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branches ::: higher degree

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object:higher degree
word class:bigram

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


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

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Heart_of_Matter
The_Republic
The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History
The_Yoga_Sutras

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0_1966-01-22
03.07_-_Brahmacharya
08.20_-_Are_Not_The_Ascetic_Means_Helpful_At_Times?
10.01_-_Cycles_of_Creation
1.00d_-_Introduction
1.00e_-_DIVISION_E_-_MOTION_ON_THE_PHYSICAL_AND_ASTRAL_PLANES
1.010_-_Self-Control_-_The_Alpha_and_Omega_of_Yoga
1.012_-_Sublimation_-_A_Way_to_Reshuffle_Thought
1.01_-_Archetypes_of_the_Collective_Unconscious
1.024_-_Affiliation_With_Larger_Wholes
1.02_-_The_Age_of_Individualism_and_Reason
1.02_-_The_Stages_of_Initiation
1.04_-_Magic_and_Religion
1.04_-_On_Knowledge_of_the_Future_World.
1.04_-_SOME_REFLECTIONS_ON_PROGRESS
1.05_-_Christ,_A_Symbol_of_the_Self
1.05_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_-_The_Psychic_Being
1.070_-_The_Seven_Stages_of_Perfection
1.07_-_Incarnate_Human_Gods
1.08_-_The_Splitting_of_the_Human_Personality_during_Spiritual_Training
1.08_-_Wherein_is_expounded_the_first_line_of_the_first_stanza,_and_a_beginning_is_made_of_the_explanation_of_this_dark_night
1.09_-_The_Secret_Chiefs
1.13_-_Knowledge,_Error,_and_Probably_Opinion
1.15_-_In_the_Domain_of_the_Spirit_Beings
1.21_-_FROM_THE_PRE-HUMAN_TO_THE_ULTRA-HUMAN,_THE_PHASES_OF_A_LIVING_PLANET
1.26_-_The_Ascending_Series_of_Substance
1.37_-_Death_-_Fear_-_Magical_Memory
1929-05-05_-_Intellect,_true_and_wrong_movement_-_Attacks_from_adverse_forces_-_Faith,_integral_and_absolute_-_Death,_not_a_necessity_-_Descent_of_Divine_Consciousness_-_Inner_progress_-_Memory_of_former_lives
1954-12-15_-_Many_witnesses_inside_oneself_-_Children_in_the_Ashram_-_Trance_and_the_waking_consciousness_-_Ascetic_methods_-_Education,_spontaneous_effort_-_Spiritual_experience
1955-02-23_-_On_the_sense_of_taste,_educating_the_senses_-_Fasting_produces_a_state_of_receptivity,_drawing_energy_-_The_body_and_food
1957-06-19_-_Causes_of_illness_Fear_and_illness_-_Minds_working,_faith_and_illness
2.03_-_DEMETER
2.08_-_The_Branches_of_The_Archetypal_Man
2.12_-_The_Origin_of_the_Ignorance
2.13_-_On_Psychology
2.20_-_The_Infancy_and_Maturity_of_ZO,_Father_and_Mother,_Israel_The_Ancient_and_Understanding
2.22_-_Rebirth_and_Other_Worlds;_Karma,_the_Soul_and_Immortality
2.26_-_Samadhi
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
3.03_-_The_Spirit_Land
3.2.02_-_Yoga_and_Skill_in_Works
4.01_-_INTRODUCTION
4.01_-_The_Presence_of_God_in_the_World
5_-_The_Phenomenology_of_the_Spirit_in_Fairytales
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
ENNEAD_01.03_-_Of_Dialectic,_or_the_Means_of_Raising_the_Soul_to_the_Intelligible_World.
ENNEAD_02.03_-_Whether_Astrology_is_of_any_Value.
ENNEAD_03.05_-_Of_Love,_or_Eros.
ENNEAD_03.06_-_Of_the_Impassibility_of_Incorporeal_Entities_(Soul_and_and_Matter).
ENNEAD_06.02_-_The_Categories_of_Plotinos.
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
ENNEAD_06.06_-_Of_Numbers.
ENNEAD_06.07_-_How_Ideas_Multiplied,_and_the_Good.
ENNEAD_06.08_-_Of_the_Will_of_the_One.
r1914_08_05
r1919_08_04
Symposium_translated_by_B_Jowett
Theaetetus
the_Eternal_Wisdom

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
higher degree

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE

carburize ::: v. t. --> To combine with carbon or a carbon compound; -- said esp. of a process for conferring a higher degree of illuminating power on combustible gases by mingling them with a vapor of volatile hydrocarbons.

Ceremonies, Ceremonials, Sacred- Originally and essentially acts of magic, designed to bring about particular and definite results, but now almost wholly ritual observances performed from habit, from unthinking reverence to misunderstood tradition, or merely to impress the devotional imagination. The anointing of a candidate in the Mysteries was actually the completion of a process which began on higher planes and in the candidate’s inner nature, not a mere symbol intended to fix his attention or to impress his mind. In two of its ecclesiastical analogs, baptism and confirmation, we find them regarded by some churches as the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” and by others as an actual conveying of grace to the candidate; and the same with other Church sacraments. In real ceremonial magic this is fully recognized, and success depends upon the exact fulfillment of the necessary conditions; similarly in white magic, but the knowledge and proficiency required for the fulfillment of the requisite conditions is apparently beyond the attainments of the great multitude of people today. It comes only in higher degrees of chelaship and is carefully guarded from profanation. For ceremonial magic, whether white or black, means the evocation of various forces of nature, stronger or weaker depending upon their nature, demanding for their control a resolute will, an inflexible mind, and an immaculately pure heart. Ceremonies performed in ignorance may be as barren of results as a static electric machine worked in a fog.

Dweller on the Threshold ::: A literary invention of the English mystic and novelist Sir Bulwer Lytton, found in his romance Zanoni.The term has obtained wide currency and usage in theosophical circles. In occultism the word "dweller,"or some exactly equivalent phrase or expression, has been known and used during long ages past. Itrefers to several things, but more particularly has an application to what H. P. Blavatsky calls "certainmaleficent astral Doubles of defunct persons." This is exact. But there is another meaning of this phrasestill more mystical and still more difficult to explain which refers to the imbodied karmic consequencesor results of the man's past, haunting the thresholds which the initiant or initiate must pass before he canadvance or progress into a higher degree of initiation. These dwellers, in the significance of the word justlast referred to are, as it were, the imbodied quasi-human astral haunting parts of the constitution thrownoff in past incarnations by the man who now has to face them and overcome them -- very real and livingbeings, parts of the "new" man's haunting past. The initiant must face these old "selves" of himself andconquer or -- fail, which failure may mean either insanity or death. They are verily ghosts of the deadmen that the present man formerly was, now arising to dog his footsteps, and hence are very truly calledDwellers on the Threshold. In a specific sense they may be truly called the kama-rupas of the man's pastincarnations arising out of the records in the astral light left there by the "old" man of the "new" man whonow is.

Elder brother: A member of the Great White Lodge (q.v.), a high initiate in occultism and esoteric sciences whose efforts and diligence have made him attain a higher degree of spiritual evolution than the ordinary student of occultism. Referred to in occult literature also as Adept, Great Initiate, Master, Master Occultist, Master of Wisdom, or Rishi.

extrapolation "mathematics, algorithm" A mathematical procedure which estimates values of a {function} for certain desired inputs given values for known inputs. If the desired input is outside the range of the known values this is called extrapolation, if it is inside then it is called interpolation. The method works by fitting a "curve" (i.e. a function) to two or more given points and then applying this function to the required input. Example uses are calculating {trigonometric functions} from tables and audio waveform sythesis. The simplest form of interpolation is where a function, f(x), is estimated by drawing a straight line ("linear interpolation") between the nearest given points on either side of the required input value: f(x) ~ f(x1) + (f(x2) - f(x1))(x-x1)/(x2 - x1) There are many variations using more than two points or higher degree {polynomial} functions. The technique can also be extended to functions of more than one input. (2007-06-29)

FREEDOM, LAW OF The law of freedom says that every monad is its own freedom and its own law, that freedom is to be gained by law, that freedom is the right to individual character and activity within the limits of the equal right of all. K1.41.8

Unconscious and, to a still higher degree, conscious encroachment upon the monads' inalienable, inviolable divine freedom, limited by the equal right of all living beings, results in the struggle for existence and the cruelty of life. K 4.11.4


hyperactivity: a higher degree of inappropriate motor activity than is considered typical for a particular age group. See Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

In connection with initiation, it means a minor manifestation of the inner god to the candidate, as contrasted with theophany, which takes place in a higher degree, and is the appearance of the inner god.

Initiant [from Latin initio entering into, beginning] One who is preparing for initiation, as distinguished from one who has been initiated — the latter being an initiate. One who is an initiate in one degree may be only an initiant as to a higher degree.

material world ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Our material world is the result of all the others, for the other principles have all descended into Matter to create the physical universe, and every particle of what we call Matter contains all of them implicit in itself; their secret action, as we have seen, is involved in every moment of its existence and every movement of its activity. And as Matter is the last word of the descent, so it is also the first word of the ascent; as the powers of all these planes, worlds, grades, degrees are involved in the material existence, so are they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually Supermind and the higher degrees of the spiritual existence.” The Life Divine

Modern Freemasonry includes many Rites and Degrees, all the so-called higher degrees being based upon the three fundamental craft degrees — 1) Entered Apprentice; 2) Fellow Craft; and 3) Master Mason — which degrees alone comprise true Masonic secrets and have any valid claim to descent from ancient Masonry. The lessons or keynotes of these three degrees are respectively 1) ethical, to subdue the passions; 2) intellectual, the training of the mind, the seven liberal arts and sciences, and the mounting of the stairway of wisdom; and 3) spiritual, the conquest of death. The lessons in each degree are enforced and illustrated by appropriate symbols and allegories. The central theme of modern Masonry is the building of King Solomon’s Temple; the death of Hiram Abif and the consequent loss of the Word; the raising of Hiram Abif, and the communication of a Substitute Word.

“Our material world is the result of all the others, for the other principles have all descended into Matter to create the physical universe, and every particle of what we call Matter contains all of them implicit in itself; their secret action, as we have seen, is involved in every moment of its existence and every movement of its activity. And as Matter is the last word of the descent, so it is also the first word of the ascent; as the powers of all these planes, worlds, grades, degrees are involved in the material existence, so are they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually Supermind and the higher degrees of the spiritual existence.” The Life Divine

peer-reviewed journal: A journal which contains articles of a scholarly nature. The articles have been reviewed by others who are experts in their field. This therefore creates a higher degree of reliability for the articles in such a publication.

Perseity: (Lat. per se) The condition of being per se, by itself, that is being such as it is from its very nature. Perseity must not be confused with aseity The former implies independence of a subject in which to inhere, whereas the latter demands a still higher degree of independence of any efficient or producing agency whatsoever, it is predicated of God alone. Thomas Aquinas held: Quod est per se, semper est prius eo quod est per aliud. That which exists per se is always a substance. This mode of existence is distinguished from that which is per accidens, that is something which is not essential, but only belongs to a subject more or less fortuitously. A thing is per se owing to its internal constitution, or essence, but that which is per accidens is due rather to external or non-essential reasons. Thomas Aquinas taught that that which is per accidens, non potest esse semper et in omnibus, whereas that which belongs to something per se, de necessitate et semper et inseparabiliter et inest. Duns Scotus held that per se esse may be understood in the sense of being incommunicable, incommunicabiliter esse, or per se subsistere, subsisting by itself, not by another. In human acts that which is directly intended is per se, while that which is per accidens is praeter intentionem. Rational beings tend toward the good, or that which is regarded as good. If the good is intended for itself it is bonum per se, otherwise it is a bonum per accidens or secundum quid, that is relatively good. -- J.J.R.

Potentiality: See Dynamis. Power: In general: the physical, mental and moral ability to act or to receive an action; the general faculty of doing, making, performing, realizing, achieving, producing or succeeding; ability, capacity, virtue, virtuality, potency, potentiality, faculty, efficacy, efficacity, efficiency, operative causality, process of change or becoming; natural operative force, energy, vigor, strength, or effective condition applied or applicable to work; person, agent, body, institution, government or state, having or exercising an ability to act in accordance with its nature and functions; spirit, divinity, deity, superhuman agent, supernatural principle of activity; an attribute or name of God; in theology, an order of angels; in law the authority, capacity or right to exercise certain natural and legal prerogatives, also, the authority vestcd in a person by law; influence, prerogative, force. A. In psychology, power is sometimes synonymous with faculty (q.v.). It also means a quality which renders the nature of an individual agent apt to elicit certain physical and moral actions. Hence, power is a natural endowment enabling the intellect to condition the will and thus create hibits and virtues, in a higher degree, power is a moral disposition enabling the individual to cultivate his perfectibility. The distinction between powers is given by the distinction of their actions. Powers are acthe or operative, and passive or receptive; they are immediate or remote. Even impotence and incapacity are not different in kind from power, but simply in degree. These Aristotelian views on power, including its ontological interpretation, have held the ground for centuries, and we find them partly also in Hobbes and Locke who defined power as the ability to make or to receive change. Hume's analysis of power showed it to be an illusion; and with the advent of positivism and experimental psychology, this concept lost much of its value. The notion of power has been used by Fechner in his doctrine and law concerning the relation between stimuli and sensations.

quantic ::: n. --> A homogeneous algebraic function of two or more variables, in general containing only positive integral powers of the variables, and called quadric, cubic, quartic, etc., according as it is of the second, third, fourth, fifth, or a higher degree. These are further called binary, ternary, quaternary, etc., according as they contain two, three, four, or more variables; thus, the quantic / is a binary cubic.

SOLAR SYSTEMIC ENERGIES The solar systems make up a widely branched-out network for distribution of cosmic energies, which are coming in from worlds 36-42. (K
2.13.1f)

The solar systems of higher degrees transmit the cosmic energies to those of lower degrees. Our solar system is of the second degree. The energies from other solar systems reach the planets via the sun, which has the task, among others, of transforming the atomic energies into molecular energies. K 2.13.5


Suspended Animation Cases of extreme insensibility where the vital activity has temporarily ceased, and the person appears to be dead. Outstanding examples are seen in persons resuscitated from drowning; in cases of those Oriental fakirs who are revived after being buried alive for days or weeks; and in those spiritual adepts who leave their body at will, and consciously go thousands of miles in their mayavi-rupa (thought-body). In the higher degrees of initiation, the trained initiant leaves his protected body while, in his higher nature, he traverses extraterrestrial spheres of existence. The adept comes and goes when the occasion justifies the effort, because his lives of training and aspiration have made him master of his lower nature, and enabled him to live and act in his liberated spiritual principle. These and other states of suspended animation show that the conscious existence of the inner man is not dependent upon his physical body.

The death and rebirth of Atys represent initiation and subsequent adeptship. His impotency points directly to the perfect chastity required for the higher degrees of initiation.

There is an automatic phase of free will in the purposeful instinct which marks the various activities of even minute and lowly forms of life. The unself-conscious beasts are protected, and therefore guided, by the wills of celestial beings who make the so-called laws of nature, yet even the beasts instinctively choose to run true to their own inner types or svabhava. They unconsciously will to be themselves and to copy no other. They have free will exactly in proportion to their consciousness, just as any person has it in the higher degrees of his intelligence and more active intuition. Thus human beings have the power to work out their evolution, for the kingdom of heaven is taken by strength. The gods have gone ahead on the pathway towards omniscience — so far as our universe is concerned — by their own individual efforts consciously to act with an ever-enlarging measure of harmony with the one divine will. Thus the volume or power of free will is in strict proportion with the degree in which the entity has brought forth the central spark of divine willing fire which animates all that is. Nevertheless no single being or entity has completely unfettered and perfectly irresponsible free will, because of its relative imperfection and because of its inescapable subordination to greater wills, each such entity ever evolving from its stage of imperfection as it ascends along the scales of being: those on the higher rungs of the hierarchical ladder consciously willing in ever-enlarging degree to follow the greater divine will which holds all in its keeping.

The ring here signifies the circle of knowledge or cycle of initiatory experience and wisdom thus gained, which the fully completed initiate thereafter carries with him in the form of the ring or circle of wisdom and power. One of the powers of the adept, for instance, is to render himself invisible at will, which is achieved by throwing around himself a veil of akasa. The descent into the earth points emphatically to the descent into the pit or underworld which every neophyte of the higher degrees must undertake before completing the initiatory cycle. See also BRIAREUS

The rules governing betrayal of the secrets were of the utmost severity, the common penalty for such infringement being death. Yet this was a sign of degeneration from the original purity of the Mysteries, for “never in any circumstances has the power or the force of the Lodge, has the hand of a Teacher, been raised in violence or in hatred against a betrayer, against the unfaithful, no matter how grave the crime might have been. Their punishment was in this: they were left strictly to themselves; and the inner penalty was the withdrawal of the Deathless Watcher, the higher self within, which had been consciously and successfully invoked upon entrance into the Mysteries, and in the higher degrees of initiation had been faced, literally face to face. The early and automatic penalty was inner death by the soul-loss. The betrayer lost his soul” (Fund 254-5).

"The Unknowable, — not absolutely unknowable, but beyond mental knowledge, — can only be a higher degree in the intensity of being of that Something, a degree beyond the loftiest summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given us by our supreme possible knowledge but rather carry it to a higher fulfilment and larger truth of what it has already gained by self-vision and self-experience.” The Life Divine

“The Unknowable,—not absolutely unknowable, but beyond mental knowledge,—can only be a higher degree in the intensity of being of that Something, a degree beyond the loftiest summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given us by our supreme possible knowledge but rather carry it to a higher fulfilment and larger truth of what it has already gained by self-vision and self-experience.” The Life Divine

::: "This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist on the soul"s undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial I'' of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; theI"" of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the I'' of this moment, theI"" of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.” The Life Divine

“This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist on the soul’s undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial I’’ of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; theI’’ of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the I’’ of this moment, theI’’ of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless Spirit into the terms of Time.” The Life Divine

Turning to the second meaning, in Freemasonry every degree has its password or words, which are given to the neophyte during initiation into that degree, the possession of which is a requisite for admission into the working of that degree, and to the conferring of it upon others. By means of it, initiates, as of Freemasonry, may become known to one another. In the ancient Mysteries such words were key words, words of power — not mere words or phrases which could be communicated to anyone merely after taking part in a ceremony however symbolic, but only to those who were inwardly qualified and worthy of receiving them; who, in fact, had achieved the right of demanding them. Thus in a sense such words were ineffable, not only not to be uttered but unutterable to anyone not entitled to receive them, anyone who had not attained through aspiration, self-conquest, and inner development of mind and heart that stage wherein an understanding of them would be possible. Such inner development must in fact have been begun before one could be truly initiated even into the lowest degree, and must be attained progressively in greater and greater measure as an indispensable qualification for advancement into a higher degree. This use of passwords is also seen in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.



QUOTES [2 / 2 - 37 / 37]


KEYS (10k)

   1 Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
   1 Plotinus

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   3 Nathaniel Branden

1:Each Mass earns you a higher degree of glory in Heaven!" ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina,
2:All is coordinated in the universe. All things depend mutually on each other. All conspires to one sole end, not only in the individual whose parts are perfectly linked together, but anteriorly and to a higher degree in the universe. ~ Plotinus, the Eternal Wisdom

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Acquisition of [higher] knowledge is not the end, but the means to the end; the end consists of the attainment, thanks to this knowledge of the higher worlds, of greater and truer self-confidence, a higher degree of courage, and a magnanimity and perseverance such as cannot, as a rule, be acquired in the lower world.For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove
2:Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call genius has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve. ~ nathaniel-branden, @wisdomtrove
3:Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:The more extreme conservatives will embrace religion and nationalism to a higher degree. ~ Tyler Cowen,
2:A trustee has a responsibility to guard the assets of others with a higher degree of care than he does his own. ~ John Ashcroft,
3:Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. ~ Nathaniel Branden,
4:In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision. ~ Ann Druyan,
5:If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans? ~ Peter Singer,
6:I do think that my work has gotten calmer, and that the violence of some of the earlier series was necessary to reach the higher degree of concentration in the later ones. ~ Rineke Dijkstra,
7:I f possessing a higher degree of intelligence d oes not entitle one human to use a nother for his or her own ends, how can i t entitle humans to ex­ ploit nonhumans for the same purpose? ~ Anonymous,
8:Intelligent women make the
mistake of assuming that if they hold a higher degree, they can hold
their own in a political debate, and they have a good understanding
of mid-caps ~ Sherry Argov,
9:Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness—that is, the absence of supportive feedback from their social environment. ~ Nathaniel Branden,
10:All is coordinated in the universe. All things depend mutually on each other. All conspires to one sole end, not only in the individual whose parts are perfectly linked together, but anteriorly and to a higher degree in the universe. ~ Plotinus,
11:So the will's desire for death is not a desire for nonexistence, but a desire for peace. When someone wrongly believes that he will not exist, he desires by nature to be at peace; that is, he desire to exist in a higher degree. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo,
12:By Father is to be understood the source of ourselves, not a person but a principle, the divine life from which we have been individualized by the processes of evolution. [...] Heaven is not a place, but a refinement of matter, a higher degree of vibration,
13:The truth is everybody does it from time to time. People dial telephone numbers and they get a wrong number only to find that they've read the last two digits backwards. Everybody does it, but dyslexics have this tendency to a higher degree. ~ Bruce Jenner,
14:The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family ~ Albert Einstein,
15:[p]eople who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of "vertical coherence" among their goals - that is, higher-level (long term) goal and lower-level (immediate) goals fit together well so that pursuing one's short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals. ~ Jonathan Haidt,
16:It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves. ~ Richard P Feynman,
17:Acquisition of knowledge is not the end, but the means to the end; the end consists in the attainment, thanks to this knowledge of the higher worlds, of greater and truer self-confidence, a higher degree of courage, and a magnanimity and perseverance such as cannot, as a rule, be acquired in the lower world. ~ Rudolf Steiner,
18:There are degrees of love. If not, the vibratory rate would be so high we wouldn’t be able to be on this plane. The degrees exist because this is the planet of lesson, and as our lessons are learned, we progress to a higher degree of embodiment of Love. We notice “evil” people because their behavior indicates separateness, not oneness, i.e., a lack of regard for others. ~ Dannye Williamsen,
19:Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist ~ Andre Bazin,
20:Equations are classified by the highest power (value of the exponent) of its unknowns. If this is one, the equation is of first degree. If this is two, the equation is of second degree, and so on. Equations of higher degree than one yield multiple possible values for their unknown quantities. These values are known as roots. The first-degree equation (the linear equation): 3x – 9 = 0 (root: x = 3) ~ Stieg Larsson,
21:Some crimes get honor and renown by being committed with more pomp, by a greater number, and in a higher degree of wickedness thanothers. Hence it is that public robberies, plunderings, and sackings have been looked upon as excellencies and noble achievements, and the seizing of whole countries, however unjustly and barbarously, is dignified with the glorious name of gaining conquests. ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld,
22:I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid - a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry - Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous." ~ Benoit Mandelbrot,
23:The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. “If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. ~ Arthur C Clarke,
24:And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. ~ Plato,
25:Whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man - whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. ~ Socrates,
26:Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call genius has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve. ~ Nathaniel Branden,
27:Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions. ~ David Hume,
28:It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes. This applies in a higher degree to the primitive people than to the civilized, and animals again will wander back a long way, and go through danger and sufferings, to recover their lost identity, in the surroundings that they know. ~ Isak Dinesen,
29:The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves. As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL. William James,
The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr,
30:And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has not all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female? Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management of pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be great, and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the most absurd? You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority of the female sex: although many women are in many things superior to many men, yet on the whole what you say is true. And ~ Plato,
31:For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that bonobos get a “reproductive payoff that compensates them for their wasteful approach to hitting the ovulatory target.” The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes. ~ Christopher Ryan,
32:seemed almost certain to the mathematicians that since the general first, second, third, and fourth degree equations can be solved by means of the usual algebraic operations such as addition, subtraction, and roots, then the general fifth degree equation and still higher degree equations could also be solved. For three hundred years this problem was a classic one. Hundreds of mature and expert mathematicians sought the solution, but a little boy found the full answer. The Frenchman Évariste Galois (1811— 1832), who refused to conform to school examinations but worked brilliantly and furiously on his own, showed that general equations of degree higher than the fourth cannot be solved by algebraic operations. To establish this result Galois created the theory of groups, a subject that is now at the base of modern abstract algebra and that transformed algebra from a a series of elementary techniques to a broad, abstract, and basic branch of mathematics. ~ Morris Kline,
33:Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world. ~ H L Mencken,
34:Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness—that is, the absence of supportive feedback from their social environment. They are more willing to follow their vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored spaces do not frighten them—or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power—the great artists, scientists, inventors, industrialists. Is not the hallmark of entrepreneurship (in art or science no less than in business) the ability to see a possibility that no one else sees—and to actualize it? Actualizing one’s vision may of course require the collaboration of many people able to work together toward a common goal, and the innovator may need to be highly skillful at building bridges between one group and another. But this is a separate story and does not affect my basic point. That which we call “genius” has a great deal to do with independence, courage, and daring—a great deal to do with nerve. This is one reason we admire it. In the literal sense, such “nerve” cannot be taught; but we can support the process by which it is learned. If human happiness, well-being, and progress are our goals, it is a trait we must strive to nurture—in our child-rearing practices, in our schools, in our organizations, and first of all in ourselves. ~ Nathaniel Branden,
35:These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definite
degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of any
arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.
They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a
lower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a
smaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But if
this is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavors
toward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree of
inequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary
to embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personal
judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in the
passing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and
“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider
to be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannot
oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedly
beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always be
people whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.
Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes
is an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;
equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth and
incomes. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
36:Under democratic technics, the only occupation that demanded a lifetime's attention was that of becoming a full human being, able to perform his biological role and to take his share in the social life of the community, absorbing and transmitting the human tradition, deliberately bringing the ceremonies he performed, the food he planted, the images he shaped, the utensils he carved or painted to a higher degree of esthetic perfection. Every part of work was life-work. This archaic attitude toward work was widespread; and despite all the efforts Western man has made, since the sixteenth century, to corrupt and destroy this basic culture, it still lingered in peasant communities, as well as in the surviving tribal enclaves that were intact at the beginning of the present century. Franz Boas noted the high regard for craftsmanship among supposedly primitive peoples; while Malinowski emphasized the same attitude among his near-neolithic 'Coral Gardeners.'

Machine culture in its original servile form did not share these life-enhancing propensities: it centered, not on the worker and his life, but on the product, the system of production, and the material or pecuniary gains therefrom. Whether kept in operation by the taskmaster's whip or by the inexorable progression of today's assembly line, the processes derived from the megamachine worked for speed, uniformity, standardization, quantification. What effect these objectives had upon the worker or upon the life that remained to him when the workday was over was no concern of those who commanded these mechanical operations. The compulsions produced by this system were more insidious than outright slavery, but as with slavery, they finally debased the controllers as well as the working force so controlled. ~ Lewis Mumford,
37:Contemporary man, owing to certain, almost imperceptible conditions of ordinary life which are firmly rooted in modern civilisation and which seem to have become, so to speak, " inevitable " in daily life, has gradually deviated from the natural type he ought to have represented on account of the sum-total of the influences of place and environment in which he was born and reared and which, under normal conditions, without any artificial impediments, would have indicated by their very nature for each individual the lawful path of his development in that final normal type which he ought to have become even in his preparatory age.   Today, civilisation, with its unlimited scope in extending its influence, has wrenched man from the normal conditions in which he should be living.   It is, of course, true that modern civilisation has opened up for man new and vaster horizons in different technical, mechanical and many other so-called " sciences ", thereby enlarging his world perception, but civilisation has, instead of a balanced rising to a higher degree of development, developed only certain sides of his general being to the detriment of others, while, because of the absence of an harmonious education, certain faculties inherent in man have even been completely destroyed, depriving him in this way of the natural privileges of his type. In other words, by not educating the growing generation harmoniously, this civilisation, which should have been, according to common sense, in all respects like a good mother to man, has withheld from him what she should have given him ; and, it appears, that she has even taken from him the possibility of the progressive and balanced development of a new type, which development would have inevitably taken place if only in the course of time and according to the law of general human progress.   From this follows the indubitable fact, which can be clearly established, that, instead of an accomplished individual type, which historical data would show man to have been some centuries ago and one normally in communion with Nature and the environment generating him, there developed instead a being that was uprooted from the soil, unfit for life, and a stranger to all normal conditions of existence. ~ G I Gurdjieff,

IN CHAPTERS [62/62]



   13 Christianity
   12 Occultism
   12 Integral Yoga
   10 Philosophy
   4 Yoga
   4 Psychology
   2 Theosophy
   2 Science
   2 Kabbalah
   1 Sufism
   1 Integral Theory


   15 Sri Aurobindo
   9 Plotinus
   5 The Mother
   5 Carl Jung
   4 Swami Krishnananda
   4 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   3 Rudolf Steiner
   3 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   2 Satprem
   2 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
   2 Plato
   2 James George Frazer
   2 Aleister Crowley


   6 The Life Divine
   4 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   4 The Study and Practice of Yoga
   4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
   3 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
   2 The Golden Bough
   2 The Future of Man
   2 Record of Yoga
   2 Questions And Answers 1955
   2 Magick Without Tears
   2 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
   2 General Principles of Kabbalah
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04


0 1966-01-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Only, I have noticed that in this bodys life, Ive never had the same experience twice I may have the same type of experience to a higher degree or to a much vaster degree, but never identically the same. And I dont retain the experience: I am constantly, constantly (gesture forward), constantly forging ahead; you know, the work of transformation of the consciousness is so rapid, it must be done so fast that you dont have time to enjoy or dwell upon an experience or draw long-lasting satisfaction from it, its impossible. It comes powerfully, very powerfully, it changes everything, then something else comes. Its the same thing with the transformation of the cells: all kinds of little disorders come, but to the consciousness they are clearly disorders related to the transformation, so you see to that particular point, you want order to be restored; at the same time, something knows full well that the disorder came to make the transition from the ordinary automatic functioning to the conscious functioning under the direct Direction and the direct Influence of the Supreme. And the body itself knows this (still, its no fun to have a pain here or a pain there, or this or that being disorganized, but it KNOWS). And when that point has reached a certain stage of transformation, you move on to another point, then on to another, and on to another again. So nothing is done, no work is definitively done until everything is ready. So you have to do the same work again, but on a higher or a vaster level, or with more intensity or in greater detail (it depends on the case), until EVERYTHING has been brought to a homogeneous point and is ready in the same way.
   According to what I see, its going as fast as it can go. But it takes a great deal of time. And everything is a question of changing the habit. The whole automatic habit of millennia must be changed into a conscious action, directly guided by the supreme Consciousness.

03.07 - Brahmacharya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It must be understood that this discipline is not merely for those who wish to follow a religious or spiritual life, but for all without exception. Brahmacharya is the first ashrama, order or stage of life with which one begins one's organisation of life; one has to pass through it to others leading to greater and higher degrees of fulfilment. It forms the foundation, prepares the necessary ground upon which the life structure can safely be raised and maintained. It is the secret fund of strength, the source of pure energies that vitalises life, enhances its values, makes it worth living.
   The energy that one stores by continence, regular habits and self-discipline increases also in that way. Sometimes special methodskriyaare adopted to help the process, Asana or Pranayama, for example. But an inner and a more psychological procedure is needed, a concentration of will and consciousnessa kind of dhyana, in other wordsin order to be able to take the next step in discipline. For after the storage and increase of energy comes the sublimation of energy, that is to say, the physico-vital energy transmuted into the energy of mental substance, medh. Sublimation means also the increase of brain-power, an enhancement in the degree and quality of its capacity. This has nothing to do with the volume of knowledge enclosed (the mass of information to which we referred before) the growth is with regard to the very stuff of the mind from within, the natural strength of intelligence that can be applied to any field of knowledge with equal success and felicity.

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 much more difficult, however, to master one's impulses quietly, deliberately, prevent them from bursting out instead of mortifying the body with ascetic feats. It is much more difficult not to be attached to things that one possesses than to possess nothing. Yet it is a simple truth that has been recognised through ages. To be without possessions or to reduce one's possessions to a minimum is easy: difficult it is not to be attached to whatever you happen to possess. It means a higher degree of moral value. Try to do this simply and you will know what it costs: when a thing comes to you, accept it and if it goes away, for some reason or other, let it go, without regret, without trying to hold it back; not to refuse it when it comes, not to regret when it leavesnaturally, I speak of material objects, things required for use in life.
   Physical asceticism does not cure. For the defects are within. You are afraid of contacts from outside and you withdraw into caves and jungles and hilltops, to live all by yourself. But you need no borrowing from others; you carry a sufficient load yourself. In fact if they were not in you, you would not have even detected them in others. You catch the infection from outside, simply because you carry the germs inside. Great waves of passion, one can say with much truth, roll through men, they are not generated in them. But if there is anyone perfectly pure, with no possibility of any passion in him, then such waves may be sweeping over for centuries together, he will not be affected or touched by them. He may see them, look at them as they pass, like a storm across the sky, but he will not feel them.

10.01 - Cycles of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   At the present time the human consciousness in general has been so prepared and its dwelling and playfield the earth consciousness made ready to such a degree that it has been possible for the still secreted higher perfection to enter into the arena. The evolution, the growth has been a gradual expression and revelation of the light, the consciousness in a higher and higher degree of purity and potency through an encasement hard and resistant at first but gradually yielding to the impact of the higher status and even transforming itself so as to become its instrument and embodiment. We speak of the present situation, we are concerned with man and what he is to grow into or bring out of himself. Here also there seem to be stages or cycles of creation leading to the final achievement. The whole burden of the present endeavour is how to transcend, transform or modify the animalhood which is the basis of humanity even now and in and through which man is growing and seeking to manifest and incarnate his superior potencies. Man's supramental destiny means that he totally outgrows the animal, outgrows even his manhood in so far as it is merely human; for he has to incorporate the principle of the supramental which wholly transcends the mental.
   The first step in this momentous movement has been taken, the first act achieved, for the supramental is now here established in the earth's atmosphere and is already percolating into general human consciousness. It is no longer a far-off object residing away in its own home, its higher transcendent status, but a concrete reality as something like earth's own. It is at work in this material envelope, this animal encasing of humanity and is vigorously transforming, demolishing and building, preparing the new structure.

1.00d - Introduction, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  And we assert that there exists a future far more marvelous than all the electronic paradises of the mind: man is not the end, any more than the archaeopteryx was, at the height of the reptiles how could anything possibly be the culmination of the great evolutionary wave? We see it clearly in ourselves: We seem to invent ever more marvelous machines, ceaselessly expand the limits of the human, even progress towards Jupiter and Venus. But that is only a seeming, increasingly deceptive and oppressive, and we do not expand anything: we merely send to the other end of the cosmos a pitiful little being who does not even know how to take care of his own kind, or whether his caves harbor a dragon or a mewling baby. We do not progress; we inordinately inflate an enormous mental balloon, which may well explode in our face. We have not improved man; we have merely colosalized him. And it could not have been otherwise. The fault does not lie in some deficiency of our virtues or intellectual capacities, for pushed to their extreme these could only generate supersaints or supermachines monsters. A saintly reptile in its hole would no more make an evolutionary summit than a saintly monk would. Or else, let us forget everything. The truth is, the summit of man or the summit of anything at all does not lie in perfecting to a higher degree the type under consideration; it lies in a something else that is not of the same type and that he aspires to become. Such is the evolutionary law. Man is not the end; man is a transitional being, said Sri Aurobindo long ago. He is heading toward supermanhood as inevitably as the minutest twig of the highest branch of the mango tree is contained in its seed. Hence, our sole true occupation, our sole problem, the sole question ever to be solved from age to age, the one that is now tearing our great earthly ship apart limb from painful limb is how to make this transition.
  Nietzsche said it also. But his superman was only a colossalization of man; we saw what he did as he tramped over Europe. That was not an evolutionary progress, only a return to the old barbarism of the blond or brunet brute of human egoism. We do not need a super-man, but something else, which is already murmuring in the heart of man and is as different from man as Bach's cantatas are from the first grunts of the hominid. And, truly, Bach's cantatas sound poor when our inner ear begins to open up to the harmonies of the future.
  --
  The secret of life is not in life, nor that of man in man, any more than the secret of the lotus is in the mud from which it grows, said Sri Aurobindo; and yet the mud and a ray of sun combine to create a higher degree of harmony. It is this site of convergence, this point of transmutation, that we must find. Then, perhaps, we will rediscover what a quiet child on a beach contemplated in a fleck of wild foam, and the supreme music that spins the worlds, and the one Marvel that was awaiting its hour.
  And what seemed to be humanly impossible will become child's play.

1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
  It can be noted that we have not summed up the two planes of abstraction on the atmic and the buddhic planes, the reason being that they mark a degree of realisation which is the property of initiates of higher degree [189] than that of the adept, and which is beyond the concept of the evolving human unit, for whom this treatise is written.
  We might here, for the sake of clarity, tabulate the five different aspects of the five senses on the five planes, so that their correspondences may be readily visualised, using the above table as the basis:

1.010 - Self-Control - The Alpha and Omega of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The act of self-control is the return of consciousness to a higher selfhood from a lower one. It is a rise from self to self, we may call it from the self that is involved in externality and objectivity, to a self that is less involved in this manner a return from objectivity to subjectivity through higher and higher degrees of ascent. But this process becomes extremely difficult on account of our weddedness to the senses. We have been habituated to look at things only through the senses, and we have no other way of knowing or judging. We immediately pass a judgement on anything that is seen with the eyes it is there in such-and-such a condition, it has such-and-such a value, it is real in this percentage. Our judgement of value and reality depends, therefore, unfortunately for us, on our sense-perceptions, so that external relationships are mistaken by us as realities. A reality is not a relationship; it is an existence by itself. So, self-control is a return of consciousness from its life of relationships, to a higher form of life where relationships become less and less palpable.
  The whole difficulty is in self-control, and this is the alpha and omega of yoga everything is here. It is practically impossible for ordinary people, because consciousness is involved there. If anything else had been involved, we would have done something. We ourselves are involved that is the meaning of consciousness getting involved and if we are involved in mistaken activity, how are we to rectify this activity? We are involved in this wrong action, and who is to rectify this wrong action? Not someone else that someone else cannot do anything in a matter where we are involved. This is the difficulty of self-control. It is not control by somebody; it is control by the self. It is control of oneself by oneself, and nothing can be more difficult in this world than this effort. But once we taste the joy of self-control, we will not like to taste even milk and honey in this world.

1.012 - Sublimation - A Way to Reshuffle Thought, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The culture of yoga does not tell us to reject, abandon, or to cut off anything if it is real, because the whole question is an assessment of values, and reality is, of course, the background of every value. What is achieved in spiritual education is a rise of consciousness from a lower degree of reality to a higher degree of reality, and in no degree is there a rejection of reality. It is only a growth from a lower level to a higher one. So when we go to the higher degree of reality, we are not rejecting the lower degree of reality, but rather we have overcome it. We have transcended it, just as when a student goes to a higher class in an educational career, that higher class transcends the lower degrees of kindergarten, first standard, second standard and third standard, but it does not reject them. Rejection is not what is implied; rather it is an absorption of values into a higher inclusive condition of understanding, insight and education.
  Yoga is a process of education. The principles of dharma, artha and kama are preparatory processes for the readiness of the soul to catch the spirit of salvation. How can we get salvation from bondage if bondage is really there? A real bondage cannot be escaped; if bondage is real, we have to remain in it forever. We already take for granted that bondage is real, which is why we want to run away from it; but running away from real bondage is impossible. There is no escapism in yoga that is impossible. There is always a conditioning of the mind to the states of understanding. Again it must be emphasised that where we have not understood a principle, we will not be able to master it.

1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world
  religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally

1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The question may be asked, what is the higher real and what is the lower real? Here again, we have the analogy of the comparative reality between dream and waking. A beggar who has very little to eat in his waking state will not be sorry that he has missed his beautiful dinner in dream. Let us suppose a beggar was dreaming that he was an emperor, and a delicious meal was served to him in his dream palace, and suddenly he awakens to the discovery that he is a beggar on the street. Will he feel sorry and cry, "Oh, what has happened to me? I was an emperor. I was enjoying my life, but now I have become a beggar. It would be better to go back to that condition of emperorship." The beggar will not be grieved over his waking from dream. He will not think that he has lost something valuable, though it is true that he has lost a great thing that he has lost his kingdom, wealth and joys and is now sitting on the street like a beggar. From a certain viewpoint, it is a loss. But the beggar would rather be on the street with a crumb of bread in the waking condition than to be rejoicing in emperorship in dream. This is because a higher degree of reality is experienced by his consciousness during waking.
  What satisfies us is not dinner, or lunch, or a kingdom, but the degree of consciousness that is experienced. This is a very subtle point which we should not miss in our analysis. If a kingdom, retinue, army, dinner, lunch and what not can satisfy a person, then a dream kingdom would be much better than a waking state beggarship it would be better to go on sleeping and dreaming about emperorship than to live as a beggar in the waking state. But he would rather be a beggar in the waking state than be sleeping and dreaming of emperorship. The penury and hardship of the beggar in the waking condition does not in any way make that condition inferior to the dreaming state, notwithstanding the fact that in dream he had an imaginary kingdom to experience and enjoy.
  The consciousness that is experienced in the waking state is superior in its degree or quality to the one that we are subjected to in dream. We are happy that we are awake, and what we are associated with is a different and secondary matter. The mere fact of getting up from sleep is a joy, because we feel that we are in a state which can be called a reality of a higher degree and inclusiveness than the lower one, which is dream. Ekatattva, or one reality, is that in which all of the lower values are included in a higher degree of comprehensiveness, just as the waking consciousness includes within itself all of the values of the dream world. Instead of contemplating upon the diverse values of the dream world, one would be content to restrict one's attention to the greater values of the waking life, because they include the lower values of dream. Although it is true that a comparison can be made between the dream life and the waking life and we feel satisfied that waking values are higher than dream values, there is no reality superior to the realities that are experienced in the waking world and, therefore, any further comparison becomes difficult. We are in a waking world, and we have not seen anything superior to this. This is the final thing that we have seen.
  Thus, any further comparison to a still higher degree of reality superior to the waking one is unthinkable to us human beings. But we sometimes find ourself in moods which give us inklings of the fact that there are things higher than what we see with our eyes. If there are not things higher than what we experience through the senses, why is it that we feel restlessness in our life? Why are we not content with things in this world? What is it that makes us feel that there should be something else, something different than what we are experiencing at present? The universal restlessness and anxiety, and the hope that is experienced by every human mind should be indicative of the presence and the possibility of something superior to the present sensory experiences.
  There cannot be hope or aspiration if something higher does not exist. It is the existence of something higher than all empirical life that draws us towards itself in a process called psychological aspiration or expectation of a better condition. Every day we expect a better state. Even a person sunk in sorrow imagines that tomorrow will be better, and that his condition may perhaps improve. It is rare to find people who are so pessimistic as to think that everything is dead wrong, and tomorrow will perhaps be worse than today. There is always a hope: "After all, tomorrow will be better. Conditions will improve, things will be better and I shall be happier." This hope is but a symbol, a significance of the existence of a condition superior to the present one. That superior condition is naturally inclusive of all the lower values. When we get something higher, we do not think of the lower not because we have lost the lower, but because in the higher we have found all that was in the lower.
  --
  The mind can be brought to concentrate itself upon higher degrees of reality through the reading of scriptural testimony, which can be corroborated by the inductive logic and deductive reasoning, etc. of our own analytical power. Sruti and yukti, as the great masters tell us, should both come to our aid in bringing the mind to a point of concentration on a higher reality than what it is experiencing now through the senses.
  The urge that we feel from within to acquire more and more things, and to enjoy greater and greater degrees of happiness, is an insignia of the existence of such states where we can have that type of experience. An intellectual urge, moral urge, spiritual urge and aesthetic urge are all indications of the presence of certain values which cannot be comprehended at present by the powers of sense and reasoning. There is an irresistible desire to ask for more and more, and we cannot ask for more and more unless this 'more' exists. We will not ask for an empty thing. The idea of the more cannot arise in a mind which has not sensed the presence of that 'more' in some subtle manner. The mind has various levels of perception. Although through the conscious level it cannot directly perceive the existence of these higher levels of reality, it can sense the presence of these higher realities through other forms of apparatus that it has within, and it is due to the action of these inward sensations that it feels agonised and restless in any given condition of lower experience.

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But by what individual faculty or standard shall the innovator find out his new foundation or establish his new measures? Evidently, it will depend upon the available enlightenment of the time and the possible forms of knowledge to which he has access. At first it was in religion a personal illumination supported in the West by a theological, in the East by a philosophical reasoning. In society and politics it started with a crude primitive perception of natural right and justice which took its origin from the exasperation of suffering or from an awakened sense of general oppression, wrong, injustice and the indefensibility of the existing order when brought to any other test than that of privilege and established convention. The religious motive led at first; the social and political, moderating itself after the swift suppression of its first crude and vehement movements, took advantage of the upheaval of religious reformation, followed behind it as a useful ally and waited its time to assume the lead when the spiritual momentum had been spent and, perhaps by the very force of the secular influences it called to its aid, had missed its way. The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured by the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to withhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by moral authority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation of Sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment and imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others. In the East such a movement divorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social significance would have produced simply a series of religious reformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice; in the West atheism and secularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the priesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of Papal authority for the authority of the Scripture, it could not fail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all supernaturalism, religious belief or suprarational truth no less than outward creed and institute.
  For, eventually, the evolution of Europe was determined less by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by the vigorous return of the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality of the one rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other. The Renascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind, its eager search for first principles and rational laws, its delighted intellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation and individual reasoning, on the other the Romans large practicality and his sense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility and the just principles of things. But both these tendencies were pursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline. It was from these sources that the individualistic age of Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control which all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise first by the materialisation of fixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally by infallible authority or stereotyped convention.

1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
   a wealth of experience, so that their self-confidence, courage and fortitude have been greatly streng thened in a normal manner while learning to bear sorrow, disappointment and failure in their undertakings with greatness of soul, and especially with equanimity and unbroken strength. Thus they are often initiates without knowing it, and it then needs but little to unseal their spiritual hearing and sight so that they become clairvoyant. For it must be noted that a genuine fire-trial is not intended to satisfy the curiosity of the candidate. It is true that he learns many uncommon things of which others can have no inkling, but this acquisition of knowledge is not the end, but the means to the end; the end consists in the attainment, thanks to this knowledge of the higher worlds, of greater and truer self-confidence, a higher degree of courage, and a magnanimity and perseverance such as cannot, as a rule, be acquired in the lower world.
  The candidate may always turn back after the fire-trial. He will then resume his life, streng thened in body and soul, and wait for a future incarnation to continue his initiation. In his present incarnation he will prove himself a more

1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection,
  than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of

1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  The view which man obtains of things in the visible world is through matter, as in the contemplation of a prospect on land. But in the fourth stage, which is that of the reason, man's view is entirely through the medium of pure spirit, as when a man looks into water. But the view he takes, and the intercourse he enjoys in the world of speculation, is as if he was looking at an object from a ship. There is, besides, in the sphere of reason a still higher degree of sight and vision, which is enjoyed by the [98] prophets, the saints, and the most devout, which may be compared to a prospect in the clearest weather. Hence, when some one observed to the apostle of God, that Jesus (upon whom be peace !) walked upon the waters, he replied, that "if his faith had been greater, he would have walked in the air."
  The view that can be taken by the heart of man, embraces all things that lie in the world of perception and understanding. Its sphere of action and exercise is the whole world. The ascent of man from the rank of beasts to that of angels, is an ascent where he is always exposed to danger and to destruction. He may, with the guidance of the divine guide, mount up to the highest heaven, or may descend through the deceits of Satan to the lowest hell. And the prophet has warned us of this danger in these words: "We have proposed to the heavens, to the earth and to the mountains to accept the deposit of the faith: they trembled to receive it. Man accepted the charge, but he became stupid and a wanderer in darkness."1

1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  in all our minds, what form can it take other than a higher degree
  of self-awareness on the part of a Mankind become at once more

1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  correspond to a higher degree of truth, I should like merely to
  express the hope that the present world situation may be looked

1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     All true truths of Love and of the works of Love the psychic being accepts in their place; but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns life into a state of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.
  

1.070 - The Seven Stages of Perfection, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The powers that are mentioned in the Yoga Sutras, which a yogi is supposed to attain by practice, are the experiences one passes through on account of the ascent of consciousness to higher degrees of perfection. One does not meditate merely for the sake of powers. They automatically arise. They are the spontaneous reactions that follow from nature outside due to the harmony one establishes with nature as a whole. Powers are nothing but the outcome of harmony with nature. When there is disharmony, there is weakness; when there is harmony, there is strength, because it is nature that is powerful. Nobody else can be strong; and the strength of nature comes to us when we are in harmony with it.
  At present, our body, our mind everything is in disharmony with nature. The earth, fire, water, air, ether every element is in disharmony with us. Thus we have hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fear of death, and all sorts of things. All these troubles arise on account of a dissonant attitude which the body-mind complex has adopted in respect of natural forces.

1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  a man-god or a god-man only a higher degree of the same supernatural
  powers which he arrogates in perfect good faith to himself. Nor does

1.08 - The Splitting of the Human Personality during Spiritual Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
   so, too, does the soul live in a higher world; only, this life of the soul continues also during sleep. The soul is in full activity during sleep, but we can know nothing of this activity so long as we have no spiritual organs of perception through which to observe what is going on around us and see what we ourselves are doing during sleep, as we observe our daily physical environment with our ordinary senses. The preceding chapters have shown that esoteric training consists in the development of such spiritual sense organs. Now if, as a result of esoteric training, the student's life during sleep is transformed in the manner described in the foregoing chapter, he will, when in that condition, be able to follow consciously everything going on around him. He can at will find his way in his environment as he could, when awake, with his ordinary senses. It should here be noted that a higher degree of clairvoyance is required for the higher perception of ordinary physical environment. This was indicated in the last chapter. In the initial stages of his development the student perceives things pertaining to another world without being able to discern their connection
   p. 217

1.08 - Wherein is expounded the first line of the first stanza, and a beginning is made of the explanation of this dark night, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
  3. Since, then, the conduct of these beginners upon the way of God is ignoble,61 and has much to do with their love of self and their own inclinations, as has been explained above, God desires to lead them farther. He seeks to bring them out of that ignoble kind of love to a higher degree of love for Him, to free them from the ignoble exercises of sense and meditation (wherewith, as we have said, they go seeking God so unworthily and in so many ways that are unbefitting), and to lead them to a kind of spiritual exercise wherein they can commune with Him more abundantly and are freed more completely from imperfections. For they have now had practice for some time in the way of virtue and have persevered in meditation and prayer, whereby, through the sweetness and pleasure that they have found therein, they have lost their love of the things of the world and have gained some degree of spiritual strength in God; this has enabled them to some extent to refrain from creature desires, so that for God's sake they are now able to suffer a light burden and a little aridity without turning back to a time62 which they found more pleasant. When they are going about these spiritual exercises with the greatest delight and pleasure, and when they believe that the sun of Divine favour is shining most brightly upon them, God turns all this light of theirs into darkness, and shuts against them the door and the source of the sweet spiritual water which they were tasting in God whensoever and for as long as they desired. (For, as they were weak and tender, there was no door closed to them, as Saint John says in the Apocalypse, iii, 8). And thus He leaves them so completely in the dark that they know not whither to go with their sensible imagination and meditation; for they cannot advance a step in meditation, as they were wont to do afore time, their inward senses being submerged in this night, and left with such dryness that not only do they experience no pleasure and consolation in the spiritual things and good exercises wherein they were wont to find their delights and pleasures, but instead, on the contrary, they find insipidity and bitterness in the said things. For, as I have said, God now sees that they have grown a little, and are becoming strong enough to lay aside their swaddling clothes and be taken from the gentle breast; so He sets them down from His arms and teaches them to walk on their own feet; which they feel to be very strange, for everything seems to be going wrong with them.
  4. To recollected persons this commonly happens sooner after their beginnings than to others, inasmuch as they are freer from occasions of backsliding, and their desires turn more quickly from the things of the world, which is necessary if they are to begin to enter this blessed night of sense. Ordinarily no great time passes after their beginnings before they begin to enter this night of sense; and the great majority of them do in fact enter it, for they will generally be seen to fall into these aridities.

1.09 - The Secret Chiefs, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  In the R.R. et A.C., this is indicated to the Adept Minor by the title conferred upon him on his initiation to that grade: Hodos Camelionis: the Path of the Chameleon. (This emphasizes the omnivalence of the force.) In the higher degrees of O.T.O. the AA is not fond of terms like this, which verge on the picturesque it is usually called "the Ophidian Vibrations," thus laying special stress upon its serpentine strength, subtlety, its control of life and death, and its power to insinuate itself into any desired set of circumstances.
  It is of this universally powerful weapon that the Secret Chiefs must be supposed to possess complete control.

1.13 - Knowledge, Error, and Probably Opinion, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  Or again: Suppose we are comparing two shades of colour, one blue and one green. We can be quite sure they are different shades of colour; but if the green colour is gradually altered to be more and more like the blue, becoming first a blue-green, then a greeny-blue, then blue, there will come a moment when we are doubtful whether we can see any difference, and then a moment when we know that we cannot see any difference. The same thing happens in tuning a musical instrument, or in any other case where there is a continuous gradation. Thus self-evidence of this sort is a matter of degree; and it seems plain that the higher degrees are more to be trusted than the lower degrees.
  In derivative knowledge our ultimate premisses must have some degree of self-evidence, and so must their connexion with the conclusions deduced from them. Take for example a piece of reasoning in geometry. It is not enough that the axioms from which we start should be self-evident: it is necessary also that, at each step in the reasoning, the connexion of premiss and conclusion should be self-evident. In difficult reasoning, this connexion has often only a very small degree of self-evidence; hence errors of reasoning are not improbable where the difficulty is great.

1.15 - In the Domain of the Spirit Beings, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  Every human being, after having died, will realise yet another fact in the astral world: having only a low degree of development, he will not be able to communicate with beings who, during their lifetime, have reached a higher degree of development, because these beings will stay in a higher, more subtle sphere of the astral world, and he himself will not be able to travel to their sphere of light. Even if he were able to move to those higher spheres he would not be able to stand the elevated vibration there and would drop back, that is he would soon find himself transferred to that astral sphere in which he belongs on account of his degree of development. A person with a high degree of perfection, however, is able to place himself into a lower sphere by accomodating the vibration of that sphere in his spirit.
  If, therefore, a spirit with a low degree of development wants to get into contact with a spirit of a higher degree of development, the former must ask the latter, by force of imagination, to come to his sphere. Whether the higher developed being will fulfill the wish of the lower being, always depends on the purpose for which the lower being calls the higher one. This clearly shows that a lower being is not capable of moving to the higher spheres of the astral world. The contrary, however, is quite possible. A magician with a good degree of development is able to place himself iilto any sphere, for he is capable of accomodating and creating every kind of vibration and any form of every sphere he wants to get into touch with. Many a reader will here remember the words of the Bible and perceive its meaning:
  "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not".
  --
  Providence has planned for him. If an individual living in this world could know in advance everything he has to go through, he would no longer have a free will in the physical world. Such an individual would be equivalent to a mere robot in all his doings or an automaton, and the task which he would have to complete in this world would become impracticable. Only an initiate of higher degree, being master over Karma, that is over cause and effect, and feeling equally familiar with the physical as well as the astral world is mature enough to know everything in advance without having to fear any disadvantageous influences on his free will.
  Beings incarnate themselves from the astral world into the physical sphere of our planet, bordered by time and space, in order to work on their development, since the material laws of this plane put far more hindrances in front of every individual than is the case in the astral sphere. The impediments of the physical world streng then the spirit and enable it to grow more rapidly in its development than it would be possible in the astral world. Therefore the human beings of the astral world are urged to achieve re-incarnation in this world as soon as possible, and are ready to accept even the toughest conditions in order to be able to continue their spiritual development.
  --
  The principles of the quabbalist's work are quite different. The magician, however, in his present state of development, cannot, for the time being, do otherwise than go on making use of beings up to the point where he has reached a higher degree of development. Each quabbalist must first have become a magician, in order to be able to work differently and more advantageous by later.
  If a magician calls a being whose shape he does not know into the earth-zone or into our physical world from another zone, then such a being, provided it wants to take on a visible shape at all, must take on the shape appropriate to its qualities in order to get into contact with the magician. A common demon, however, is not able to do this, for a demon lacking the necessary maturity is not capable of condensing itself from out of its sphere into the earth-zone or our physical world. Therefore most books on magic conjurations do not even mention simple demons, but talk only of demons with a certain rank and title. But even these are never dealt with in detail.

1.21 - FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN, THE PHASES OF A LIVING PLANET, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  ing a higher degree of freedom.
  So we may assume that sporadically, in the course of time,

1.26 - The Ascending Series of Substance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  10:But how does this ascending series affect the possibilities of our material existence? It would not affect them at all if each plane of consciousness, each world of existence, each grade of substance, each degree of cosmic force were cut off entirely from that which precedes and that which follows it. But the opposite is the truth; the manifestation of the Spirit is a complex weft and in the design and pattern of one principle all the others enter as elements of the spiritual whole. Our material world is the result of all the others, for the other principles have all descended into Matter to create the physical universe, and every particle of what we call Matter contains all of them implicit in itself; their secret action, as we have seen, is involved in every moment of its existence and every movement of its activity. And as Matter is the last word of the descent, so it is also the first word of the ascent; as the powers of all these planes, worlds, grades, degrees are involved in the material existence, so are they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually supermind and the higher degrees of the spiritual existence. Evolution comes by the unceasing pressure of the supra-material planes on the material compelling it to deliver out of itself their principles and powers which might conceivably otherwise have slept imprisoned in the rigidity of the material formula. This would even so have been improbable, since their presence there implies a purpose of deliverance; but still this necessity from below is actually very much aided by a kindred superior pressure.
  11:Nor can this evolution end with the first meagre formulation of life, mind, supermind, spirit conceded to these higher powers by the reluctant power of Matter. For as they evolve, as they awake, as they become more active and avid of their own potentialities, the pressure on them of the superior planes, a pressure involved in the existence and close connection and interdependence of the worlds, must also increase in insistence, power and effectiveness. Not only must these principles manifest from below in a qualified and restricted emergence, but also from above they must descend in their characteristic power and full possible efflorescence into the material being; the material creature must open to a wider and wider play of their activities in Matter, and all that is needed is a fit receptacle, medium, instrument. That is provided for in the body, life and consciousness of man.

1.37 - Death - Fear - Magical Memory, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  Alternatively, there may be something in the nature of such impressions that is unsuitable for carrying over into the conscious mind of the new man. Or there may be a rule e.g. the draught of the waters of the River Le the and it might be possible for some Adept (whose initiation is of a higher degree than, or of a different type to, mine) to make his way through that particular barrier.
  Enough of may, might, perhaps, and all that harpy brood! The plain fact is that I remember nothing at all of any Post Mortem experiences, and I have never known anyone else who does.

1929-05-05 - Intellect, true and wrong movement - Attacks from adverse forces - Faith, integral and absolute - Death, not a necessity - Descent of Divine Consciousness - Inner progress - Memory of former lives, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  It is the mystery of the contact and fusion of the higher and the lower planes of consciousness that is the great secret, the hidden key. Always it has a transforming force; only here it would be on a larger scale and reach a higher degree. If there is someone on earth who is capable of coming consciously into contact with a plane that has not yet been manifested here and if by rising into it in his consciousness he can make that plane and the material meet and harmonise, then the great decisive movement of Natures yet unrealised transformation can take place. A new power will descend and change the conditions of life upon earth.
  Even as it is, every time that a great soul has come and revealed some light of truth or brought down upon earth a new force, the conditions on earth have changed, though not exactly in the way that had been hoped and expected. For example, one who has attained to a certain plane of knowledge and consciousness and spiritual experience, has come and said, I am bringing to you liberation or I am bringing to you peace. Those who were around him believed, perhaps, that he was bringing it in a material way; when they found it was not as they thought, they could not understand what he had done. What he brought was a change in the consciousness, a peace of a kind unknown till then or a capacity for liberation that was not there before. But these movements belonged to the inner life and brought no tangible external change in the world. Perhaps the intention to change the world externally was not there; perhaps there was not the necessary knowledge; but still something was effected by these pioneers.

1954-12-15 - Many witnesses inside oneself - Children in the Ashram - Trance and the waking consciousness - Ascetic methods - Education, spontaneous effort - Spiritual experience, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  It is much more difficult to master one's impulses quietly, composedly, and to prevent them from showing themselves-much more!-without taking ascetic measures. It is much more difficult not to be attached to the things you possess than to possess nothing. This is something that has been known for centuries. It requires a much greater quality not to be attached to the things one possesses than to be without any possessions or to reduce one's possessions to a strict minimum. It is much more difficult. It is a much higher degree of moral worth. Simply this attitude: when a thing comes to you, to take it, use it; when for one reason or another it goes away, to let it go and not regret it. Not to refuse it when it comes, to know how to adapt yourself and not to regret it when it goes.
  Even if defects come?

1955-02-23 - On the sense of taste, educating the senses - Fasting produces a state of receptivity, drawing energy - The body and food, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  There are certain faculties which get intensified, and so one takes that for a spiritual effect. It has very little to do with the spiritual life except that there are people who eat much, think much about their food, are very deeply absorbed in it, and then when they have eaten well-and as I say, they must digest it, and so all their energies are concentrated on their digestion-these people are dull in mind, and this pulls them down very much towards matter; so if they stop eating and stop thinking about food-because there is one thing, that if one fasts and thinks all the time that he is hungry and would like to eat, then it is ten times worse than eating-and can truly fast because they think of something else and are occupied with something else and are not interested in food-then that can help one to climb to a slightly higher degree of consciousness, to free himself from the slavery to material needs. But fasting is above all good for those who believe in it-as everything. When you have the faith that this will make you progress, is going to purify you, it does you good. If you don't believe in it, it doesn't do much, except that it makes you thin.
  There was... Maeterlinck-you know the books of Maeterlinck, I think; you must have read The Blue Bird and others. He was a very fat man, and as he had a sense of beauty, becoming fat upset him very much. So he had decided to fast once a week; one day in the week he did not eat, and as he was an intelligent man he did not bother about food; he wrote, he worked hard on that day, and that kept him reasonably well and in an elegant form; and from that point of view it was very useful to him.

1957-06-19 - Causes of illness Fear and illness - Minds working, faith and illness, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  I dont say that a highly cultured man cant have faith, but it is more difficult, for there is always this mental element which contradicts, discusses, tries to understand, which is difficult to convince, which wants proofs. His faith is less pure. It is necessary, then, to pass on to a higher degree in the evolutionary spiral, pass from the mental to the spiritual; then, naturally, faith takes on a quality of a very high order. But I mean that in daily life, ordinary life, a very simple man who has a very ardent faith can have a mastery over his bodywithout it being truly a mastery; it is simply a spontaneous movementa control over his body far greater than somebody who has reached a much higher development.
  Mother, I am asking you a small personal question. An incurable illness, an organic disease has been cured by your grace, but a purely functional illness is not. How can that be? In the same body. Is it a lack of receptivity or?

2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  grand orthogenesis of everything living towards a higher degree
  of immanent spontaneity. Secondarily, we find by periodical

2.08 - The Branches of The Archetypal Man, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
  This higher degree of perfection has its source in
  the Bound World (Olam Ha-akudim ), where there is

2.12 - The Origin of the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  - can only be a higher degree in the intensity of being of that
  Something, a degree beyond the loftiest summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given us by our supreme possible knowledge but rather carry it to a higher fulfilment and larger truth of what it has already gained by self-vision and self-experience. It is then this Something, an

2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: The fact is that the Infinite creates a figure of himself in the Inconscient you can say, even in the Nescient and tries to manifest by the pressure of his infinite power, higher and higher degrees of consciousness till it reaches the Divine. This happens because in the Infinite there are infinite possibilities and all of them are bound to realise themselves at some time. This universe is only one of its possibilities. If you ask why he creates it, we have to say, "Because it is possible." We are obliged to say, "He does it for Lila." It is not proper to expect God to act with the same motives as men. If you ask "why" and "for what purpose" in the human sense, then there is no reply.
   Disciple: You said that there is the Asuric plane or world from which this idea of suffering comes. You said that suffering is the law of their development. Is suffering their only law?
  --
   Then you go on developing more and more and manifest higher and higher degrees of supramental working in which the action becomes increasingly more independent of the mind.
   Disciple: Can an individual in the Supermind know the function of, and deal with, the material world without the direct intervention of mental knowledge?
  --
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it depends upon how long you can keep the body. Even if we don't succeed in perfecting it, but establish it in the physical, then in time it will unfold all the degrees of the Supermind and there is no reason to suppose that it will not manifest even higher degrees than the Supermind manifest not equally in all, of course.
   9 JULY 1926

2.20 - The Infancy and Maturity of ZO, Father and Mother, Israel The Ancient and Understanding, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
  which precedes each elevation to a higher degree is
  considered to be concealed preparation for a new stage

2.22 - Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; for, normally, when we insist on the soul's undying existence, what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is the very imperfect superficial "I" of the moment, evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; the "I" of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual individual in us, is the Person that we are; but the "I" of this moment, the "I" of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless spirit into the terms of Time.
  What our normal demand of survival asks for is a similar survival for our mind, our life, even our body; the dogma of the resurrection of the body attests to this last demand, - even as it has been the root of the age-long effort of man to discover the elixir of immortality or any means magical, alchemic or scientific to conquer physically the death of the body. But this aspiration could only succeed if the mind, life or body could put on something of the immortality and divinity of the indwelling spirit. There are certain circumstances in which the survival of the outer mental personality representative of the inner mental Purusha could be possible. It could happen if our mental being came to be so powerfully individualised on the surface and so much one with the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the progressive action of the Infinite that the soul no longer needed to dissolve the old form of mind and create a new one in order to progress. A similar individualisation, integration and openness of the vital being on the surface would alone make possible a similar survival of the life-part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the inner life-being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen then is that the wall between the inner self and the outer man would have broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would govern the life. Our mind nature and our life nature could then be a continuous progressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of successive formations preserved only in their essence. Our mental personality and life personality would then subsist without dissolution from birth to birth; they would be in this sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in their sense of identity. This would be evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life over the Inconscience and the limitations of material Nature.

2.26 - Samadhi, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If we examine the phraseology of the old books, we shall find that the waking state is the consciousness of the material universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence dominated by the physical mind. The dream state is a consciousness corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane behind, which to us, even when we get intimations of them, have not the same concrete reality as the things of the physical existence. The sleep-state is a consciousness corresponding to the supramental plane proper to the gnosis, which is beyond our experience because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is not developed in us, its faculties not active, and therefore we are in relation to that plane in a condition of dreamless sleep. The Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self-existence or our absolute being with which we have no direct relations at all, whatever mental reflections we may receive in our dream or our waking or even, irrecoverably, in our sleep consciousness. This fourfold scale corresponds to the degrees of the ladder of being by which we climb back towards the absolute Divine. Normally therefore we cannot get back from the physical mind to the higher planes or degrees of consciousness without receding from the waking state, without going in and away from it and losing touch with the material world. Hence to those who desire to have the experience of these higher degrees, trance becomes a desirable thing, a means of escape from the limitations of the physical mind and nature.
  Samadhi or Yogic trance retires to increasing depths according as it draws farther and farther away from the normal or waking state and enters Into degrees of consciousness less and less communicable to the waking mind, less and less ready to receive a summons from the waking world. Beyond a certain point the trance becomes complete and it is then almost or quite impossible to awaken or call back the soul that has receded into them; it can only come back by its own will or at most by a violent shock of physical appeal dangerous to the system owing to the abrupt upheaval of return. There are said to be supreme states of trance ill which the soul persisting for too long a time cannot return; for it loses its hold on the cord which binds it to the consciousness of life, and the body is left, maintained indeed in its set position, not dead by dissolution, but incapable of recovering the ensouled life which had inhabited it. Finally, the Yogin acquires at a certain stage of development the power of abandoning his body definitively without the ordinary phenomena of death, by an act of will,500 or by a process of withdrawing the pranic life-force through the gate of the upward life-current (udana), opening for it a way through the mystic brahmaradhra in the head. By departure from life in the state of Samadhi he attains directly to that higher status of being to which he aspires.

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  When the higher descends into the lower consciousness, it alters the lower but is also modified and diminished by it; when the lower ascends, it is sublimated but at the same time qualifies the sublimating substance and power. This interaction creates an abundant number of different intermediate and interlocked degrees of the force and consciousness of being, but it also makes it difficult to bring about a complete integration of all the powers under the full control of any one power. For this reason there is not actually a series of simple clear-cut and successive stages in the individual's evolution; there is instead a complexity and a partly determinate, partly confused comprehensiveness of the movement. The soul may still be described as a traveller and climber who presses towards his high goal by step on step, each of which he has to build up as an integer but must frequently redescend in order to rebuild and make sure of the supporting stair so that it may not crumble beneath him: but the evolution of the whole consciousness has rather the movement of an ascending ocean of Nature; it can be compared to a tide or a mounting flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill while the rest is still below. At each stage the higher parts of the nature may be provisionally but incompletely organised in the new consciousness while the lower are in a state of flux or formation, partly moving in the old way though influenced and beginning to change, partly belonging to the new kind but still imperfectly achieved and not yet firm in the change. Another image might be that of an army advancing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied, so that there has to be a frequent halt and partial return to the traversed areas for consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied country and assimilation of its people. A rapid conquest might be possible, but it would be of the nature of an encampment or a domination established in a foreign country; it would not be the assumption, total assimilation, integration needed for the entire supramental change.
  This entails certain consequences which modify the clear successions of the evolution and prevent it from following the cleanly determined and firmly arranged course which our logical intelligence demands from Nature but seldom gets from her. As life and mind begin to appear when the organisation of Matter is sufficient to admit them but the more complex and perfect organisation of Matter comes with the evolution of life and mind, as mind appears when life is sufficiently organised to admit of a developed vibration of consciousness but life receives its full organisation and development only after mind can act upon it, as the spiritual evolution begins when man as mind is capable of the movements of spirituality but mind also rises to its own highest perfection by the growth of the intensities and luminosities of the spirit, so it is with this higher evolution of the ascending powers of the Spirit. As soon as there is a sufficient spiritual development, something of intuition, illumination of the being, the movements of the higher spiritual grades of Consciousness begins to manifest, - sometimes one, sometimes the other or all together, and they do not wait for each power in the series to complete itself before a higher power comes into action. An Overmind light and power may descend in some sort, create a partial form of itself in the being and take a leading part or supervise or intervene while the intuitive and illumining mind and higher mind are still incomplete; these would then remain in the whole, acting along with the greater Power, often penetrated or sublimated by it or rising into it to form a greater or overmind intuition, a greater or overmind illumination, a greater or overmind spiritual thinking. This intricate action takes place because each descending power by its intensity of pressure on the nature and uplifting effect makes the being already capable of a still higher invasion before that earlier power itself is complete in its self-formation; but also it happens because the work of assumption and transformation of the lower nature can with difficulty be done if a higher and higher intervention does not take place. The illumination and the higher thought need the help of the intuition, the intuition needs the help of the overmind to combat the darkness or ignorance in which they labour and to give them their own fullness. Still, it is not possible in the end for the overmind status and integration to be complete until the higher mind and the illumined mind have been integrated and taken up into the intuition and the intuition itself subsequently integrated and taken up into the all-enlarging and all-sublimating overmind energy. The law of the gradation has to be satisfied even in the complexity of the process of evolutionary Nature.

2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All life and living beings ready to rise beyond the mental ignorance, but not ready yet for the supramental height, would find in a sort of echelon or a scale with overlapping degrees their assured basis, their intermediate steps of self-formation, their expression of realised capacity of spiritual existence on the way to the supreme Reality. But also the presence of the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden TruthPower everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressing life and consciousness, a better lifeorder. A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence. Instead of a constant intermixed and confused struggle between the growth of Consciousness and the power of the Inconscience, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the evolution would become a graded progression from lesser light to greater light; in each stage of it the conscious beings belonging to that stage would respond to the inner Consciousness-Force and expand their own law of cosmic Nature towards the possibility of a higher degree of that Nature. This is at least a strong possibility and might be envisaged as the natural consequence of the direct action of supermind on the evolution. This intervention would not annul The Gnostic Being the evolutionary principle, for supermind has the power of withholding or keeping in reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into full or partial action; but it would harmonise, steady, facilitate, tranquillise and to a great extent hedonise the difficult and afflicted process of the evolutionary emergence.
  There is something in the nature of supermind itself that would make this great result inevitable. It is in its foundation a unitarian and integralising and harmonic consciousness, and in its descent and evolutionary working out of the diversity of the Infinite it would not lose its unitarian trend, its push towards integralisation or its harmonic influence. The Overmind follows out diversities and divergent possibilities on their own lines of divergence: it can allow contradictions and discords, but it makes them elements of a cosmic whole so that they are forced, however unwittingly and in spite of themselves, to contri bute their share to its wholeness. Or we may say that it accepts and even encourages contradictions, but obliges them to support each other's existence so that there may be divergent roads of being and consciousness and experience that lead away from the One and from each other but still maintain themselves on the Oneness and can lead back again each on its own path to the Oneness. That is the secret sense even of our own world of Ignorance which works from the Inconscience but with the underlying cosmicity of the overmind principle. But the individual being in such a creation does not possess this secret principle in knowledge and does not base upon it his action. An overmind being here would perceive this secret; but he might still work on his own lines of Nature and law of action, Swabhava, Swadharma, according to the inspiration, the dynamic control or the inner governance of the Spirit or the Divine within him and leave the rest to their own line in the whole: an overmind creation of knowledge in the Ignorance might therefore be something separate from the surrounding world of Ignorance and guarded from it by the luminous encircling and separating wall of its own principle. The supramental gnostic being, on the contrary, would not only found all his living on an intimate sense and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group life, but would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving mental world, even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For the gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Ignorance; it would be natural to his sense of integrality and it would be within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation. That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of the world, but such a change would be a natural consequence of the appearance of a new Power in Nature and its universal influence. In the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature.

2.28 - The Divine Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  45: All kinds of disparity and maladjustment and incompleteness of our knowledge, will, capacity, executive force and dealing intervene constantly in our action, our working out of life, and are an abundant source of imperfection or ineffectivity. These disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a status and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater light than that of mind nature or life nature. An identity and au thenticity and a harmony of truth with truth are the native character of all gnostic seeing and action; as the mind grows into the gnosis, our mental seeing and action lifted into the gnostic light or visited and ruled by it would begin to partake of this character and, even if still restricted and within limits, must become much more perfect and within these limits effective: the causes of our incapacity and frustration would begin to diminish and disappear. But also the larger existence will invade the mind with the potencies of a greater consciousness and a greater force, a bringing out of new powers of the being. Knowledge is power and act of consciousness, Will is conscious power and conscious act of force of being; both in the gnostic being will reach greater magnitudes than any we now know, a higher degree of themselves, a richer instrumentation: for wherever there is an increase of consciousness, there is an increase of the potential force and the actual power of the existence.
  46: In the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power, this correlation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness itself is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and rhythm of its powers in their emergence are diminished and disturbed by the discordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there is the original, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious mind is only a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising coherence. Life-Force also in the material world seems to be more dynamic and effective than Mind; our Mind is free and fully powerful in idea and cognition only: its force of action, its power of effectuation outside this mental field is obliged to work with life and matter as instruments and, under the conditions imposed on it by life and matter, our mind is hampered and half effective. But even so we see that Nature-force in the mental being is much more powerful to deal with himself and with life and matter than Nature-force in the animal; it is the greater force of consciousness and knowledge, the greater emerged force of being and will that constitute this superiority. In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger dynamis of action than the mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life-force: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life. But it is his use of mind that enables him to arrive at a full exploitation of this superiority, and in the end the mental man by his power of knowledge, his science, is able to extend the mastery of existence far beyond what life in matter could accomplish by its own agencies or what the vital man could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct without that increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power over existence and over Nature must come when a still greater consciousness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental Energy in our too individualised and restricted force of existence.

3.03 - The Spirit Land, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
  Before the spirit can be observed on its further pilgrimage the land which it enters must first be examined. It is the "World of the Spirit." (In theosophical literature this is called the "mental" world. Here, the expression "World of the Spirit" or "Spirit-land" will be used.) This world is so unlike the physical that all that is said about it will appear fantastic to him who is willing to trust his physical senses only. And what has already been said in regard to the world of the soul holds good here to a still higher degree; that is, that one has to use analogies in order to describe it. For our speech, which for the most part serves only for the realities of the senses, is not richly blessed with expressions for the "Spirit-land." It is therefore especially necessary here to ask the reader to understand much that is said as an indication only. For everything that is described here is so unlike the physical world that it can only in this way be depicted. The author is ever conscious of how little this account can really resemble the experiences of this region owing
   p. 130

3.2.02 - Yoga and Skill in Works, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the Truth of things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies in an ever higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul out of the great peril by which it had been
  120

4.01 - INTRODUCTION, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [349] We have already met the royal pair, and particularly the figure of the King, several times in the course of our inquiry, not to mention the material which was presented under this head in Psychology and Alchemy. Conforming to the prototype of Christ the King in the Christian world of ideas, the King plays a central role in alchemy and cannot, therefore, be dismissed as a mere metaphor. In the Psychology of the Transference I have discussed the deeper reasons for a more comprehensive treatment of this symbol. Because the king in general represents a superior personality exalted above the ordinary, he has become the carrier of a myth, that is to say, of the statements of the collective unconscious. The outward paraphernalia of kingship show this very clearly. The crown symbolizes his relation to the sun, sending forth its rays; his bejewelled mantle is the starry firmament; the orb is a replica of the world; the lofty throne exalts him above the crowd; the address Majesty approximates him to the gods. The further we go back in history the more evident does the kings divinity become. The divine right of kings survived until quite recent times, and the Roman Emperors even usurped the title of a god and demanded a personal cult. In the Near East the whole essence of kingship was based far more on theological than on political assumptions. There the psyche of the whole nation was the true and ultimate basis of kingship: it was self-evident that the king was the magical source of welfare and prosperity for the entire organic community of man, animal, and plant; from him flowed the life and prosperity of his subjects, the increase of the herds, and the fertility of the land. This signification of kingship was not invented a posteriori; it is a psychic a priori which reaches far back into prehistory and comes very close to being a natural revelation of the psychic structure. The fact that we explain this phenomenon on rational grounds of expediency means something only for us; it means nothing for primitive psychology, which to a far higher degree than our objectively oriented views is based on purely psychic and unconscious assumptions.
  [350] The theology of kingship best known to us, and probably the most richly developed, is that of ancient Egypt, and it is these conceptions which, handed down by the Greeks, have permeated the spiritual history of the West. Pharaoh was an incarnation of God1 and a son of God.2 In him dwelt the divine life-force and procreative power, the ka: God reproduced himself in a human mother of God and was born from her as a God-man.3 As such he guaranteed the growth and prosperity of the land and the people,4 also taking it upon himself to be killed when his time was fulfilled, that is to say when his procreative power was exhausted.5

4.01 - The Presence of God in the World, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  lishing higher and higher degrees of organic unity
  in the zone of thought which envelops the world

5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  to a much higher degree than was the case with psychic phenom-
  ena in the narrower sense. Not only is a certain physical depend-
  --
  they possess a higher degree of spontaneity than the main func-
  tion, which displays a large measure of reliability and is ame-

6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  broken off must have personality to an even higher degree.
  The inference seemed logical, since it does not depend on

BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  the lower and the higher degrees of intelligence.
  Leibnitz conceived of the Monads as elementary and indestructible units endowed with the power of

ENNEAD 01.03 - Of Dialectic, or the Means of Raising the Soul to the Intelligible World., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  2. The musician can rise to the rank of the lover, and either remain there, or rise still higher. But the lover has some reminiscence of the beautiful; but as here below he is separated (from it, he is incapable of clearly knowing what it is). Charmed with the beautiful objects that meet his views, he falls into an ecstasy. He must therefore be taught not to content himself with thus admiring a single body, but, by reason, to embrace all bodies that reveal beauty; showing him what is identical in all, informing him that it is something alien to the bodies, which comes from elsewhere, and which exists even in a higher degree in the objects of another nature; citing, as examples, noble occupations, and beautiful laws. He will be shown that beauty is found in the arts, the sciences, the virtues, all of which are suitable means of familiarizing the lover with the taste of incorporeal things. He will then be made to see that beauty is one, and he will be shown the element which, in every object, constitutes beauty. From virtues he will be led to progress to intelligence and essence, while from there he will have nothing else to do but to progress towards the supreme goal.
  HOW THE PHILOSOPHER RISES TO THE INTELLIGIBLE WORLD.

ENNEAD 02.03 - Whether Astrology is of any Value., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  7. In fact, we would still have to ask ourselves for the cause of the events (in our world) even if the stars, like many other things, really prognosticated future events. We would still have to wonder at the maintenance of the order without which no events could be prefigured. We might, therefore, liken the stars to letters, at every moment flung along the heavens, and which, after having been displayed, continued in ceaseless motion, so that, while exercising another function in the universe, they would still possess significance.212 Thus in a being animated by a single principle it is possible to judge one part by another; as it is possible, by the study of the eyes or some other organ of an individual, to conclude as to his characters, to the dangers to which he is exposed, and how he may escape them. Just as our members are parts of our bodies, so are we ourselves parts of the universe. Things, therefore, are made for each other. Everything is significant, and the wise man can conclude from one thing to another. Indeed many habitual occurrences are foreseen by men generally. In the universe everything is reduced to a single system.213 To1173 this co-ordination is due the possibility of birds furnishing us with omens, and other animals furnishing us with presages. All things mutually depend from each other. Everything conspires to a single purpose,214 not only in each individual, whose parts are perfectly related; but also in the universe, and that in a higher degree, and far earlier. This multiple being could be turned into a single universal Living organism only by a single principle. As in the human body every organ has its individual function, likewise in the universe each being plays its individual part; so much the more that they not only form part of the universe, but that they themselves also form universes not without importance.215 All things, therefore, proceed from a single principle, each plays its individual part, and lends each other mutual assistance. Neither are they separate from the universe, but they act and react on each other, each assisting or hindering the other. But their progress is not fortuitous, nor is it the result of chance. They form a series, where each, by a natural bond, is the effect of the preceding one, and the cause of the following one.216
  THERE IS A NATURAL LAW WHICH DIRECTS THE SOUL.

ENNEAD 03.05 - Of Love, or Eros., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  Thus he who does not desire to procreate seems to aspire to the possession of the beautiful in a higher degree. He who desires to procreate does no doubt desire to procreate the beautiful; but his desire indicates in him the presence of need, and dissatisfaction with mere possession of beauty; He thinks he will be procreating beauty, if he begets on that which is beautiful. They who wish to satisfy physical love against human laws, and nature, no doubt have a natural inclination as principle of a triple passion; but they lose their way straying from the right road for lack of knowledge of the end to which love was impelling them, of the goal of the aspiration (roused by) the desire of generation, and of the proper use of the image of beauty.120 They really do ignore Beauty itself.1125 They who love beautiful bodies without desiring to unite themselves to them, love them for their beauty only. Those who love the beauty of women, and desire union with them, love both beauty and perpetuity, so long as this object is not lost from sight. Both of these are temperate, but they who love bodies for their beauty only are the more virtuous. The former admire sensual beauty, and are content therewith; the latter recall intelligible beauty, but, without scorning visible beauty, regard it as an effect and image of the intelligible Beauty.121 Both, therefore, love beauty without ever needing to blush. But, as to those (who violate laws human and divine), love of beauty misleads them to falling into ugliness; for the desire of good may often mislead to a fall into evil. Such is love considered as a passion of the soul.
  THE PLATONIC MYTH OF LOVE.

ENNEAD 03.06 - Of the Impassibility of Incorporeal Entities (Soul and and Matter)., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  If such be the nature of existence, it could be neither body, nor the substrate of bodies; for their existence is nonentity. (Materialists, however, object), How could we refuse to attri bute "being" to the nature of bodies, such as these cliffs and rocks, to the solid earth, and in short, to all these impenetrable objects? When I am struck, am I not by the shock forced to acknowledge that these objects exist as (real) "being"? On the other hand, how does it happen that entities that are not impenetrable, which can neither shock others nor be shocked by them, which are completely invisible, like soul and intelligence, are genuine beings?51 Our answer is that the earth, which possesses corporeal nature in the highest degree, is inert; the element that is less gross (the air) is already more mobile, and362 resides in a higher region; while fire withdraws still more from corporeal nature. The things which best suffice themselves least agitate and trouble the others; those that are heavier and more terrestrial, by the mere fact that they are incomplete, subject to falling, and incapable of rising, fall by weakness, and shock the others by virtue of their inertia, and their weight. Thus inanimate bodies fall more heavily, and shock and wound others more powerfully. On the contrary, animated bodies, by the mere fact of greater participation in existence, strike with less harshness. That is why movement, which is a kind of life, or at least an image of life, exists in a higher degree in things that are less corporeal.
  CORPOREITY IS NONENTITY BECAUSE OF LACK OF UNITY.

ENNEAD 06.02 - The Categories of Plotinos., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  4. If, on occupying ourselves with this sense-world, we wished to determine the nature of bodies, would we not begin by studying some part thereof, such as a stone? We could then distinguish therein substance, quantitysuch as dimension and quality, such as color; and after having discovered these same elements in other bodies, we could say that the elements of the corporeal nature are being, quantity, and quality; but that these three coexist; and that, though thought distinguish them, all three form but one and the same body. If, besides, we were to recognize that movement is proper to this same organization, would we not add it to the three elements already distinguished? These four elements, however, would form but a single one, and the body, though one, would, in its nature, be the reunion of all four. We shall have to take the same course with our present subject, intelligible Being, and its genera and principles. Only, in this comparison, we shall have to make abstraction of all that is peculiar to bodies, such as generation, sense-perception, and extension. After having established this separation, and having thus distinguished essentially different things, we shall arrive at the conception of a certain intelligible existence, which possesses real essence, and unity in a still higher degree. From this standpoint, one might be surprised how the (substance which is thus) one can be both one and many. In respect to bodies, it is generally recognized that the same thing is both one and many; the body can indeed be divided infinitely; color and appearance, for instance, are therein very differing properties, since they are separated here below. But in respect to the soul, if she be conceived as one, without899 extent, dimension and absolutely simple, as it appears at first sight, how could we, after that, believe that the soul were manifold? We should have here expected to reach unity, all the more as, after having divided the animal in body and soul, and after having demonstrated that the body is multiform, composite and diverse, one might well, on the contrary, have expected to find the soul simple; and to have accepted this conclusion as final, as the end of our researches. We would thus have taken the soul as a sample of the intelligible world, just as the body represents the sense-world. Having thus considered this soul, let us examine how this unity can be manifold; how, in its turn, the manifold can be unity; not indeed a composite formed of separable parts, but a single nature simultaneously one and manifold. For, as we have already said, it is only by starting from this point and demonstrating it, that we will establish solidly the truth about the genera of essence.
  THE SOUL IS A PLURAL UNITY OF SEMINAL REASONS.

ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  In the Porphyrian period, he rejected the idea of intelligible matter.475 Forced to fashion entirely new arguments, he seizes as tool the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality, or energy as dynamic accomplishment.476 But no logical device can help a man to pull himself up by his boot-straps. If by Being you mean existence, then its opposite must be negative, and to speak of real non-being, as something that shares being, is an evasion. To say that matter remains non-being, while having the possibility of future Being, which however can never be actualized, is mere juggling with words. Even if matter is no more than a weak, confused image, it is not non-being. If it is a positive lie, it is not non-being. To talk of a higher degree of Non-being, that is real non-being, is simply to confuse the actuality intended with the thought of non-being, which of course is a thought as actually existing as any other. Moreover if matter is imperishable, it cannot be non-being; and if it possesses Being potentially, it certainly is not non-existence. The Aristotelian potentiality could help to create this evasion, but did not remove its real nature; it merely supplied Plotinos with an intellectual device to characterize something that would not be actually existing as still having the possibility of existence; but this is not non-existence. In another writing477 of this period Plotinos continues his evasions about the origin and nature of matter. First, he grants that it is something that is not original, being later than many earthly, and all intelligible objects; although, if he had returned to the conception of intelligible matter, he would have been at liberty to assert the originality of the latter. Then he holds that Being is common to both form and matter, as to quality, but not as to1298 quantity. Last, he closes the paragraph by saying that perhaps form and matter do not come from the same origin, as there is a difference between them.
  In Plotinos's third, or Eustochian period, the same evasions occur. For instance478 he limits Being to goodness. Then he acknowledges the existence of evil things, and derives their evil quality from a primary evil, the "image of essence," the Being of evil. That he is conscious of having strained a point is evident from the fact that he adds the clause, "if there can be a Being of evil." Likewise,479 while discussing evil, which is generally recognized because in our daily lives there is positive pain, and sensations of pain, he defines evil as lack of qualities. To say that evil is not such as to form, but as to nature is opposite to form is nonsense, inasmuch as life is full of positive evils, as Numenius brought out in 16, and Plotinos acknowledged even in spite of his polemic against the Gnostics.

ENNEAD 06.06 - Of Numbers., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  13. To begin with, it is unreasonable to insist that the notion of the subject one comes to us from the subject itself (which is one), from the visible man, for instance, or from some other animal, or even some stone. Evidently the visible man and the One are things entirely different, which could not be identified28; otherwise, our judgment would not be able (as it is) to predicate unity of the non-man. Besides, as the judgment does not operate on emptiness for the right side, and other such things, seeing a difference of position when it tells us that an object is here, or there; likewise, it also sees something when it says that an object is one; for it does not experience there an affection that is vain, and it does not affirm unity without some foundation. It cannot be believed that the judgment says that an object is one because it sees that it is alone, and that there is no other; for, while saying that there is no other, the judgment implicitly asserts that the other is one. Further, the notions of "other" and "different" are notions posterior to that of unity; if the judgment did not rise to unity, it would not assert either the "other" nor the "different"; when it affirms that an object is alone, it says, "there is one only object"; and therefore predicates unity before "only." Besides, the judgment which affirms is itself a substantial (being) before affirming unity of some other (being); and the (being) of which it speaks is664 one likewise before the judgment either asserts or conceives anything about it. Thus (being) must be one or many; if it be many, the one is necessarily anterior, since, when the judgment asserts that plurality is present, it evidently asserts that there is more than one; likewise, when it says that an army is a multitude, it conceives of the soldiers as arranged in one single corps. By this last example, it is plain that the judgment (in saying one body), does not let the multitude remain multitude, and that it thus reveals the existence of unity; for, whether by giving to the multitude a unity which it does not possess, or by rapidly revealing unity in the arrangement (which makes the body of the multitude), the judgment reduces multitude to unity. It does not err here about unity, any more than when it says of a building formed by a multitude of stones that it is a unity; for, besides, a building is more unified than an army.29 If, further, unity inhere in a still higher degree in that which is continuous, and in a degree still higher in what is not divisible,30 evidently that occurs only because the unity has a real nature, and possesses existence; for there is no greater or less in that which does not exist.
  UNITY, THOUGH BY PARTICIPATION EXISTING IN SENSE-OBJECTS, IS INTELLIGIBLE.
  Just as we predicate being of every sense-thing, as well as of every intelligible thing, we predicate it in a higher degree of intelligible things, attri buting a higher degree (of substantiality) to the (beings that are veritable than to sense-objects), and to sense-objects than to other genera (of physical objects); likewise, clearly seeing unity in sense-objects in a degree higher than in the intelligible (essences), we recognize the existence of unity in all its modes, and we refer them all to Unity in itself. Besides, just as "being and essence"31 are nothing sensual, though sense-objects665 participate therein, so unity, though by participation it inhere in sense-objects, is not any the less an intelligible Unity. Judgment grasps it by an intellectual conception; by seeing one thing (which is sensual) it also conceives another which it does not see (because it is intelligible); it therefore knew this thing in advance; and if judgment knew it in advance, judgment was this thing, and was identical with that whose existence it asserted. When it says, "a certain" object, it asserts the unity, as, when it speaks of "certain" objects, it says that they are two or more. If then one cannot conceive of any object whatever without "one," "two," or some other number, it becomes possible to insist that the thing without which nothing can be asserted or conceived, does not at all exist. We cannot indeed deny existence to the thing without whose existence we could not assert or conceive anything. Now that which is everywhere necessary to speak and to conceive must be anterior to speech and conception, so as to contri bute to their production. If, besides, this thing be necessary to the hypostatic existence of every essence for there is no essence that lacks unityit must be anterior to being, and being must be begotten by it. That is why we say "an essence" instead of first positing "essence," and "a" only thereafter, for there must be "one" in essence, to make "several" possible; but (the converse is not true; for) unity does not contain essence, unless unity itself produce it by applying itself to the begetting of it. Likewise, the word "that" (when employed to designate an object) is not meaningless; for instead of naming the object, it proclaims its existence, its presence, its "being," or some other of its kinds of "essence." The word "that" does not therefore express something without reality, it does not proclaim an empty conception, but it designates an object as definitely as some proper name.
  666

ENNEAD 06.07 - How Ideas Multiplied, and the Good., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  First it can be demonstrated that plants contain nothing opposed to reason; since, even here below, a718 plant contains a "reason" which constitutes its life.91 But if the essential "reason" of the plant, which constitutes it, is a life of a particular kind, and a kind of soul, and if this "reason" itself be a unity, is it the primary Plant? No: the primary Plant, from which the particular plant is derived, is above that "reason." The primary Plant is unity; the other is multiple, and necessarily derives from this unity. If so, the primary Plant must possess life in a still higher degree, and be the Plant itself from which the plants here below proceed, which occupy the second or third rank, and which derive from the primary Plant the traces of the life they reveal.
  HOW THE EARTH EXISTS IN THE INTELLIGIBLE.
  But how does the earth exist in the intelligible world? What is its essence? How can the earth in the intelligible world be alive there? Let us first examine our earth, that is, inquire what is its essence? It must be some sort of a shape, and a reason; for the reason of the plant is alive, even here below. Is there then a living ("seminal) reason" in the earth also? To discover the nature of the earth, let us take essentially terrestrial objects, which are begotten or fashioned by it. The birth of the stones, and their increase, the interior formation of mountains, could not exist unless an animated reason produced them by an intimate and secret work. This reason is the "form of the earth,"92 a form that is analogous to what is called nature in trees. The earth might be compared to the trunk of a tree, and the stone that can be detached therefrom to the branch that can be separated from the trunk. Consideration of the stone which is not yet dug out of the earth, and which is united to it as the uncut branch is united to the tree, shows that the earth's nature, which is a productive force, constitutes719 a life endowed with reason; and it must be evident that the intelligible earth must possess life at a still higher degree, that the rational life of the earth is the Earth-in-itself, the primary Earth, from which proceeds the earth here below.
  THE FIRE AS IT IS IN THE INTELLIGIBLE WORLD.

ENNEAD 06.08 - Of the Will of the One., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  Indeed, if Intelligence depend upon a further principle, at least this one is not external, but is the Good itself. If then it be in the Good itself that it finds its welfare, so much the more does it itself possess independence and liberty, since it seeks them only in view of the Good. When therefore Intelligence acts in conformity with the Good, it has a higher degree of independence; for it possesses already the "conversion to the Good," inasmuch as it proceeds from the Good, and the privilege of being in itself, because Intelligence is turned towards the Good; now it is better for Intelligence to remain within itself, since it is thus turned towards the Good.
  FREEDOM OF WILL AND VIRTUE ARE INDEPENDENT OF THE ACTIONS.

r1914 08 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Lipi 40 refers to the state of the Tapas effectivity which is now normal in this degree, ie effective but with resistance, slow success, often apparent unsuccess (being fulfilled afterwards or when the Tapas is not active or the attention elsewhere) or successful in wrong time, patra & circumstance. The higher degrees of the siddhi are held back or manifest only in detail.
   The next step is to raise it to 50.

r1919 08 04, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   T active in the highest ideality of the third degree. The turn here is to the rejection of the confusion of incertitude. There is also some filling of the third with the light of the higher degrees.
   Dream of connected sequences, but some fantasia. Beginning of a firmer gnosis in the dialogue.

Symposium translated by B Jowett, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
  The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject; they are the only Dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is discussed at length. In both of them philosophy is regarded as a sort of enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too, philosophy might be described as 'dying for love;' and there are not wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium. But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no break between this world and another; and we rise from one to the other by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in a single science (compare Rep.). At first immortality means only the succession of existences; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute; not bounded by this world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable. Plato does not go on to ask whether the individual is absorbed in the sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to have attained the true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into the relation in which human beings stood to it. That the soul has such a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking of the eternal nature, seems to imply that she too is eternal (compare Phaedrus). But Plato does not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or in God. He is willing to rest in the contemplation of the idea, which to him is the cause of all things (Rep.), and has no strength to go further.
  The Symposium of Xenophon, in which Socrates describes himself as a pander, and also discourses of the difference between sensual and sentimental love, likewise offers several interesting points of comparison. But the suspicion which hangs over other writings of Xenophon, and the numerous minute references to the Phaedrus and Symposium, as well as to some of the other writings of Plato, throw a doubt on the genuineness of the work. The Symposium of Xenophon, if written by him at all, would certainly show that he wrote against Plato, and was acquainted with his works. Of this hostility there is no trace in the Memorabilia. Such a rivalry is more characteristic of an imitator than of an original writer. The (so-called) Symposium of Xenophon may therefore have no more title to be regarded as genuine than the confessedly spurious Apology.

Theaetetus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  e. 'Consciousness' is the most treacherous word which is employed in the study of the mind, for it is used in many senses, and has rarely, if ever, been minutely analyzed. Like memory, it accompanies all mental operations, but not always continuously, and it exists in various degrees. It may be imperceptible or hardly perceptible: it may be the living sense that our thoughts, actions, sufferings, are our own. It is a kind of attention which we pay to ourselves, and is intermittent rather than continuous. Its sphere has been exaggerated. It is sometimes said to assure us of our freedom; but this is an illusion: as there may be a real freedom without consciousness of it, so there may be a consciousness of freedom without the reality. It may be regarded as a higher degree of knowledge when we not only know but know that we know. Consciousness is opposed to habit, inattention, sleep, death. It may be illustrated by its derivative conscience, which speaks to men, not only of right and wrong in the abstract, but of right and wrong actions in reference to themselves and their circumstances.
  f. Association is another of the ever-present phenomena of the human mind. We speak of the laws of association, but this is an expression which is confusing, for the phenomenon itself is of the most capricious and uncertain sort. It may be briefly described as follows. The simplest case of association is that of sense. When we see or hear separately one of two things, which we have previously seen or heard together, the occurrence of the one has a tendency to suggest the other. So the sight or name of a house may recall to our minds the memory of those who once lived there. Like may recall like and everything its opposite. The parts of a whole, the terms of a series, objects lying near, words having a customary order stick together in the mind. A word may bring back a passage of poetry or a whole system of philosophy; from one end of the world or from one pole of knowledge we may travel to the other in an indivisible instant. The long train of association by which we pass from one point to the other, involving every sort of complex relation, so sudden, so accidental, is one of the greatest wonders of mind...This process however is not always continuous, but often intermittent: we can think of things in isolation as well as in association; we do not mean that they must all hang from one another. We can begin again after an interval of rest or vacancy, as a new train of thought suddenly arises, as, for example, when we wake of a morning or after violent exercise. Time, place, the same colour or sound or smell or taste, will often call up some thought or recollection either accidentally or naturally associated with them. But it is equally noticeable that the new thought may occur to us, we cannot tell how or why, by the spontaneous action of the mind itself or by the latent influence of the body. Both science and poetry are made up of associations or recollections, but we must observe also that the mind is not wholly dependent on them, having also the power of origination.

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  3) All is coordinated in the universe. All things depend mutually on each other. All conspires to one sole end, not only in the individual whose parts are perfectly linked together, but anteriorly and to a higher degree in the universe. ~ Plotinus
  4) What the members of the body are in the individual being, reasonable beings are in the same way even though separate, because they are formed to cooperate in one common work. ~ Mar-cus Aurelius

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