula1
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Javad_alizadeh_joking-on--amazing-formula.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/M&M's:_The_Lost_Formulas
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Formula_(1980_film)
Inch High Private Eye (1973 - 1974) - INCH HIGH, "the world's biggest little detective," was the hero of Inch High, Private Eye, a 1972 Hanna Barbera cartoon for kids. He could shrink down to the height of one inch, thanks to the help of a secret shrinking formula. Unfortunately, the effects of the formula weren't reliable, and he would...
Formula One (1953 - Current) - Put simply, since its inception in 1950, the Formula One race series has been world television's most iconic and well-known race series. The first race aired on TV was the 1953 British Grand Prix which was broadcast by the BBC. Since then the series has now expanded to major worldwide coverage with...
Puppet Master(1989) - Andr Toulon is a puppet maker and the best of the kind. One day he happens upon an old Egyptian formula able to create life, so he decides to give life to his puppets. The Nazis seek to use this knowledge to their advantage and in desperation, Toulon commits suicide. Some years later four psychics...
Mad Monster Party?(1967) - When Baron Von Frankenstein discovers the formula for a powerful anti-matter potion, he gathers all of the monsters -- and his nebbish nephew Felix -- for a party to announce his retirement. But the monsters aren't happy that he's named Felix as his successor, so they scheme to rub out the mortal....
The Saint(1997) - Simon Templar (Val Kilmer) is a theif. His next operation is to steal the formula for Cold Fusion, made by scientist Dr. Emma Russel (Elisabet
Return of the Living Dead Part II(1988) - A virtual remake of its predecessor, Return of the Living Dead (1985), which itself was a tongue-in-cheek rip-off of director George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), this follow-up adheres strictly to a gore and gags formula. Jesse Wilson (Michael Kenworthy), is a young boy being bullied by...
Mandroid(1993) - When a super elixir (capable of either curing all diseases or being used as an all-powerful destructive weapon) is discovered in eastern Europe, a scientist (Curt Lowens) tries to hijack the formula. To prevent the elixir's safe return, he invents an android controlled by the use of thought-power al...
The Invisible Kid(1988) - A nerdy teenage scientist discovers a formula for invisibility, and uses it to take revenge on all those who have wronged him--and also to spy on the girls' shower room.
Dead Heat(1988) - Although many genre filmmakers have managed to blend horror and humor with great success, movies employing this formula often run the risk of both elements canceling each other out, resulting in a horror comedy that is neither scary nor funny. Alas, Dead Heat is a textbook example of this kind of fa...
Horror High(1974) - Vernon Potts is the local high school nerd is picked on by everybody from students to the teachers. His only salvation is in his science experiments, his most recent one involving a new formula which transforms his pet guinea pig in a enraged monster. One night while staying late at the school on hi...
For the love of Benji(1977) - second film featuring Benji the dog. In this film, he scampers through Athens with secret agents in pursuit, who are trying to get the formula tattooed on his paw.
SSSSSSS(1973) - A deranged Ophiologist(Strother Martin)has developed a formula to turn humans into cobras.The doctor begins using the formula on his young assistant(Dirk Benedict)who slowly begins morphing into a snake.
The Wasp Woman(1959) - A cosmetics queen develops a youth formula from jelly taken from queen wasps. She fails to anticipate the typical hoary side effects.
The Amazing Transparent Man(1960) - A crazed scientist invents an invisibility formula. He plans to use the formula to create an army of invisible zombies.
Invisible Agent(1942) - The Invisible Man's grandson uses his secret formula to spy on Nazi Germany.
Invisible: The Chronicles Of Benjamin Knight(1993) - When a lab experiment goes wrong, Benjamin Knight is left invisible while his scientist friends trying to find a formula that will restore his visibility to last the rest of his life.
Torn Curtain(1966) - An American scientist publicly defects to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the solution for a formula resin and then figuring out a plan to escape back to the West.
Formula 51(2001) - An American master chemist plans to score big on a once in a lifetime drug deal. All does not go as planned and he is soon entangled in a web of deceit.
The 2nd Best Secret Agent In The Whole Wide World(1965) - Dauntless British agent Charles Vine is called upon to escort to London the famed Swedish scientist Henrik Jacobs to negotiate the sale of a secret formula. However, sinister forces gambling for enormous stakes are already at work. With the aid of the most fantastic gadgets, Vine manages to extricat...
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1391/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula -- Adventure, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1392/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula_11 -- Drama, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1393/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula_Zero -- Drama, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1394/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula_Saga -- Drama, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1395/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula_Sin -- Drama, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1396/Future_GPX_Cyber_Formula__Early_Days_Renewal -- Drama, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Sports
https://myanimelist.net/anime/2215/Kishin_Taisen_Gigantic_Formula --
Formula 1: Drive to Survive ::: TV-MA | 40min | Documentary, Sport | TV Series (2019 ) -- Docuseries following the FIA Formula One World Championship across multiple seasons. Stars: Valtteri Bottas, Will Buxton, Pierre Gasly
Love and Death (1975) ::: 7.7/10 -- PG | 1h 25min | Comedy, War | 18 July 1975 (Canada) -- In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon. Director: Woody Allen Writer: Woody Allen Stars:
Rush (2013) ::: 8.1/10 -- R | 2h 3min | Action, Biography, Drama | 27 September 2013 (USA) -- The merciless 1970s rivalry between Formula One rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Director: Ron Howard Writer: Peter Morgan
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) ::: 6.6/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 48min | Comedy, Sport | 4 August 2006 (USA) -- Number one NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby stays atop the heap thanks to a pact with his best friend and teammate, Cal Naughton, Jr. But when a French Formula One driver, makes his way up the ladder, Ricky Bobby's talent and devotion are put to the test. Director: Adam McKay Writers:
The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019) ::: 7.6/10 -- PG | 1h 49min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 9 August 2019 (USA) -- Through his bond with his owner, aspiring Formula One race car driver Denny, golden retriever Enzo learns that the techniques needed on the racetrack can also be used to successfully navigate the journey of life. Director: Simon Curtis Writers:
Torn Curtain (1966) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG | 2h 8min | Drama, Romance, Thriller | 27 July 1966 (USA) -- An American scientist publicly defects to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the solution for a formula resin before planning an escape back to the West. Director: Alfred Hitchcock Writer:
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Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Super Power Shounen -- Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising -- Izuku "Deku'' Midoriya and his fellow students in Class 1-A of UA High's hero course have been chosen to participate in a safety program on Nabu Island. To further improve their skills and gain experience in more ordinary heroics, the students aid the kind citizens with small services and everyday chores. With the low crime rate in the quiet community, all seems well and good, but the rise of a new villain threatens to put the students' courage to the test and challenge their capabilities as heroes. -- -- A merciless villain by the name of Nine is in search of a certain "quirk" needed to fulfill his diabolical plan—creating a society where only those with the strongest quirks reign supreme. As his attack on Nabu Island endangers the lives of the residents, securing the citizens becomes the first priority for Class 1-A; defeating Nine along with his wicked accomplices is also imperative. A straightforward strategy is formulated until a young boy named Katsuma Shimano, whom Deku had befriended, suddenly requires particular protection. Concerned for the boy's wellbeing, Deku and his classmates must now devise a plan to ensure Katsuma's safety at all costs. -- -- With Nine wreaking havoc to find the catalyst for his ill-intended schemes and the heroes desperate to defend Katsuma from harm, will Deku and his friends be able to come out victorious, or will they find themselves unable to escape a hopeless situation? -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Dec 20, 2019 -- 311,218 8.07
Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Super Power Shounen -- Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising Boku no Hero Academia the Movie 2: Heroes:Rising -- Izuku "Deku'' Midoriya and his fellow students in Class 1-A of UA High's hero course have been chosen to participate in a safety program on Nabu Island. To further improve their skills and gain experience in more ordinary heroics, the students aid the kind citizens with small services and everyday chores. With the low crime rate in the quiet community, all seems well and good, but the rise of a new villain threatens to put the students' courage to the test and challenge their capabilities as heroes. -- -- A merciless villain by the name of Nine is in search of a certain "quirk" needed to fulfill his diabolical plan—creating a society where only those with the strongest quirks reign supreme. As his attack on Nabu Island endangers the lives of the residents, securing the citizens becomes the first priority for Class 1-A; defeating Nine along with his wicked accomplices is also imperative. A straightforward strategy is formulated until a young boy named Katsuma Shimano, whom Deku had befriended, suddenly requires particular protection. Concerned for the boy's wellbeing, Deku and his classmates must now devise a plan to ensure Katsuma's safety at all costs. -- -- With Nine wreaking havoc to find the catalyst for his ill-intended schemes and the heroes desperate to defend Katsuma from harm, will Deku and his friends be able to come out victorious, or will they find themselves unable to escape a hopeless situation? -- -- Movie - Dec 20, 2019 -- 311,218 8.07
Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z -- -- Toei Animation -- 52 eps -- Other -- Action Comedy Magic School Sci-Fi Shoujo Slice of Life Super Power -- Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z -- Based on the American cartoon, "The Powerpuff Girls." -- -- Professor Utonium and his son Ken are studying the strange Chemical X. When a mochi cake falls into the formula, it changes into Chemical Z. Ken fires a ray of Chemical Z at a glacier in Tokyo Bay, however that causes strange black and white lights to scatter. The black lights turn its victims into monsters, with emphasis on a black light hitting a zoo monkey and transforming him into Mojo Jojo. -- -- The white lights, however, aim at three normal girls, Momoko, Miyako, and Kaoru. This gives them the power to transform into superheroes, the Powerpuff Girls Z! -- 26,381 6.36
Detective Conan -- -- TMS Entertainment -- ? eps -- Manga -- Adventure Mystery Comedy Police Shounen -- Detective Conan Detective Conan -- Shinichi Kudou, a high school student of astounding talent in detective work, is well known for having solved several challenging cases. One day, when Shinichi spots two suspicious men and decides to follow them, he inadvertently becomes witness to a disturbing illegal activity. Unfortunately, he is caught in the act, so the men dose him with an experimental drug formulated by their criminal organization, leaving him to his death. However, to his own astonishment, Shinichi lives to see another day, but now in the body of a seven-year-old child. -- -- Perfectly preserving his original intelligence, he hides his real identity from everyone, including his childhood friend Ran Mouri and her father, private detective Kogorou Mouri. To this end, he takes on the alias of Conan Edogawa, inspired by the mystery writers Arthur Conan Doyle and Ranpo Edogawa. -- -- Detective Conan follows Shinichi who, as Conan, starts secretly solving the senior Mouri's cases from behind the scenes with his still exceptional sleuthing skills, while covertly investigating the organization responsible for his current state, hoping to reverse the drug's effects someday. -- -- 262,623 8.16
Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken -- -- Rockwell Eyes, Steve N' Steven -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Mystery Slice of Life -- Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken -- After transferring to Ishinomori Middle School, Tetsuko "Alice" Arisugawa overhears her classmates discussing a strange rumor. The previous occupant of her seat, a nondescript "Judas," is missing and presumed murdered—poisoned by one of his four wives. Amidst dealing with her mother's undesired meddling in her affairs and warding off her classmates' bullying, the troubled Alice starts to investigate the mystery surrounding Judas' disappearance. -- -- The trail of clues leads her to the house of her next-door neighbor, the quirky and reclusive Hana Arai. After an awkward introduction, Hana agrees to help Alice and formulates a plan that may lead them to the answers they seek. The two girls embark on a journey to uncover what happened to Judas, and perhaps a friendship may start to blossom between the two along the way. -- -- -- Licensor: -- GKIDS -- Movie - Feb 20, 2015 -- 29,201 7.30
Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken -- -- Rockwell Eyes, Steve N' Steven -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Mystery Slice of Life -- Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken -- After transferring to Ishinomori Middle School, Tetsuko "Alice" Arisugawa overhears her classmates discussing a strange rumor. The previous occupant of her seat, a nondescript "Judas," is missing and presumed murdered—poisoned by one of his four wives. Amidst dealing with her mother's undesired meddling in her affairs and warding off her classmates' bullying, the troubled Alice starts to investigate the mystery surrounding Judas' disappearance. -- -- The trail of clues leads her to the house of her next-door neighbor, the quirky and reclusive Hana Arai. After an awkward introduction, Hana agrees to help Alice and formulates a plan that may lead them to the answers they seek. The two girls embark on a journey to uncover what happened to Judas, and perhaps a friendship may start to blossom between the two along the way. -- -- Movie - Feb 20, 2015 -- 29,201 7.30
On Your Mark -- -- Studio Ghibli -- 1 ep -- Music -- Sci-Fi Music Drama -- On Your Mark On Your Mark -- In the future, mankind can no longer live on the ground due to intense radiation, both from the sun and from an abandoned nuclear plant. One day, a group of special police raided a religious cult compound, and after a fierce firefight two policemen found a winged mutant girl, with chains on her arms, barely alive. However, government scientists dressed in hazardous material suits immediately intervened and brought her back to a research facility. Realizing they were merely transferring her from one prison to another, those two policemen formulated a daring plan to set her free once and for all. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Music - Jun 29, 1995 -- 25,222 7.48
Saredo Tsumibito wa Ryuu to Odoru -- -- Seven Arcs Pictures -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Drama Fantasy Sci-Fi -- Saredo Tsumibito wa Ryuu to Odoru Saredo Tsumibito wa Ryuu to Odoru -- It is a world replete with dragons and Jushiki sorcerers. Jushiki is a devastatingly powerful formula that can alter the laws of physics, capable of creating enormous TNT explosives or poisonous gas through plasma and nuclear fusion. A down-on-his-luck sorcerer named Gayus joins forces with the beautiful but cruel Jushiki practitioner, Gigina, as bounty hunters pursuing dragons. Then one day, they are presented with an odd request: to serve as security guards for a grand festival put on by Mouldeen, the ruler of their kingdom. It is then that a mysterious serial killing of Jushiki sorcerers begins. -- -- (Source: TBS Global Business) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 47,289 5.81
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications#Formula_editors
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1975 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1985 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1986 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1987 Buenos Aires Grand Prix 1 Festival Automolistico Internacional de Formula 3
1987 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1989 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1990 FIA European Formula 3 Cup
1992 Buenos Aires Grand Prix World Cup Formula 3000
1994 Formula One cheating controversy
2000 Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup
2001 Formula Chrysler Euroseries
2001 Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup
2002 Formula Nissan 2000 Series
2002 Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup
2003 British Formula 3 International Series
2003 Euro Formula 3000 Series
2003 Formula 3 Euro Series
2003 Formula Renault 2000 Masters
2003 Formula Renault V6 Eurocup
2004 British Formula 3 International Series
2004 Euro Formula 3000 Series
2004 Formula 3 Euro Series
2004 Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup
2004 Formula Renault V6 Eurocup
2005 British Formula 3 International Series
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