TERMS STARTING WITH
instruments. His aides are the angels Reivtip and
instruments—the thrones, chariots, firmament,
Instruments,” during which the invocant is
TERMS ANYWHERE
A buy_stop order instructs a broker to purchase a security when it hits a strike price that is higher than the current spot price. Once the price hits that strike, the buy stop becomes a market order, fillable at the next available price. This type of order can apply to stocks, derivatives, forex or a variety of other tradable instruments. The buy stop order can serve a variety of purposes with the underlying assumption that a share price that climbs to a certain height will continue to rise.
accompaniment ::: n. --> That which accompanies; something that attends as a circumstance, or which is added to give greater completeness to the principal thing, or by way of ornament, or for the sake of symmetry.
A part performed by instruments, accompanying another part or parts performed by voices; the subordinate part, or parts, accompanying the voice or a principal instrument; also, the harmony of a figured bass.
a due: intended as a duet; for two voices or instruments; together; two instruments are to play in unison after a solo passage for one of the instruments
Advanced RISC Machine "processor" (ARM, Originally {Acorn} RISC Machine). A series of low-cost, power-efficient 32-bit {RISC} {microprocessors} for embedded control, computing, {digital signal processing}, {games}, consumer {multimedia} and portable applications. It was the first commercial RISC microprocessor (or was the {MIPS R2000}?) and was licensed for production by {Asahi Kasei Microsystems}, {Cirrus Logic}, {GEC Plessey Semiconductors}, {Samsung}, {Sharp}, {Texas Instruments} and {VLSI Technology}. The ARM has a small and highly {orthogonal instruction set}, as do most RISC processors. Every instruction includes a four-bit code which specifies a condition (of the {processor status register}) which must be satisfied for the instruction to be executed. Unconditional execution is specified with a condition "true". Instructions are split into load and store which access memory and arithmetic and logic instructions which work on {registers} (two source and one destination). The ARM has 27 registers of which 16 are accessible in any particular processor mode. R15 combines the {program counter} and processor status byte, the other registers are general purpose except that R14 holds the {return address} after a {subroutine} call and R13 is conventionally used as a {stack pointer}. There are four processor modes: user, {interrupt} (with a private copy of R13 and R14), fast interrupt (private copies of R8 to R14) and {supervisor} (private copies of R13 and R14). The {ALU} includes a 32-bit {barrel-shifter} allowing, e.g., a single-{cycle} shift and add. The first ARM processor, the ARM1 was a prototype which was never released. The ARM2 was originally called the Acorn RISC Machine. It was designed by {Acorn Computers Ltd.} and used in the original {Archimedes}, their successor to the {BBC Micro} and {BBC Master} series which were based on the eight-bit {6502} {microprocessor}. It was clocked at 8 MHz giving an average performance of 4 - 4.7 {MIPS}. Development of the ARM family was then continued by a new company, {Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.} The {ARM3} added a {fully-associative} on-chip {cache} and some support for {multiprocessing}. This was followed by the {ARM600} chip which was an {ARM6} processor {core} with a 4-kilobyte 64-way {set-associative} {cache}, an {MMU} based on the MEMC2 chip, a {write buffer} (8 words?) and a {coprocessor} interface. The {ARM7} processor core uses half the power of the {ARM6} and takes around half the {die} size. In a full processor design ({ARM700} chip) it should provide 50% to 100% more performance. In July 1994 {VLSI Technology, Inc.} released the {ARM710} processor chip. {Thumb} is an implementation with reduced code size requirements, intended for {embedded} applications. An {ARM800} chip is also planned. {AT&T}, {IBM}, {Panasonic}, {Apple Coputer}, {Matsushita} and {Sanyo} either rely on, or manufacture, ARM 32-bit processor chips. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.sys.arm}. (1997-08-05)
Advanced RISC Machine ::: (processor) (ARM, Originally Acorn RISC Machine). A series of low-cost, power-efficient 32-bit RISC microprocessors for embedded control, computing, licensed for production by Asahi Kasei Microsystems, Cirrus Logic, GEC Plessey Semiconductors, Samsung, Sharp, Texas Instruments and VLSI Technology.The ARM has a small and highly orthogonal instruction set, as do most RISC processors. Every instruction includes a four-bit code which specifies a instruction to be executed. Unconditional execution is specified with a condition true.Instructions are split into load and store which access memory and arithmetic and logic instructions which work on registers (two source and one destination).The ARM has 27 registers of which 16 are accessible in any particular processor mode. R15 combines the program counter and processor status byte, the other and R14). The ALU includes a 32-bit barrel-shifter allowing, e.g., a single-cycle shift and add.The first ARM processor, the ARM1 was a prototype which was never released. The ARM2 was originally called the Acorn RISC Machine. It was designed by Acorn MIPS. Development of the ARM family was then continued by a new company, Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.The ARM3 added a fully-associative on-chip cache and some support for multiprocessing. This was followed by the ARM600 chip which was an ARM6 processor core with a 4-kilobyte 64-way set-associative cache, an MMU based on the MEMC2 chip, a write buffer (8 words?) and a coprocessor interface.The ARM7 processor core uses half the power of the ARM6 and takes around half the die size. In a full processor design (ARM700 chip) it should provide 50% to 100% more performance.In July 1994 VLSI Technology, Inc. released the ARM710 processor chip.Thumb is an implementation with reduced code size requirements, intended for embedded applications.An ARM800 chip is also planned.AT&T, IBM, Panasonic, Apple Coputer, Matsushita and Sanyo either rely on, or manufacture, ARM 32-bit processor chips.Usenet newsgroup: comp.sys.arm. (1997-08-05)
Advantage Gen "language, software" A {CASE} tool for {rapid application development} which generates code from graphical {business process models}. Formerly called Information Engineering Facility (IEF) and produced by {Texas Instruments}, it was then bought by {Sterling Software, Inc.} who renamed it to COOL:Gen to fit into their COOL line of products. {Computer Associates International, Inc.} then acquired {Sterling Software, Inc.}, and renamed the tool "Advantage Gen". In 2003, CA are supporting Advantage Gen and adding support for {J2EE}/{EJB}, enhanced web enablement, {Web services} and {.Net}. {(http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=256)}. (2003-06-23)
Amal: “On the highest regions of the Mind are found these rare powers who make our space and time their means of knowledge, their instruments of action.”
. a (manomaya purusha) ::: "the Soul on the mental level", the purus.a as a mental being "in whose nature the clarity and luminous power of the mind acts in its own right independent of any limitation or oppression by the vital or corporeal instruments"; the "Spirit poised in mind" which "becomes the mental self of a mental world and dwells there in the reign of its own pure and luminous mental Nature".
American Standard Code for Information Interchange "character, standard" The basis of {character sets} used in almost all present-day computers. {US-ASCII} uses only the lower seven {bits} ({character points} 0 to 127) to convey some {control codes}, {space}, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and A-Z. More modern {coded character sets} (e.g., {Latin-1}, {Unicode}) define extensions to ASCII for values above 127 for conveying special {Latin characters} (like accented characters, or {German} ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin writing systems (e.g., {Cyrillic}, or {Han characters}), and such desirable {glyphs} as distinct open- and close-{quotation marks}. ASCII replaced earlier systems such as {EBCDIC} and {Baudot}, which used fewer bytes, but were each {broken} in their own way. Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, {hackers} need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly. Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from revision 2.3 of the {Usenet} ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including their official {ITU-T} names and the particularly silly names introduced by {INTERCAL}. See {V} {ampersand}, {asterisk}, {back quote}, {backslash}, {caret}, {colon}, {comma}, {commercial at}, {control-C}, {dollar}, {dot}, {double quote}, {equals}, {exclamation mark}, {greater than}, {hash}, {left bracket}, {left parenthesis}, {less than}, {minus}, {parentheses}, {oblique stroke}, {percent}, {plus}, {question mark}, {right brace}, {right brace}, {right bracket}, {right parenthesis}, {semicolon}, {single quote}, {space}, {tilde}, {underscore}, {vertical bar}, {zero}. Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The "
American Standard Code for Information Interchange ::: The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. US-ASCII uses only the lower seven bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some as EBCDIC and Baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly.Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL.See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash, caret, colon, comma, commercial at, control-C, dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark, brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon, single quote, space, tilde, underscore, vertical bar, zero.Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The
ana (jnana; jnanam; gnana) ::: knowledge; "that power of direct and divine knowledge which works independently of the intellect & senses or uses them only as subordinate assistants", the first member of the vijñana catus.t.aya, consisting primarily of the application of any or all of the supra-intellectual faculties of smr.ti, sruti and dr.s.t.i "to the things of thought, ideas and knowledge generally"; sometimes extended to include other instruments of vijñana such as trikaladr.s.t.i and telepathy; also, short for jñanaṁ brahma; wisdom, an attribute of Mahavira; (on page 1281) the name of a svarga. j ñana ana atman
TRIADS Permanent triplets of evolutionary atoms and molecules that accompany the monad, functioning as its instruments during the entire evolution from the mineral kingdom to the sixth natural kingdom inclusive. During this entire evolution, the monad has three units.
The firsts triad consists of a mental molecule (47:4), an emotional atom (48:1), and a physical atom (49:1). The second triad consists of a superessential molecule (45:4), an essential atom (46:1), and a mental atom (47:1). The third triad consists of a manifestal molecule (43:4), a submanifestal atom (44:1), and a superessential atom (45:1).
Evolution in the solar system (43-49) is evolution in and through triads. The monad activates its triads from below. It is always involved in the physical atom of the first triad. In the animal kingdom, the monad passes to the emotional atom, and in the human kingdom (at the mental stage) to the mental molecule. The transition to the fifth natural kingdom implies a transition to second triad mental atom, whereupon the first triad can be dispensed with. The transition to the sixth natural kingdom implies a transition to the third triad 45-atom, whereupon the second triad is dispensed with as well. As long as the second and third triads are inactive, they are held in trust by collective beings belonging to the deva evolution. (P 2.15f)
ana (vijnana; vijnanam; vijnan) ::: "the large embracing consciousness . . . which takes into itself all truth and idea and object of knowledge and sees them at once in their essence, totality and parts or aspects", the "comprehensive consciousness" which is one of the four functions of active consciousness (see ajñanam), a mode of awareness that is "the original, spontaneous, true and complete view" of existence and "of which mind has only a shadow in the highest operations of the comprehensive intellect"; the faculty or plane of consciousness above buddhi or intellect, also called ideality, gnosis or supermind (although these are distinguished in the last period of the Record of Yoga as explained under the individual terms), whose instruments of knowledge and power form the vijñana catus.t.aya; the vijñana catus.t.aya itself; the psychological principle or degree of consciousness that is the basis of maharloka, the "World of the Vastness" that links the worlds of the transcendent existence, consciousness and bliss of saccidananda to the lower triloka of mind, life and matter, being itself usually considered the lowest plane of the parardha or higher hemisphere of existence. Vijñana is "the knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast [satyam r.taṁ br.hat] of the divine existence". vij ñana ana ananda
a nessuna cosa: to nothing; an indication to hold a fermata until it dies away (this only works with instruments which cannot sustain a note)
An exchange ::: is a marketplace in which securities, commodities, derivatives and other financial instruments are traded. The core function of an exchange is to ensure fair and orderly trading and the efficient dissemination of price information for any securities trading on that exchange. Exchanges give companies, governments and other groups a platform from which to sell securities to the investing public.
arco: the bow used for playing some string instrument; i.e., played with the bow, as opposed to pizzicato (plucked), in music for bowed instruments; normally used to cancel a pizzicato direction
armory ::: n. --> A place where arms and instruments of war are deposited for safe keeping.
Armor; defensive and offensive arms.
A manufactory of arms, as rifles, muskets, pistols, bayonets, swords.
Ensigns armorial; armorial bearings.
That branch of heraldry which treats of coat armor.
arms ::: n. --> Instruments or weapons of offense or defense.
The deeds or exploits of war; military service or science.
Anything which a man takes in his hand in anger, to strike or assault another with; an aggressive weapon.
The ensigns armorial of a family, consisting of figures and colors borne in shields, banners, etc., as marks of dignity and distinction, and descending from father to son.
The legs of a hawk from the thigh to the foot.
asina nati ::: nati with udasinata, a submission to the divine Will that rises superior to the dualities, "regarding joy and sorrow equally as God"s working in these lower instruments". udasina ud
A vanilla_strategy ::: is a common or popular approach to investing or decision making in business. Although the concept is relatively basic, some investors and businesses excel because they stick with an ordinary, "vanilla" strategy, while others succeed through innovation. For example, in derivatives trading, a vanilla strategy is the use of two different plain vanilla instruments, such as swaps, at the same time.
awkward ::: a. --> Wanting dexterity in the use of the hands, or of instruments; not dexterous; without skill; clumsy; wanting ease, grace, or effectiveness in movement; ungraceful; as, he was awkward at a trick; an awkward boy.
Not easily managed or effected; embarrassing.
Perverse; adverse; untoward.
barking irons ::: --> Instruments used in taking off the bark of trees.
A pair of pistols.
instruments. His aides are the angels Reivtip and
instruments—the thrones, chariots, firmament,
Blue chip - Common stock of high quality that has a long record of earnings and dividend payments. Blue chip stocks are often viewed as long-term investment instruments. They have low risk and provide modest but dependable return. Examples are International Telephone and Telegraph and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Blue chip may also refer to a high-quality bond that is secure and stable in price and interest payments.
bowing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Bow
of Bow ::: n. --> The act or art of managing the bow in playing on stringed instruments.
In hatmaking, the act or process of separating and
Branch and Hang ::: (humour) (BRH) Originally a mythical instruction for the IBM 1130 at Indiana University.Later some real examples were discovered. The Texas Instruments TI-980 allowed all addressing modes with all instructions, including Store Immediate Extended Link Immediate (makes a subroutine call to the same instruction -- Branch and Hang).Compare HCF. (1997-02-12)
Branch and Hang "humour" (BRH) Originally a mythical instruction for the {IBM 1130} at {Indiana University}. Later some real examples were discovered. The {Texas Instruments} {TI-980} allowed all {addressing modes} with all instructions, including Store Immediate Extended (stores the value into the extension word of the instruction) and Branch and Link Immediate (makes a subroutine call to the same instruction -- Branch and Hang). Compare {HCF}. (1997-02-12)
buccinator ::: n. --> A muscle of the cheek; -- so called from its use in blowing wind instruments.
Buddhindriyas (Sanskrit) Bhuddhīndriya-s In Hindu philosophy, one of the three main divisions of the human being according to the indriyas (instruments, organs); used in theosophy as “organs or means of spiritual consciousness, apperception, sense and action” (FSO 275). See also INDRIYA
But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to con- centrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indi- cation of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result. And afterwards you wfil realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works ; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be
calibrate ::: v. i. --> To ascertain the caliber of, as of a thermometer tube; also, more generally, to determine or rectify the graduation of, as of the various standards or graduated instruments.
canon or kanon (Ger): a theme that is repeated and imitated and built upon by other instruments with a time delay, creating a layered effect; see Pachelbel's Canon.
Capitalism: A mode of economic production which is characterized by the fact that the instruments of production (land, factories, raw materials, etc.) are controlled to a greater or lesser extent by private individuals or groups. Since the control an individual can exercise over means of production is never absolute and as a matter of fact fluctuates widely with the ever-changing natural and social environment, "capitalism" is a very loose term which covers a host of actually different economic systems. An implication of this basic notion of individual control is that the individual will control production in his own interests. The ideological counterpart to this fact is the concept of "profit," just as the ideological counterpart to the control itself is the myth of "private property" and "free enterprise." -- M.B.M.
cartbote ::: n. --> Wood to which a tenant is entitled for making and repairing carts and other instruments of husbandry.
case ::: n. --> A box, sheath, or covering; as, a case for holding goods; a case for spectacles; the case of a watch; the case (capsule) of a cartridge; a case (cover) for a book.
A box and its contents; the quantity contained in a box; as, a case of goods; a case of instruments.
A shallow tray divided into compartments or "boxes" for holding type.
An inclosing frame; a casing; as, a door case; a window case.
catadioptrics ::: n. --> The science which treats of catadioptric phenomena, or of the used of catadioptric instruments.
catgut ::: n. --> A cord of great toughness made from the intestines of animals, esp. of sheep, used for strings of musical instruments, etc.
A sort of linen or canvas, with wide interstices.
catheter ::: n. --> The name of various instruments for passing along mucous canals, esp. applied to a tubular instrument to be introduced into the bladder through the urethra to draw off the urine.
charta ::: n. --> Material on which instruments, books, etc., are written; parchment or paper.
A charter or deed; a writing by which a grant is made. See Magna Charta.
chime ::: n. --> See Chine, n., 3.
The harmonious sound of bells, or of musical instruments.
A set of bells musically tuned to each other; specif., in the pl., the music performed on such a set of bells by hand, or produced by mechanism to accompany the striking of the hours or their divisions.
Pleasing correspondence of proportion, relation, or sound.
To sound in harmonious accord, as bells.
cocus wood ::: --> A West Indian wood, used for making flutes and other musical instruments.
Commodity - An article of commerce or product that can be used for commerce. In a narrower sense, commodity is product traded on an authorised commodity exchange. Some types of commodities: agricultural products, metals, petroleum, foreign currencies, financial instruments and indices, etc.
Compaq Computer Corporation "company" A US manufacturer and vendor of {IBM PC compatible} {personal computers} and servers. Compaq was started in 1982 by three ex-{Texas Instruments} employees and by 1995 had become the largest PC manufacturer. Quarterly sales $2499M, profits $210M (Aug 1994). Compaq was acquired by {Hewlett-Packard} in 2004. {(http://compaq.com/)}. (1995-10-24)
Compaq Computer Corporation ::: (company) The largest US manufacturer and vendor of IBM PC compatible personal computers and servers. Compaq was started in 1982 by three ex-Texas Instruments employees.Quarterly sales $2499M, profits $210M (Aug 1994). . (1995-10-24)
concertante ::: n. --> A concert for two or more principal instruments, with orchestral accompaniment. Also adjectively; as, concertante parts.
concertino ::: n. --> A piece for one or more solo instruments with orchestra; -- more concise than the concerto.
conflation ::: n. --> A blowing together, as of many instruments in a concert, or of many fires in a foundry.
con sordina, or con sordine (plural): with a mute, or with mutes; several orchestral instruments can have their tone muted with wood, rubber, metal, or plastic devices (for string instruments, mutes are clipped to the bridge, and for brass instruments, mutes are inserted in the bell); compare senza sordina in this list (which instructs the musicians to remove their mutes); see also Sordino. Note: sordina, with plural sordine, is strictly correct Italian, but the forms con sordino and con sordini are much more commonly used as terms in music.
consort ::: n. --> One who shares the lot of another; a companion; a partner; especially, a wife or husband.
A ship keeping company with another.
Concurrence; conjunction; combination; association; union.
An assembly or association of persons; a company; a group; a combination.
Harmony of sounds; concert, as of musical instruments.
COOL ::: 1. Concurrent Object-Oriented Language.2. CLIPS Object-Oriented Language?3. A C++ class library developed at Texas Instruments. COOL contains a set of containers like Vectors, List, Hash_Table, etc. It uses a shallow hierarchy with (like libg++). The template syntax is very close to Cfront3.x and g++2.x. Can build shared libraries on Suns.JCOOL's main difference from COOL and GECOOL is that it uses real C++ templates instead of a similar syntax that is preprocessed by a special 'cpp' distributed with COOL and GECOOL. .GECOOL, JCOOL: .E-mail: Van-Duc Nguyen (1992-08-05)
COOL 1. {Concurrent Object-Oriented Language}. 2. CLIPS Object-Oriented Language? 3. A C++ class library developed at {Texas Instruments} that defines {containers} like {Vectors}, {List}, {Hash_Table}, etc. It uses a shallow hierarchy with no common {base class}. The functionality is close to {Common Lisp} data structures (like {libg++}). The {template} {syntax} is very close to {Cfront} 3.x and {g++} 2.x. JCOOL's main difference from COOL and GECOOL is that it uses real C++ templates instead of a similar syntax that is preprocessed by a special 'cpp' distributed with COOL and GECOOL. {(ftp://csc.ti.com/pub/COOL.tar.Z)}. GECOOL, JCOOL: {(ftp://cs.utexas.edu/pub/COOL/)}. E-mail: Van-Duc Nguyen "nguyen@crd.ge.com" (1992-08-05)
crampoons ::: n. --> A clutch formed of hooked pieces of iron, like double calipers, for raising stones, lumber, blocks of ice, etc.
Iron instruments with sharp points, worn on the shoes to assist in gaining or keeping a foothold.
deadbeat ::: a. --> Making a beat without recoil; giving indications by a single beat or excursion; -- said of galvanometers and other instruments in which the needle or index moves to the extent of its deflection and stops with little or no further oscillation.
DED ::: Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare SED, LER, write-only memory. In the early 1970s both Signetics and Texas instruments released DED spec sheets as AFJs (suggested uses included as a power-off indicator).[Jargon File]
DED Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare {SED}, {LER}, {write-only memory}. In the early 1970s both Signetics and Texas instruments released DED spec sheets as {AFJs} (suggested uses included "as a power-off indicator"). [{Jargon File}]
delicate ::: 1. Distinguishing subtle differences. 2. Of instruments: precise, skilled, or sensitive in action or operation. 3. Marked by sensitivity of discrimination and skillful in expression, technique, etc. 4. Exquisitely or beautifully fine in texture, construction, or finish. 5. Exquisite, fine, or subtle in quality, character, construction, etc. 6. (of colour, tone, taste, etc.) Pleasantly subtle, soft, or faint.
diaphragm ::: n. --> A dividing membrane or thin partition, commonly with an opening through it.
The muscular and tendinous partition separating the cavity of the chest from that of the abdomen; the midriff.
A calcareous plate which divides the cavity of certain shells into two parts.
A plate with an opening, which is generally circular, used in instruments to cut off marginal portions of a beam of light, as
Distributed Network Operating System ::: (operating system) (DNOS) A proprietary operating system for Texas Instruments 990-series minicomputers. (1996-04-01)
Distributed Network Operating System "operating system" (DNOS) A proprietary {operating system} for {Texas Instruments} {990}-series {minicomputers}. (1996-04-01)
Divine Forces ::: In our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 253
divisi or div.: divided; i.e., in a part in which several musicians normally play exactly the same notes they are instead to split the playing of the written simultaneous notes among themselves. It is most often used for string instruments, since with them another means of execution is often possible. (The return from divisi is marked unisono: see in this list.)
drum. (S. dundubhi, mṛdanga; P. dundubhi, mutinga; T. rnga bo che; C. gu; J. ku; K. ko 鼓). Drums and other percussion instruments are used in many Buddhist cultures to signal the events of the daily monastic schedule, to call the monks and nuns to assembly, and in Buddhist liturgical activities. Drums also appear frequently in Buddhist literature as a symbol of the power of the dharma to encourage good and frighten away evil. In Chinese monasteries, a drum is beaten at dawn and dusk to gather the monastic residents for services; a "cloud drum," viz., a drum ornamented with clouds, calls the monks to the midday meal; and a bathing drum is used to announce bath time in CHAN monasteries. The Chinese typically use four instruments to mark the schedule of events in a monastery: the dharma drum, temple bell, cloud-shaped gong, and wooden fish (C. muyu = K. MOKTAK). Especially interesting is the wooden fish, a wooden percussion instrument carved in the shape of a fish that is used for calling the monks to meals and to mark time during chanting. Because a fish's eyes are always open day and night, the wooden fish is a subtle admonition to monks and nuns to remain ever vigilant about their practice. Drums are often used together with other instruments during Buddhist liturgical activities. Small drums, bells, and gongs, for example, are used to mark time during Buddhist rituals and while chanting the Buddha's name (C. NIANFO). ¶ Drums often appear in conjunction with heavenly divinities (DEVA) in Buddhist literature. Dundubhisvara-rāja is the lord of the sound of celestial drums, viz., the thunder. Meghasvara-rāja, a son of MahābhijNābhibhu, is the ruler of the cloud drums in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. The heavenly drum in the TRĀYASTRIMsA heaven spontaneously emits a sublime sound without being struck; it warns the divine inhabitants that even their lives are impermanent and subject to the law of causality. Drums are a common metaphor for the Buddha or dharma in Buddhist literature. "Great Drum of the Dharma" is one of the epithets of a Buddha, since he exhorts sentient beings to perform wholesome actions and frightens away baleful influences and demons. The YOGĀCĀRABHuMIsĀSTRA describes one of the characteristics of the divine voice of a Buddha as being like the thunderous sound of a heavenly drum. The drum of dharma is also likened to both a noxious drum that helps to repress unwholesome action and evil, as well as a heavenly drum that offers kind and gentle encouragement to sentient beings to perform wholesome deeds. The noxious drum is likened also to the buddha-nature (C. FOXING), which can help overcome all evil. There are many variant Sanskrit names for drums and percussion instruments, including bherī, ghattita, GHAntA, dundubha, and panava. See also MOKT'AK; dAMARU.
dynamometrical ::: a. --> Relating to a dynamometer, or to the measurement of force doing work; as, dynamometrical instruments.
earth ::: 1. The realm of mortal existence; the temporal world. 2. The softer, friable part of land; soil, especially productive soil. **Earth, earth"s, earth-beauty"s, earth-being"s, earth-beings, earth-bounds, earth-bride, earth-fact, earth-force, Earth-Goddess, earth-hearts, earth-habit"s, earth-heart, earth-instruments, earth-kind, earth-life, earth-light, earth-made, earth-matter"s, earth-mind, earth-mind"s, earth-myth, earth-nature, earth-nature"s, Earth-Nature"s, earth-nursed, earth-pain, Earth-plasm, earth-poise, earth-scene, earth-scene"s, earth-seat, earth-shapes, earth-stage, earth-stuff, earth-time, earth-time"s, earth-use, earth-vision, earth-ways, summer-earth.
enginery ::: n. --> The act or art of managing engines, or artillery.
Engines, in general; instruments of war.
Any device or contrivance; machinery; structure or arrangement.
euphoniad ::: n. --> An instrument in which are combined the characteristic tones of the organ and various other instruments.
faqi. (S. *dharmabhājana; T. chos kyi snod; J. hoki; K. popki 法器). In Chinese, "dharma vessel" or "implement of dharma." When referring to objects, faqi is the collective name for all the implements used either for ritual and liturgical purposes (e.g., bells, drums, and wooden fish) or for decorative purposes (e.g., canopies, banners, flower vases, censers, and lamps). The term is also used to refer to the few possessions allowable to a monk or nun, such as the begging bowl (PĀTRA), recitation beads (JAPAMĀLĀ), and the staff; see also PARIsKĀRA. One of the six forms of AVALOKITEsVARA, the Thousand-Hands and Thousand-Eyes emanation (S. SĀHASRABHUJASĀHASRANETRĀVALOKITEsVARA; C. Qianshou Qianyan Guanshiyin Pusa), is commonly depicted in abbreviated form with forty hands, each of which holds a different faqi (cf. T. phyag mtshan, lag cha). According to the Nīlakantha[ka]sutra, these forty faqi include weapons, precious jewels, liturgical instruments, the sun and moon, and plants. The bodhisattva uses these various faqi to protect and save the sentient beings of the continent of JAMBUDVĪPA. When used metaphorically to refer to a person, faqi is a term of praise, meaning "one who has been, or has the potential to be, molded into a vessel of the dharma," or "someone who is suitably prepared to believe in and understand the teachings of Buddhism." In the CHAN tradition, one who is capable of being entrusted with the store of the proper dharma eye (ZHENFAYANZANG), the sublime mind of NIRVĀnA, is called a "dharma vessel."
Fictionism: An extreme form of pragmatism or instrumentalism according to which the basic concepts and principles of natural science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, religion and jurisprudence are pure fictions which, though lacking objective truth, are useful instruments of action. The theory is advanced under the influence of Kant, by the German philosopher H. Vaihinger in his Philosophie des Als Ob, 1911. Philosophv of the "As If." English translation by C. K. Ogden.) See Fiction, Construction. -- L. W.
Finance ::: is a term describing the study and system of money, investments, and other financial instruments. Some people prefer to divide finance into three distinct categories: public finance, corporate finance, and personal finance. There is also the recently emerging area of social finance. Behavioral finance seeks to identify the cognitive (e.g. emotional, social, and psychological) reasons behind financial decisions.
Financial_instruments ::: are assets that can be traded. They can also be seen as packages of capital that may be traded. Most types of financial instruments provide an efficient flow and transfer of capital all throughout the world's investors. These assets can be cash, a contractual right to deliver or receive cash or another type of financial instrument, or evidence of one's ownership of an entity.
Fire supporting the individual evolution on the earth and the psychic being is the soul-coosciousoess developing itself or rather its manifestation from life to life with the mind, vital and body as Its instruments until all is ready for the union with the
flint glass ::: --> A soft, heavy, brilliant glass, consisting essentially of a silicate of lead and potassium. It is used for tableware, and for optical instruments, as prisms, its density giving a high degree of dispersive power; -- so called, because formerly the silica was obtained from pulverized flints. Called also crystal glass. Cf. Glass.
focus: The combination of belief, practice, and instruments through which a mage focuses her magick. (See paradigm.) (Like countermagick, this is more of a game term than a setting term.)
Force ::: Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 253
"For it is a gnostic way of dynamic living that must be the fulfilled divine life on earth, a way of living that develops higher instruments of world-knowledge and world-action for the dynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world of material Nature.” The Life Divine
“For it is a gnostic way of dynamic living that must be the fulfilled divine life on earth, a way of living that develops higher instruments of world-knowledge and world-action for the dynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world of material Nature.” The Life Divine
free-hand ::: a. --> Done by the hand, without support, or the guidance of instruments; as, free-hand drawing. See under Drawing.
game ::: n. --> Crooked; lame; as, a game leg.
To rejoice; to be pleased; -- often used, in Old English, impersonally with dative.
To play at any sport or diversion.
To play for a stake or prize; to use cards, dice, billiards, or other instruments, according to certain rules, with a view to win money or other thing waged upon the issue of the contest; to gamble.
graduator ::: n. --> One who determines or indicates graduation; as, a graduator of instruments.
An instrument for dividing any line, right or curve, into small, regular intervals.
An apparatus for diffusing a solution, as brine or vinegar, over a large surface, for exposure to the air.
grenadillo ::: n. --> A handsome tropical American wood, much used for making flutes and other wind instruments; -- called also Grenada cocos, or cocus, and red ebony.
gtor ma. (torma). The Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit term bali (offering, tribute), an offering of food to propitiate a deity. There are ritual texts (S. balividhi) for constructing and offering gtor ma, differing based on the purpose of the offering and the status of the recipient. In Tibet the gtor ma is always a distinctive conical shape, and became a canvas for extremely ornate butter sculpture. The spectacular gtor ma ritual culminated in the gtor bzlog (tordok) or gtor rgyag (torgyak) on the last day of the Tibetan year, during which the monastic assembly would march out with the gtor ma. All negativities and bad spirits of the departing year are drawn to the offering, which is then hurled into a blazing pyre accompanied by a cacophony of instruments and the loud bangs of firecrackers. On the last of the fifteen days of festivities celebrating lo gsar (new year) in LHA SA, the bco lnga mchod pa competition to judge the best gtor ma was held; it is reported that some gtor ma were so high that ladders had to be used to reach the top; they were decorated with extremely ornate butter sculptures, including figures manipulated like puppets with hidden strings. There are a variety of gtor mas in Tibet, usually made of barley flour with butter if they are expected to last and be eaten, or with water if they are to be thrown out; they may be painted red if the recipient protector or deity is wrathful, and clear or whitish in color if in a peaceful form.
guide ::: “The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness.” The Life Divine
hathayoga ::: a system of yoga which selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; the use of the body for the opening of the divine life on all of its planes.
Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tran- quillisc. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed ; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers the facul- ties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Suarajya. self-rule, must be sub- stituted for this subjection. Fits!, therefore, the powers of ordei must be helped to overcome the powers of disorder. The pre- liminary movement of Rajayoga is a careful self-discipline by which good habits of mind are substituted for the lawless move- ments that indulge the lower nervous being. By the practice of
His erring sense and his instruments’ artifice.
hone ::: v. i. --> To pine; to lament; to long. ::: n. --> A kind of swelling in the cheek.
A stone of a fine grit, or a slab, as of metal, covered with an abrading substance or powder, used for sharpening cutting instruments, and especially for setting razors; an oilstone.
horography ::: n. --> An account of the hours.
The art of constructing instruments for making the hours, as clocks, watches, and dials.
horologiography ::: n. --> An account of instruments that show the hour.
The art of constructing clocks or dials; horography.
horology ::: n. --> The science of measuring time, or the principles and art of constructing instruments for measuring and indicating portions of time, as clocks, watches, dials, etc.
H. Scholz, Geschichte der Logik, Berlin, 1931. Logical Empiricism: See Scientific Empiricism I. Logical machines: Mechanical devices or instruments designed to effect combinations of propositions, or premisses, with which the mechanism is supplied, and derive from them correct logical conclusions. Both premisses and conclusions may be expressed by means of conventional symbols. A contrivance devised by William Stanley Jevons in 1869 was a species of logical abacus. Another constructed by John Venn in 1881 consisted of diagrams which could be manipulated in such a manner that appropriate consequences appeared. A still more satisfactory machine was designed by Allan Marquand in 1882. Such devices would indicate that the inferential process is mechanical to a notable extent. -- J.J.R-
hygrometry ::: n. --> That branch of physics which relates to the determination of the humidity of bodies, particularly of the atmosphere, with the theory and use of the instruments constructed for this purpose.
IEEE 488 ::: (hardware, standard) (GPIB, General-Purpose Interface Bus, HP-IB, Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus) An 8-bit parallel bus common on test equipment.The IEEE-488 standard was proposed by Hewlett-Packard in the late 1970s and has undergone a couple of revisions. HP documentation (including data sheets and manuals) calls it HP-IB, or Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus.It allows up to 15 intelligent devices to share a single bus, with the slowest device participating in the control and data transfer handshakes to drive the speed of the transaction. The maximum data rate is about one megabit per second.Other standards committees have adopted HP-IB (American Standards Institute with ANSI Standard MC 1.1 and International Electro-technical Commission with IEC Publication 625-1).To paraphrase from the HP 1989 Test & Measurement Catalog (the 50th Anniversary version): The HP-IB has a party-line structure wherein all devices on the bus to their functions (Data Bus, Data Byte Transfer Control Bus, General Interface Management Bus).In June 1987 the IEEE approved a new standard for programmable instruments called IEEE Std. 488.2-1987 Codes, Formats, Protocols, and Common Commands. It IEEE 488-1978 (now 488.1). HP-IB is Hewlett-Packard's implementation of IEEE 488.1. (1996-05-10)
IEEE 488 "hardware, standard" (GPIB, General-Purpose Interface Bus, HP-IB, Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus) An 8-bit parallel {bus} common on {test equipment}. The IEEE-488 standard was proposed by {Hewlett-Packard} in the late 1970s and has undergone a couple of revisions. HP documentation (including data sheets and manuals) calls it HP-IB, or Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus. It allows up to 15 intelligent devices to share a single bus, with the slowest device participating in the control and data transfer handshakes to drive the speed of the transaction. The maximum data rate is about one {megabit} per second. Other standards committees have adopted HP-IB (American Standards Institute with ANSI Standard MC 1.1 and International Electro-technical Commission with IEC Publication 625-1). To paraphrase from the HP 1989 Test & Measurement Catalog (the 50th Anniversary version): The HP-IB has a party-line structure wherein all devices on the bus are connected in parallel. The 16 signal lines within the passive interconnecting HP-IB (IEEE-488) cable are grouped into three clusters according to their functions (Data Bus, Data Byte Transfer Control Bus, General Interface Management Bus). In June 1987 the IEEE approved a new standard for programmable instruments called IEEE Std. 488.2-1987 Codes, Formats, Protocols, and Common Commands. It works with the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, IEEE 488-1978 (now 488.1). HP-IB is Hewlett-Packard's implementation of IEEE 488.1. (1996-05-10)
..if we suppose the unity to be unbroken, we then arrive at the existence of consciousness in all forms of the Force which is at work in the world. Even if there be no conscient or superconscient Purusha inhabiting all forms, yet is there in those forms a conscious force of being of which even their outer parts overtly or inertly partake. Necessarily, in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds. Essentially, we arrive at that unity which materialistic Science perceives from the other end when it asserts that Mind cannot be another force than Matter, but must be merely development and outcome of material energy. Indian thought at its deepest affirms on the other hand that Mind and Matter are rather different grades of the same energy, different organisations of one conscious Force of Existence.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 95-96 ::: The essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself and its objects, and in its true nature this power must be direct, self-fulfilled and complete: if it is in us indirect, incomplete, unfulfilled in its workings, dependent on constructed instruments, it is because consciousness here is emerging from an original veiling Inconscience and is yet burdened and enveloped with the first Nescience proper to the Inconscient.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 1053
Ignorance ; she has descended there and is not all above. Partly she veils and partly she unveils her knowledge and her power, often holds them back from her instruments and personalities and follows that she may transform them the way of the seeking mind, the way of the aspiring psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the imprisoned and suffering physical nature.
In all these cases the condition results from a compression of the astral fluid already existing “about a person, so as to form an elastic shell, absolutely non-penetrable by any physical object” (IU 1:378). Nor does ordinary heat register, as such, on astral substance. This invisible shell of compressed astral fluid also accounts for the instances where the person so protected cannot be shot. In these cases the bullets appear just beyond the muzzle of the weapon, quiver in the air, and fall to the ground, as if meeting an impenetrable barrier. This protecting, elastic shell also explains why heavy blows and attacks with sharp instruments will make no impression upon “convulsionaries” as was shown by the historic records in the cases of the convulsionaries of St. Medard (IU 1:373-6).
Indeterminacy Used in science to mean that the investigation of intra-atomic phenomena has (for the time being) reached the limits of human power to determine the behavior of a particle. The Heisenberg principle of uncertainty states that it is impossible to increase the accuracy of measurement of the velocity of a particle without by this very observational act introducing an uncertainty into the determination of its position. The attempt to represent phenomena as a chain of cause and effect must lead sooner or later to a point where we can no longer trace the cause — not because causes vanish, but because of the imperfection of our observation and of our instruments, so that the chain of causation continues until we lose track of it because of incapacity. Hence we are unable to predict the behavior of a particle. Subsequent investigation may enable us to carry the chain of causation farther, but the process cannot go on indefinitely without carrying us beyond the physical plane. The standards of measurement successfully adopted for molar physics and for phenomena within terrestrial limits have proved inadequate for the definition of phenomena outside those limits; and both theory and experiment show that these standards are largely conceptual and must be changed to suit new conditions.
indriya (indriya; indriyam) ::: sense-organ, especially any of "the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects" (see vis.aya); the sense-faculty in general, "fundamentally not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of consciousness with its objects" (saṁjñana). Each of the physical senses has two elements, "the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it"; the mind (manas) is sometimes regarded as a "sixth sense", though "in fact it is the only true sense organ and the rest are no more than its outer conveniences and secondary instruments". indriyaindriya-ananda
In Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920, p. 156), Dewey states "When the claim or pretension or plan is acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. The hypothesis that works is the true one, and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that receive confirmation in their work and consequences". The needs and desires which truth must satisfy, however, are not conceived as personal and emotional (as with James) but rather as "public" in some not altogether explicit sense. Although Dewey emphasizes the functional role of propositions and laws (and even of sensations, facts and objects), and describes these materials of knowledge as means, tools, instruments or operations for the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one in the process of inquiry (Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, N. Y., 1938), he does not clearly deny that they have a strictly cognitive role as well, and he once states that "the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making goods -- excellencies of all kinds -- secure in experienced existence". (The Quest for Certainty, N. Y., 1929, p. 37.) Indeed, in his Logic (p. 345), he quotes with approval Peirce's definition "truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless inquiry would tend to bring scientific belief, . . ." Here truth seems to be represented as progressive approximation to reality, but usually it is interpreted as efficacy, verification or practical expediency.
instrument ::: 1. A means by which something is affected or done; agency. 2. A person used by an agency for a particular purpose. instruments, instruments", instrument-personality.
instrumentally ::: adv. --> By means of an instrument or agency; as means to an end.
With instruments of music; as, a song instrumentally accompanied.
instrumentation ::: n. --> The act of using or adapting as an instrument; a series or combination of instruments; means; agency.
The arrangement of a musical composition for performance by a number of different instruments; orchestration; instrumental composition; composition for an orchestra or military band.
The act or manner of playing upon musical instruments; performance; as, his instrumentation is perfect.
instrument ::: n. --> That by means of which any work is performed, or result is effected; a tool; a utensil; an implement; as, the instruments of a mechanic; astronomical instruments.
A contrivance or implement, by which musical sounds are produced; as, a musical instrument.
A writing, as the means of giving formal expression to some act; a writing expressive of some act, contract, process, as a deed, contract, writ, etc.
Instruments,” during which the invocant is
instrument: When referring to magick, an instrument represents the tools and activities involved in a focus: belief inspires practice, which employs instruments to provide focus. The Technocracy often calls its instruments apparatuses, and many other technomancers use that term as well.
Intel 8086 "processor" A sixteen bit {microprocessor} chip used in early {IBM PCs}. The {Intel 8088} was a version with an eight-bit external data bus. The Intel 8086 was based on the design of the {Intel 8080} and {Intel 8085} (it was {source compatible} with the 8080) with a similar {register set}, but was expanded to 16 bits. The Bus Interface Unit fed the instruction stream to the Execution Unit through a 6 byte {prefetch} queue, so fetch and execution were concurrent - a primitive form of {pipelining} (8086 instructions varied from 1 to 4 bytes). It featured four 16-bit general {registers}, which could also be accessed as eight 8-bit registers, and four 16-bit {index registers} (including the {stack pointer}). The data registers were often used implicitly by instructions, complicating {register allocation} for temporary values. It featured 64K 8-bit I/O (or 32K 16 bit) ports and fixed {vectored interrupts}. There were also four {segment registers} that could be set from index registers. The segment registers allowed the CPU to access 1 meg of memory in an odd way. Rather than just supplying missing bytes, as most segmented processors, the 8086 actually shifted the segment registers left 4 bits and added it to the address. As a result, segments overlapped, and it was possible to have two pointers with the same value point to two different memory locations, or two pointers with different values pointing to the same location. Most people consider this a {brain damaged} design. Although this was largely acceptable for {assembly language}, where control of the segments was complete (it could even be useful then), in higher level languages it caused constant confusion (e.g. near/far pointers). Even worse, this made expanding the address space to more than 1 meg difficult. A later version, the {Intel 80386}, expanded the design to 32 bits, and "fixed" the segmentation, but required extra modes (suppressing the new features) for compatibility, and retains the awkward architecture. In fact, with the right assembler, code written for the 8008 can still be run on the most recent {Intel 486}. The {Intel 80386} added new {op codes} in a kludgy fashion similar to the {Zilog Z80} and {Zilog Z280}. The {Intel 486} added full {pipelines}, and {clock doubling} (like the {Zilog Z280}). So why did {IBM} chose the 8086 series when most of the alternatives were so much better? Apparently IBM's own engineers wanted to use the {Motorola 68000}, and it was used later in the forgotten {IBM Instruments} 9000 Laboratory Computer, but IBM already had rights to manufacture the 8086, in exchange for giving Intel the rights to its {bubble memory} designs. Apparently IBM was using 8086s in the IBM {Displaywriter} {word processor}. Other factors were the 8-bit {Intel 8088} version, which could use existing {Intel 8085}-type components, and allowed the computer to be based on a modified 8085 design. 68000 components were not widely available, though it could use {Motorola 6800} components to an extent. {Intel} {bubble memory} was on the market for a while, but faded away as better and cheaper memory technologies arrived. (1994-12-23)
In the legal code of the United States, a money_transmitter ::: or money transfer service is a business entity that provides money transfer services or payment instruments. Money Transmitters in the US are part of a larger group of entities called money service businesses or MSBs. ~ Wikipedia
Investment_securities ::: are securities (tradable financial assets, such as equities or fixed income instruments) that are purchased in order to be held for investment. This is in contrast to securities, which are purchased by a broker-dealer or other intermediary, for quick resale (i.e. trading account securities). Investment Securities are subject to governance via Article 8 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC).
It is only in this world that the action of fate seems extraneous to human will, for in reality we are the weaver of our own fates. The Morai are karmic agents or forces rather than karma, which is fundamentally the law governing universal equilibrium. In its essence the constant working of cosmic harmony, karma must of necessity manifest itself in multimyriad forms and manners — in and through multimyriad agents or forces. Karma being essentially the law of cosmic unity and concord, it is only the individuals which disturb this universal equilibrium who can feel the reaction therefrom, whether in one life or in a later one; but the karmic effects are by no means always identic with the originating causative action of the individual, because of the karmic agents of many kinds through which karma works. Thus, the gods, all human beings, the earth itself, and all its component forces and substances are karmic agents constantly interacting upon each other; so that while abstractly the action of karma is infallible and infinitely unerring and cannot ever be escaped or set aside, its reactions upon the individual who broke its laws may take place in diverse ways and usually through agents or instruments, since karma is no individual or cosmic god.
It selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation.
Jack Kilby "person" (1924 - 2005-06-20) The electronics engineer who invented the {integrated circuit} in 1958 at {Texas Instruments}. {TI Biography (http://ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackstclair.shtml)}. [Was the {JK flip-flop} named after him?] (2005-06-22)
Jack Kilby ::: (person) (1924 - 2005-06-20) The electronics engineer who invented the integrated circuit in 1958 at Texas Instruments. .[Was the JK flip-flop named after him?](2005-06-22)
Joint Test Action Group "architecture, body, electronics, integrated circuit, standard, testing" (JTAG, or "IEEE Standard 1149.1") A {standard} specifying how to control and monitor the pins of compliant devices on a {printed circuit board}. Each device has four JTAG control lines. There is a common reset (TRST) and clock (TCLK). The data line {daisy chains} one device's test data out (TDO) pin to the test data in (TDI) pin on the next device. The {protocol} contains commands to read and set the values of the pins (and, optionally {internal registers}) of devices. This is called "{boundary scanning}". The protocol makes board testing easier as signals that are not visible at the board connector may be read and set. The protocol also allows the testing of equipment, connected to the JTAG port, to identify components on the board (by reading the device identification register) and to control and monitor the device's outputs. JTAG is not used during normal operation of a board. {JTAG Technologies B.V. (http://jtag.com/)}. {Boundary Scan/JTAG Technical Information - Xilinx, Inc. (http://xilinx.com/support/techsup/journals/jtag/)}. {Java API for Boundary Scan FAQs - Xilinx Inc. (http://xilinx.com/products/software/sx/sxfaqs.htm)}. {JTAG Boundary-Scan Test Products - Corelis, Inc. (http://corelis.com/products/scanovrv.html)}. {"Logic analyzers stamping out bugs at the cutting edge", EDN Access, 1997-04-10 (http://ednmag.com/ednmag/reg/1997/041097/08df_02.htm)}. {IEEE 1149.1 Device Architecture - Boundary-Scan Tutorial from ASSET InterTech, Inc. (http://asset-intertech.com/tutorial/arch.htm)}. {"Application-Specific Integrated Circuits", Michael John Sebatian Smith, published Addison-Wesley - Design Automation Cafe (http://dacafe.com/DACafe/EDATools/EDAbooks/ASIC/Book/CH14/CH14.2.htm)}. {Software Debug options on ASIC cores - Embedded Systems Programming Archive (http://embedded.com/97/feat9701.htm)}. {Designing for On-Board Programming Using the IEEE 1149.1 (JTAG) Access Port - Intel (http://developer.intel.com/design/flcomp/applnots/292186.htm)}. {Built-In Self-Test Using Boundary Scan by Texas Instruments - EDTN Network (http://edtn.com/scribe/reference/appnotes/md003e9a.htm)}. (1999-11-15)
Karanatman (Sanskrit) Kāraṇātman [from kāraṇa cause + ātman self] The causal self; the divine source of one’s being, from which flow forth in a descending scale in continuously less ethereal grades and qualities the various elements which form the human compound constitution. It is the causal self because from it as the primordial fountain of consciousness and being flow forth all the elements, principles, qualities, characteristics — the svabhava — of any entity undergoing its long evolutionary peregrination in the realms of the manifested universe. It is equivalent to atman, called in Hindu literature Isvara (Lord). The various monads in the human constitution — divine, spiritual, human, animal, and astral-vital — are derivatives from this fundamental or supreme atman in the constitution, its children or offspring. These various monads by their reproductive action actually are the causal principles or instruments of the various and unending series of reimbodiments that any entity during the kosmic manvantara is under karmic necessity of undergoing; and it is, therefore, these various monads in their outer or vehicular aspect which are the respective karanopadhis or karana-sarira.
Karmendriyas (Sanskrit) Karmendriya-s Organs of action; the innate astral-vital-physical organs of sensation and action on the physical plane — the generative organs, hands, feet, excretory organs, and mouth. They form one of the three classes of indriyas (organs, channels, instruments) given in Hindu philosophy, the others being buddhindriyas (organs of spiritual consciousness, sense, and action) and jnanendriyas (organs of intellectual and psychological consciousness) (FSO 275-6). The karmendriyas also have correspondences with the tanmatras (rudiments), bhutas (elements), and jnanendriyas (sense organs) as well as with the lokas, rupas, and human principles and senses (BCW 12:660-1, 12:667). See also INDRIYA
keyboardist (Eng) : a musician who plays any instrument with a keyboard. In Classical music, this may refer to instruments such as the piano, pipe organ, harpsichord, and so on. In a jazz or popular music context, this may refer to instruments such as the piano, electric piano, synthesizer, Hammond organ, and so on.
Klangfarbenmelodie (Ger): "tone-color-melody", distribution of pitch or melody among instruments, varying timbre
Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench "tool" (LabVIEW) A package from National Instruments Corp originally developed to provide a {graphical user interface} to instruments connected by the {IEEE 488} (GPIB) bus. It has powerful graphical editing facilities for defining and interconnecting "virtual instruments". (1996-04-24)
Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench ::: (tool) (LabVIEW) A package from National Instruments Corp originally developed to provide a graphical user interface to instruments connected by the IEEE 488 (GPIB) bus. It has powerful graphical editing facilities for defining and interconnecting virtual instruments. (1996-04-24)
Leibniz's philosophy was the dawning consciousness of the modern world (Dewey). So gradual and continuous, like the development of a monad, so all-inclusive was the growth of his mind, that his philosophy, as he himself says, "connects Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, the Scholastics with the moderns, theology and morals with reason." The reform (if all science was to be effected by the use of two instruments, a universal scientific language and a calculus of reasoning. He advocated a universal language of ideographic symbols in which complex concepts would be expressed by combinations of symbols representing simple concepts or by new symbols defined as equivalent to such a complex. He believed that analysis would enable us to limit the number of undefined concepts to a few simple primitives in terms of which all other concepts could be defined. This is the essential notion back of modern logistic treatments.
lens ::: n. --> A piece of glass, or other transparent substance, ground with two opposite regular surfaces, either both curved, or one curved and the other plane, and commonly used, either singly or combined, in optical instruments, for changing the direction of rays of light, and thus magnifying objects, or otherwise modifying vision. In practice, the curved surfaces are usually spherical, though rarely cylindrical, or of some other figure.
magnetometric ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or employed in, the measurement of magnetic forces; obtained by means of a magnetometer; as, magnetometric instruments; magnetometric measurements.
maqui ::: n. --> A Chilian shrub (Aristotelia Maqui). Its bark furnishes strings for musical instruments, and a medicinal wine is made from its berries.
Masonry Operative masonry, the art of building in stone; speculative and emblematic Freemasonry, called such since 1717 when four English Lodges of operative masons established the Grand Lodge of England of Speculative and Emblematic Freemasonry, so called because building materials, tools, and instruments are symbolically and analogically used in the building of the universe and of man as a temple enshrining a god. Originally, however, among the ancient Masons, and today throughout the Orient “wherever magic and the wisdom-religion are studied, its practitioners and students are known among their craft as Builders — for they build the temple of knowledge, of secret science. Those of the adepts who are active, are styled practical or operative Builders, while the students, or neophytes are classed as speculative or theoretical. The former exemplify in works their control over the forces of inanimate as well as animate nature; the latter are but perfecting themselves in the rudiments of the sacred science” (IU 2:392).
materiel ::: n. --> That in a complex system which constitutes the materials, or instruments employed, in distinction from the personnel, or men; as, the baggage, munitions, provisions, etc., of an army; or the buildings, libraries, and apparatus of a college, in distinction from its officers.
mathematical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to mathematics; according to mathematics; hence, theoretically precise; accurate; as, mathematical geography; mathematical instruments; mathematical exactness.
“Maya or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. . . . Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyan-Chohans, are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cogniser is also a reflection, and the things cognised are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya” (SD 1:39-40).
mechanic ::: a. --> The art of the application of the laws of motion or force to construction.
A mechanician; an artisan; an artificer; one who practices any mechanic art; one skilled or employed in shaping and uniting materials, as wood, metal, etc., into any kind of structure, machine, or other object, requiring the use of tools, or instruments.
Having to do with the application of the laws of motion in the art of constructing or making things; of or pertaining to
Mind, vital, physical are properly instruments for the soul and spirit ; when they work for themselves then they produce ignorant and imperfect things — if they can be made into conscious instruments of the psychic and the spirit, then they get their own diviner fulfilment ; that Is the idea contained in what we call transformation in this yoga.
minstrelsy ::: n. --> The arts and occupation of minstrels; the singing and playing of a minstrel.
Musical instruments.
A collective body of minstrels, or musicians; also, a collective body of minstrels&
musical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to music; having the qualities of music; or the power of producing music; devoted to music; melodious; harmonious; as, musical proportion; a musical voice; musical instruments; a musical sentence; musical persons. ::: n. --> Music.
muyu. (J. mokugyo; K. mogo 木魚). In Chinese, literally "wooden fish"; referring to a wooden percussion instrument carved in the shape of a fish, which is commonly used in Chinese Buddhist monasteries to summon monks and nuns to daily events and to mark time during rituals. It is one of the four percussion instruments (see DRUM), together with the Brahmā bell, dharma drum, and cloud-shaped gong. Various explanations are given for its fish-like shape. According to the BAIZHANG QINGGUI ("Baizhang's Rules of Purity"), since a fish's eyes are never closed, the wooden fish is a subtle admonition to monks and nuns to remain ever vigilant about their practice. The TIANTAI monastic code, Jiaoyuan Qinggui ("Rules of Purity for the Garden of the Teachings"), includes a story said to come from the ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBHĀsĀ, about a monk who had been reborn as a fish with a tree growing out of his back, which was retribution for betraying his teacher and slandering the dharma in a prior lifetime. Whenever the tree swayed, the fish bled and felt great pain. One day, the monk's former teacher was crossing the sea in a boat and, seeing the fish, recognized it to be his former student. He performed the "rite of water and land" (C. SHUILU HUI), freeing the fish from its torment, and the fish repented for its past behavior. When his former student was again reborn, the tree was donated to a monastery, which carved it into the shape of a fish as a symbol of admonition. In a third story from a different source, the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG was returning home from India and saved a wealthy man's three-year-old son from the stomach of a big fish. The man wanted to repay him for his deed, so Xuanzang instructed him to have a piece of wood carved in the shape of a fish and hung in the monastery for the benefit of the fish. Over time, the body depicted on the wooden fish began to take on more the look of a dragon, autochthonous water divinities in traditional China, with a dragon-like head with a talismanic pearl (MAnI) in its mouth. In Korea, the muyu takes on the more abstract fish shape of the MOKT'AK (wooden clacker).
nabich'um. (). In Korean, "butterfly dance," a CHAKPoP ritual dance usually performed by Buddhist nuns during Korean Buddhist rituals, such as the YoNGSANJAE. This dance is typically performed outdoors in the central campus of a monastery and is often accompanied by ritual chanting (PoMP'AE; C. FANBAI) and traditional musical instruments. The pomp'ae chant requests the three jewels (RATNATRAYA) and protecting dragons (NĀGA) to attend the ceremony. Generally, the nabich'um is performed by two or four nuns in long, white robes with floor-length sleeves and yellow conical hats, thus resembling butterflies. The dance expresses a desire to transform oneself so as to lead all sentient beings to enlightenment. Nabich'um is quite slow, with subdued movements, and is performed without the feet of the dancer moving more than a step away from where the dance began. Nabich'um may also be performed as part of an offering of incense and flowers carried out by the dancers. Nabich'um is also sometimes performed without musical accompaniment.
Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal ope- rations. Id the ancient tradition of Hatha Yoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hatha Yogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the ner- vous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called prana- yama, the control of the breath or vital power ; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Prdnayaina, for the Hatha Yogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature ; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity arc attained.
neginoth ::: n. pl. --> Stringed instruments.
nehiloth ::: n. pl. --> A term supposed to mean, perforated wind instruments of music, as pipes or flutes.
nn "tool, messaging" A {terminal based} program for reading {Usenet} {news} by Kim F. Storm "storm@texas.dk", Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark. nn lets you chooose {news groups} and articles to read and unsubscribe from news groups. It uses its own local database maintained by the nnmaster program. The {NNTP} support was designed and implemented by Ren'e Seindal, Institute of Datalogy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: "nn-bugs@dkuug.dk" (bugs, fixes, suggestions, etc.) {Usenet} newgroup: {news:news.software.nn}. {FAQ (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/by-newsgroup/news/news.software.nn.html)} (2017-10-27)
nn ::: (tool, messaging) A terminal based program for reading Usenet news by Kim F. Storm , Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark.nn lets you decide which of the many news groups you are interested in, and unsubscribe to those which don't interest you. nn lets you select articles to necessary information (this database is built and maintained by the nnmaster program).The NNTP support was designed and implemented by Ren'e Seindal, Institute of Datalogy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.E-mail: (bugs, fixes, suggestions, etc.)Usenet newgroup: news.software.nn. (1995-12-04)
nonetto ::: n. --> A composition for nine instruments, rarely for nine voices.
notary ::: n. --> One who records in shorthand what is said or done; as, the notary of an ecclesiastical body.
A public officer who attests or certifies deeds and other writings, or copies of them, usually under his official seal, to make them authentic, especially in foreign countries. His duties chiefly relate to instruments used in commercial transactions, such as protests of negotiable paper, ship&
OATH ::: Object-oriented Abstract Type Hierarchy, a class library for C++ from Texas Instruments.
OATH Object-oriented Abstract Type Hierarchy, a class library for C++ from {Texas Instruments}.
oboe ::: n. --> One of the higher wind instruments in the modern orchestra, yet of great antiquity, having a penetrating pastoral quality of tone, somewhat like the clarinet in form, but more slender, and sounded by means of a double reed; a hautboy.
observatory ::: n. --> A place or building for making observations on the heavenly bodies.
A building fitted with instruments for making systematic observations of any particular class or series of natural phenomena.
A place, as an elevated chamber, from which a view may be observed or commanded.
A lookout on a flank of a battery whence an officer
Obsession The act of besieging, or the state of being bothered or besieged by a foreign personality, especially by an evil spirit, before demonic possession. This condition is found among the sufferers from insanity, epilepsy, hysteria, drug addiction, dipsomania, severe asthmas, and mediumship; these sufferers are found to be suitable, negative instruments or vehicles through which disimbodied entities of strong desire can contact sensuous life. Sometimes, even where organic degeneration is found to be present, questions arise whether this is the cause or the effect of continued nervous and mental wrongs. These latter are striking evidence of the vexing or besieging influence which appears in varying degrees, of restlessness with inner tension, of clouded consciousness, inhibition of will, unusual irritability, vague fears, suicidal impulses, epileptic befogged states, and sudden impulsions, criminal and otherwise. In these disorders those afflicted, although karmically sensitive to psychic conditions and influences, often retain enough normal resistance against surrendering to abnormal control to account for the many-sided inner conflict of the siege. This subjective conflict is sometimes disclosed, as in a patient who, subject to attacks of impulsive violence, anticipates them and asks to be restrained. Thus, psychiatrists note that in the insane, the will power to resist wrongdoing is usually lost before moral judgment is gone. Sometimes the inner man knows that he is not sane and longs for help, but cannot make himself understood.
octet ::: n. --> A composition for eight parts, usually for eight solo instruments or voices.
on the satisfaction of cgo-dcsire or on the eating up of the fuel it embraces. It is a while flame, not a red one ; but white heat is not inferior to the red variety in its ardour. It is true that the psychic love does not usually get its full play in human rela- tions and human nature ; it finds the fullness of -its fire and ecstasy more easily when it is lifted towards the Divine. In the human relation the psychic love gets mixed up with other ele- ments which seek at once to use it and overshadow it. It gels an outlet for its o^vn full intensities only at rare moments. Other- wise it comes in only as an element, but even so it contributes all the higher things in a love fundamentally vital-— all the finer sweetness, tenderness, fidelity, self-giving, self-sacrifice, rcachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself, come from the psychic. If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, phj-sieal, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reflection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life.
operator ::: n. --> One who, or that which, operates or produces an effect.
One who performs some act upon the human body by means of the hand, or with instruments.
A dealer in stocks or any commodity for speculative purposes; a speculator.
The symbol that expresses the operation to be performed; -- called also facient.
optician ::: a. --> One skilled in optics.
One who deals in optical glasses and instruments.
orchestra ::: a group of performers on various musical instruments, playing music as symphonies, operas, or other musical compositions. orchestral.
orchestrion ::: n. --> A large music box imitating a variety of orchestral instruments.
organic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an organ or its functions, or to objects composed of organs; consisting of organs, or containing them; as, the organic structure of animals and plants; exhibiting characters peculiar to living organisms; as, organic bodies, organic life, organic remains. Cf. Inorganic.
Produced by the organs; as, organic pleasure.
Instrumental; acting as instruments of nature or of art to a certain destined function or end.
organ trio: in jazz or rock, a group of three musicians which includes a Hammond organ player and two other instruments, often an electric guitar player and a drummer.
passion-flower ::: any of various climbing, tendril-bearing, chiefly tropical American vines of the genus Passiflora, having large showy flowers with a fringelike crown and a conspicuous stalk that bears the stamens and pistil, with some varieties yielding a delicious fruit. [From the resemblance of its parts to the instruments of the Passion.]
PC-Scheme Version 3.03 compiler, debugger, profiler, editor, libraries {(ftp://altdorf.ai.mit.edu/archive/pc-scheme/)}. Written at {Texas Instruments}. Runs on {MS-DOS} 286/386 IBM PCs and compatibles. Includes an optimising compiler, an emacs-like editor, inspector, debugger, performance testing, foreign function interface, window system and an object-oriented subsystem. Also supports the dialect used in {Hal Abelson} and {Gerald Sussman}'s {SICP}. Conformance: Revised^3 Report, also supports dialect used in SICP. restriction: official version is $95, contact "rww@ibuki.com" ports: MS-DOS See also {PCS/Geneva}. (1992-02-23)
PC-Scheme ::: Version 3.03compiler, debugger, profiler, editor, libraries .Written at Texas Instruments. Runs on MS-DOS 286/386 IBM PCs and compatibles. Includes an optimising compiler, an emacs-like editor, inspector, debugger, object-oriented subsystem. Also supports the dialect used in Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman's SICP.Conformance: Revised^3 Report, also supports dialect used in SICP.restriction: official version is $95, contact ports: MS-DOSSee also PCS/Geneva. (1992-02-23)
Peratae (Latin) Peratai (Greek) One of the Gnostic bodies or associations, the Naaseni or Ophites, the “Serpent Gnostics,” so called because of the mystical prominence of the serpent symbol in their rites and observances. This Gnostic body is said by scholars to have been founded by Euphrates, who possessed wide astrological knowledge, and because of the teachings which his school followed were they named Peratai — wanderers, i.e., on this earth of trial and tribulation; or “those of the other side,” signifying individuals who regarded themselves as merely wanderers or pilgrims in regions far from their native home, the spirit. Among other ideas, they held that the celestial bodies in a person’s horoscope are the instruments of destiny or karma, which because of causes engendered in other lives bring the individuals to birth on this earth under the destined yoke marked in the celestial spaces by the sun, moon, and planets; and in order to protect themselves from the malignant influence of the genii of the planets they wore serpent sigils or talismans. C. W. King states that the Ophites were the descendants of the Bacchic Mystae, basing this on the fact that coins of the period bear the Bacchic serpent, which is represented as raising himself out of the sacred coffer, while the reverse side of the coin shows two serpents entwined around torches (Gnostics and Their Remains 225).
pieno ::: a. --> Full; having all the instruments.
plectrum ::: n. --> A small instrument of ivory, wood, metal, or quill, used in playing upon the lyre and other stringed instruments.
ploughbote ::: n. --> Wood or timber allowed to a tenant for the repair of instruments of husbandry. See Bote.
Policy instruments - The variables that the government can control directly to achieve its policy objectives.
Pragmatic Realism: The doctrine that knowledge comes by way of action, that to know is to act by hypotheses which result in successful adaption or resolve practical difficulties. According to pragmatic realism, the mind is not outside the realm of nature; in experience the organism and the world are at one; the theories of knowledge which follow the alleged dualism between the objective and subjective worlds are false. Ideas and knowledge are instruments for activity and not spectators of an outside realm. -- V.F.
prarabdha (karma) ::: mechanical action of the instruments of the prakrti continuing by force of old impulsion and habit or continued initiation of past energy.
probe-pointed ::: a. --> Having a blunt or button-shaped extremity; -- said of cutting instruments.
Process Design Language 2 ::: (language) (PDL2) A language developed for the Texas Instruments ASC computer.[Texas Instruments Process Design Methodology - Design Specification: Process Design Language, Volume I (Sep 1976)].[Mentioned in An Overview of Ada J.G.P. Barnes, Soft Prac & Exp 10:851-887 (1995-08-13)
Process Design Language 2 "language" (PDL2) A language developed for the {Texas Instruments} {ASC} computer. ["Texas Instruments Process Design Methodology - Design Specification: Process Design Language", Volume I (Sep 1976)]. [Mentioned in "An Overview of Ada" J.G.P. Barnes, Soft Prac & Exp 10:851-887 (1980)]. (1995-08-13)
quintette ::: n. --> A composition for five voices or instruments; also, the set of five persons who sing or play five-part music.
Range ::: refers to the difference between the low and high prices for a security or index over a specific time period. Range defines the price spread for a defined period, such as a day, month or year, and indicates the security’s price volatility. The more volatile the security or index, the wider the range. The range expands over greater time periods; a security’s daily range is typically smaller than its 52-week range, which in turn is tighter than its five-year or 10-year range. Technical analysts closely follow ranges since they are useful in pinpointing entry and exit points for trades. Investors and traders may refer to a range, as a price range or trading range. BREAKING DOWN 'Range' The range depends on the type of security; and for a stock, the sector in which it operates. For example, the range for fixed-income instruments is much tighter than that for commodities and equities, which are more volatile in price. Even for fixed-income instruments, a Treasury bond or government security typically has a smaller trading range than a junk bond or convertible security. Many factors affect a security’s price, and hence its range. Macroeconomic factors such as the economic cycle and interest rates have a significant bearing on the price of securities over lengthy time periods. A recession, for instance, can dramatically widen the price range for most equities as they plunge in price. For example, most technology stocks had wide price ranges between 1998 to 2002, as they soared to lofty levels in the first half of that period and then slumped – many to single-digit prices – in the aftermath of the dotcom bust. Similarly, the 2007-08 financial crisis considerably widened the trading range for equities due to the broad correction that saw most indices plunge over 50% in price. Stock ranges have narrowed significantly since the Great Recession as volatility has reduced during a nine-year bull market. Ranges and Volatility Since price volatility is equivalent to risk, a security’s trading range is a good indicator of risk. A conservative investor prefers securities with smaller price fluctuations compared to securities that are susceptible to significant gyrations. Such an investor may prefer to invest in more stable sectors like utilities, healthcare and telecommunications, rather than in more cyclical (or high-beta) sectors like financials, technology and commodities. Generally speaking, high-beta sectors may have wider ranges than low-beta sectors. Range Support and Resistance A security's range can effectively highlight support and resistance levels. If the bottom of a stock's range has been around $10 on a number of occasions spanning many months or years, then the $10 region would be considered an area of strong support. If the stock breaks below that level (especially on heavy volume), traders interpret it as a bearish signal. Conversely, a breakout above a price that has marked the top of the range on numerous occasions is considered as a breach of resistance and provides a bullish signal. (To learn more, see: How do I Effectively Create a Range-Bound Trading Strategy?)
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal ::: (humour) Back in the good old days - the Golden Era of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called Real Men and out that Real Men don't relate to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.)But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computers in their microwave ovens, 12-year-old kids can blow danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with TRASH-80s.There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. If this difference is why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12-year-old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings).LANGUAGESThe easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use Fortran. Quiche Eaters use need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done - they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a Fortran IV compiler, and a beer.Real Programmers do List Processing in Fortran.Real Programmers do String Manipulation in Fortran.Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in Fortran.Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in Fortran.If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.STRUCTURED PROGRAMMINGThe academics in computer science have gotten into the structured programming rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily in the world won't help you solve a problem like that - it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming:Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTOs.Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused.Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements - they make the code more interesting.Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious.Since Fortran doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using assigned GOTOs.Data Structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name.OPERATING SYSTEMSWhat kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid - CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M.Unix is a lot more complicated of course - the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week - but when it gets right systems: they send jokes around the world on UUCP-net and write adventure games and research papers.No, your Real Programmer uses OS 370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte core dump without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.)OS is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS 370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were mistaken.PROGRAMMING TOOLSWhat kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymore, needless to say, is a Real Programmer.One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day he got a long distance call from a user whose system had includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies.In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn't contain a system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems - Emacs and VI being two. The the Real Programmer wants a you asked for it, you got it text editor - complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary object Programmer to do the job - no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called job security.Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers:Fortran preprocessors like MORTRAN and RATFOR. The Cuisinarts of programming - great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming.Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps.Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient.Source code maintenance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5].THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORKWhere does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no Real or sorting mailing lists for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!).Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers.Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions.It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies.Real Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles.Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or a Pascal programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government - mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.The Real Programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing Fortran, so there are a fair number of people doing graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs.THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAYGenerally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing Real Programmers away from the computer room:At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it.At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper.At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand.At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying Poor George, he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time.THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITATWhat sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it's best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done.The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are:Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office.Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush.Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages.Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calendar for the year 1969.Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars - the type that are made pre-stale at the bakery so they can't get any worse while waiting in the vending machine.Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double-stuff Oreos for special occasions.Underneath the Oreos is a flowcharting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintenance people.)The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general:No Real Programmer works 9 to 5 (unless it's the ones at night).Real Programmers don't wear neckties.Real Programmers don't wear high-heeled shoes.Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch [9].A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife's name. He does, however, know the entire ASCII (or EBCDIC) code table.Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't open at three in the morning. Real Programmers survive on Twinkies and coffee.THE FUTUREWhat of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same ever learning Fortran! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers?From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS 370 nor Fortran show any signs of dying out, one of them has a way of converting itself back into a Fortran 66 compiler at the drop of an option card - to compile DO loops like God meant them to be.Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real in - like having the best parts of Fortran and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal "humour" Back in the good old days - the "Golden Era" of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that didn't. A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers - they're so impersonal". (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate" to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.) But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computers in their microwave ovens, 12-year-old kids can blow Real Men out of the water playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and even understand their very own Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with {TRASH-80s}. There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. If this difference is made clear, it will give these kids something to aspire to -- a role model, a Father Figure. It will also help explain to the employers of Real Programmers why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12-year-old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings). LANGUAGES The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use {Fortran}. Quiche Eaters use {Pascal}. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked how to pronounce his name. He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the {IBM 370} {Fortran-G} and H compilers. Real programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done - they are perfectly happy with a {keypunch}, a {Fortran IV} {compiler}, and a beer. Real Programmers do List Processing in Fortran. Real Programmers do String Manipulation in Fortran. Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in Fortran. Real Programmers do {Artificial Intelligence} programs in Fortran. If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in {assembly language}. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING The academics in computer science have gotten into the "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another - clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000-line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000-line Fortran program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that - it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming: Real Programmers aren't afraid to use {GOTOs}. Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused. Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements - they make the code more interesting. Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 {nanoseconds} in the middle of a tight loop. Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious. Since Fortran doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using {assigned GOTOs}. Data Structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater) actually wrote an entire book [2] contending that you could write a program based on data structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the Array. Strings, lists, structures, sets - these are all special cases of arrays and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name. OPERATING SYSTEMS What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid - CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M. Unix is a lot more complicated of course - the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week - but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on {UUCP}-net and write adventure games and research papers. No, your Real Programmer uses OS 370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all. A truly outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte {core dump} without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.) OS is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS 370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were mistaken. PROGRAMMING TOOLS What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory - it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten.) Legend has it that {Seymore Cray}, inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data's computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymore, needless to say, is a Real Programmer. One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. The moral of this story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies. In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this situation has to do his work with a "text editor" program. Most systems supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse. Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems - {Emacs} and {VI} being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise. It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine. For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary {object code} directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original Fortran code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job - no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called "job security". Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers: Fortran preprocessors like {MORTRAN} and {RATFOR}. The Cuisinarts of programming - great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming. Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps. Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient. Source code maintenance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5]. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK Where does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no Real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in {COBOL}, or sorting {mailing lists} for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!). Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers. Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions. It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. Real Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles. Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based Fortran programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation - hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter. The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or a Pascal programmer) for navigation to these tolerances. As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government - mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, however, a black cloud has formed on the Real Programmer horizon. It seems that some highly placed Quiche Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense programs should be written in some grand unified language called "ADA" ((C), DoD). For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming - a language with structure, a language with data types, {strong typing}, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough interesting features to make it approachable -- it's incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn't like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I'm sure you know, was the author of "GoTos Considered Harmful" - a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language. The Real Programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing there's enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them - a Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challenge in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for computer graphics yet. On the other hand, all computer graphics is done in Fortran, so there are a fair number of people doing graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud). Occasionally, the Real Programmer does step out of the office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing Real Programmers away from the computer room: At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it. At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper. At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand. At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying "Poor George, he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary." In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time. THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it's best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done. The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are: Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office. Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush. Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages. Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calendar for the year 1969. Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars - the type that are made pre-stale at the bakery so they can't get any worse while waiting in the vending machine. Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double-stuff Oreos for special occasions. Underneath the Oreos is a flowcharting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintenance people.) The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn't bother the Real Programmer - it gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general: No Real Programmer works 9 to 5 (unless it's the ones at night). Real Programmers don't wear neckties. Real Programmers don't wear high-heeled shoes. Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch [9]. A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife's name. He does, however, know the entire {ASCII} (or EBCDIC) code table. Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't open at three in the morning. Real Programmers survive on Twinkies and coffee. THE FUTURE What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these days are soft - protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and "user friendly" operating systems. Worst of all, some of these alleged "computer scientists" manage to get degrees without ever learning Fortran! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers? From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS 370 nor Fortran show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like adding structured coding constructs to Fortran have failed. Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with Fortran 77 compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself back into a Fortran 66 compiler at the drop of an option card - to compile DO loops like God meant them to be. Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real Programmer - two different and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and complicated teletype driver, virtual memory. If you ignore the fact that it's "structured", even 'C' programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there's no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in - like having the best parts of Fortran and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for
REASON. ::: The reason has its place especially with regard to certain physical things and general worldly questions — though even there it is a very fallible judge — or in the forma- tion of metaphysical conclusions and generalisations ; but its claim to be the decisive aulhori^ in matters of yoga or in spiritual things is untenable. The activities of the outward intellect there lead only to the formation of personal opinions, not to the discovery of Truth. It has always been understood in India that the reason and its logic or its judgment cannot give you the realisation of spiiitua] truths but can only assist in an intellectual presentation of ideas; realisation comes by intuition and inner experience. Reason and intellectuality cannot make you see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted to them by the soul and welcome and rejoice in it. But also the mind may prevent it or at least stand long in the way of the realisation of the vision. For its prepossessions. prKonceived
recording ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Record ::: a. --> Keeping a record or a register; as, a recording secretary; -- applied to numerous instruments with an automatic appliance which makes a record of their action; as, a recording gauge or telegraph.
registering ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Register ::: a. --> Recording; -- applied to instruments; having an apparatus which registers; as, a registering thermometer. See Recording.
reins ::: n. 1. Long narrow leather straps attached to each end of the bit of a bridle and used by a rider or driver to control a horse or other animal. 2. Fig. Controlling, guiding or governing powers. 3. The means or instruments by which power is exercised. adj. swift-reined. *v. rein. 4. To restrain or control. *reined.
Religion does that to man in the name of the Divine, in the name of God. The worst possible evil is enacted and that is because people sincerely believe they are instruments of light when they have actually become instruments of darkness.”
resonance ::: n. --> The act of resounding; the quality or state of being resonant.
A prolongation or increase of any sound, either by reflection, as in a cavern or apartment the walls of which are not distant enough to return a distinct echo, or by the production of vibrations in other bodies, as a sounding-board, or the bodies of musical instruments.
ripieno ::: a. --> Filling up; supplementary; supernumerary; -- a term applied to those instruments which only swell the mass or tutti of an orchestra, but are not obbligato.
Risk_tolerance ::: is the degree of variability in investment returns that an investor is willing to withstand. Risk tolerance is an important component in investing. You should have a realistic understanding of your ability and willingness to stomach large swings in the value of your investments; if you take on too much risk, you might panic and sell at the wrong time. BREAKING DOWN 'Risk Tolerance' Risk tolerance assessments for investors abound, including risk-related surveys or questionnaires. As an investor, you may also want to review historical worst-case returns for different asset classes to get an idea of how much money you would feel comfortable losing if your investments have a bad year or bad series of years. Other factors affecting risk tolerance are the time horizon you have to invest, your future earning capacity, and the presence of other assets such as a home, pension, Social Security or an inheritance. In general, you can take greater risk with investable assets when you have other, more stable sources of funds available. Aggressive Risk Tolerance Aggressive investors tend to be market-savvy. A deep understanding of securities and their propensities allows such individuals and institutional investors to purchase highly volatile instruments, such as small company stocks that can plummet to zero or options contracts that can expire worthless. While maintaining a base of riskless securities, aggressive investors reach for maximum returns with maximum risk.
Rupa-devas (Sanskrit) Rūpa-deva-s [from rūpa form + deva divinity] Celestial beings having form; that class of celestial beings or lower dhyani-chohans still having forms who “are the intelligent Rulers of this world of Matter, and who, with all this intelligence are but the blindly obedient instruments of the One; the active agents of a Passive Principle” (ML 107-8). These rupa-devas have completed their cycling as monads in the human stage and have graduated into the class next superior to mankind. See also ARUPA-DEVAS
saktiriti (shaktiriti) ::: sakti (the power of the instruments) consists of. . . .
saxhorn ::: n. --> A name given to a numerous family of brass wind instruments with valves, invented by Antoine Joseph Adolphe Sax (known as Adolphe Sax), of Belgium and Paris, and much used in military bands and in orchestras.
SCOOPS ::: Scheme Object-Oriented Programming System. Developed at Texas Instruments in 1986. It supports multiple inheritance and class variables. . (1994-11-01)
SCOOPS Scheme Object-Oriented Programming System. Developed at {Texas Instruments} in 1986. It supports {multiple inheritance} and {class variables}. {(ftp://altdorf.ai.mit.edu/archive/scheme-library/unsupported/CScheme)}. (1994-11-01)
SCPI Consortium ::: (body) A body established to promote Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments.Address: 8380 Hercules Drive, Suite P3, La Mesa, CA 91942, USA. . Address: ACEA, P.O. Box 134, 7640 AC Wierden The Netherlands. Telephone: +31 546 577 994. E-mail: . (1999-01-05)
SCPI Consortium "body" A body established to promote {Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments}. Address: 8380 Hercules Drive, Suite P3, La Mesa, CA 91942, USA. {SCPI in Europe (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/acea/scpi_uk.htm)}. Address: ACEA, P.O. Box 134, 7640 AC Wierden The Netherlands. Telephone: +31 546 577 994. E-mail: "ACEA@compuserve.com". (1999-01-05)
SCPI {Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments}
sealer ::: n. --> One who seals; especially, an officer whose duty it is to seal writs or instruments, to stamp weights and measures, or the like.
A mariner or a vessel engaged in the business of capturing seals.
seismometric ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to seismometry, or seismometer; as, seismometric instruments; seismometric measurements.
self-knowledge ::: knowing of oneself, without help from another.
Sri Aurobindo: The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate. *The Life Divine
"Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.” The Life Divine
"The Truth-Consciousness is everywhere present in the universe as an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity.” The Life Divine
senza ::: prep. --> Without; as, senza stromenti, without instruments.
septette ::: n. --> A set of seven persons or objects; as, a septet of singers.
A musical composition for seven instruments or seven voices; -- called also septuor.
sestet ::: n. --> A piece of music composed for six voices or six instruments; a sextet; -- called also sestuor.
The last six lines of a sonnet.
shake: a jazz term describing a trill between one note and its minor third; or, with brass instruments, between a note and its next overblown harmonic.
Sod occurs frequently in the Old Testament, translated as secret or assembly, where Mysteries would be a more correct rendering: e.g., “Jacob called unto his sons, and said . . . Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. . . . come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly” (Genesis 49:1, 5-6). The Bible is “a series of historical records of the great struggle between white and black Magic, between the Adepts of the right path, the Prophets, and those of the left, the Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. . . . The great schism that arose between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of ‘the Sons of God,’ is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two schools of Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob” (SD 2:211).
sonata ::: n. --> An extended composition for one or two instruments, consisting usually of three or four movements; as, Beethoven&
song: A lyric poem, with several duplicated stanzas or refrains, written to be set to music in either vocal performance or with accompaniment of musical instruments.
SOUL. ::: Soul is something of the Divine that descends into evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the IgnoraR<% into the Light. It deve- lops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments, it is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates ; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolu- tion of the individual.
soul ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The word ‘soul", as also the word ‘psychic", is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not, in ordinary parlance, no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire — the false soul or desire-soul — is intended by the words ‘soul" and ‘psychic" and not the true soul, the psychic being.” *Letters on Yoga
"The word soul is very vaguely used in English — as it often refers to the whole non-physical consciousness including even the vital with all its desires and passions. That was why the word psychic being has to be used so as to distinguish this divine portion from the instrumental parts of the nature.” *Letters on Yoga
"The word soul has various meanings according to the context; it may mean the Purusha supporting the formation of Prakriti, which we call a being, though the proper word would be rather a becoming; it may mean, on the other hand, specifically the psychic being in an evolutionary creature like man; it may mean the spark of the Divine which has been put into Matter by the descent of the Divine into the material world and which upholds all evolving formations here.” *Letters on Yoga
"A distinction has to be made between the soul in its essence and the psychic being. Behind each and all there is the soul which is the spark of the Divine — none could exist without that. But it is quite possible to have a vital and physical being supported by such a soul essence but without a clearly evolved psychic being behind it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The soul and the psychic being are practically the same, except that even in things which have not developed a psychic being, there is still a spark of the Divine which can be called the soul. The psychic being is called in Sanskrit the Purusha in the heart or the Chaitya Purusha. (The psychic being is the soul developing in the evolution.)” *Letters on Yoga
"The soul or spark is there before the development of an organised vital and mind. The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light. It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments. It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.” *Letters on Yoga
". . . for the soul is seated within and impervious to the shocks of external events. . . .” *Essays on the Gita
". . . the soul is at first but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when there is a formed psychic being able to express itself with some directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller portion of the being — ‘no bigger in the mass of the body than the thumb of a man" was the image used by the ancient seers — and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity or ignorant smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and not a fraction of Nature.” The Life Divine
"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” The Life Divine
*Soul, soul"s, Soul"s, souls, soulless, soul-bridals, soul-change, soul-force, Soul-Forces, soul-ground, soul-joy, soul-nature, soul-range, soul-ray, soul-scapes, soul-scene, soul-sense, soul-severance, soul-sight, soul-slaying, soul-space,, soul-spaces, soul-strength, soul-stuff, soul-truth, soul-vision, soul-wings, world-soul, World-Soul.
sounding-board ::: n. --> A thin board which propagates the sound in a piano, in a violin, and in some other musical instruments.
A board or structure placed behind or over a pulpit or rostrum to give distinctness to a speaker&
spiccato: distinct, separated; i.e., a way of playing the violin and other bowed instruments by bouncing the bow on the string, giving a characteristic staccato effect
Sri Aurobindo: "The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life"s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: “There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life’s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments "standard" (SCPI) A standard complementing {IEEE 488}, developed by {Hewlett-Packard} and promoted by the {SCPI Consortium}. (1994-11-01)
Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments ::: (standard) (SCPI) A standard complementing IEEE 488, developed by Hewlett-Packard and promoted by the SCPI Consortium. (1994-11-01)
Standard Instrument Control Library (SICL) A {platform}-independent {API} for software to control and test electronic instruments conforming to {IEEE 488}. (1995-01-05)
Standard Instrument Control Library ::: (SICL) A platform-independent API for software to control and test electronic instruments conforming to IEEE 488. (1995-01-05)
string ::: 1. Any series of things arranged or connected in a line or following closely one after another. 2. The vibrating element that produces sound in string instruments and is composed of lengths of a flexible material kept under tension so that they may vibrate freely, but controllably, made of gut, fibre, wire, etc. 3. Slender cords or thick threads used for binding or tying; lines or something resembling this. Also fig. **strings, heart-strings, heart-strings", apron strings (see apron).**
" Suffering is not inflicted as a punishment for sin or for hostility — that is a wrong idea. Suffering comes like pleasure and good fortune as an inevitable part of life in the ignorance. The dualities of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, good fortune and ill-fortune are the inevitable results of the ignorance which separates us from our true consciousness and from the Divine. Only by coming back to it can we get rid of suffering. Karma from the past lives exists, much of what happens is due to it, but not all. For we can mend our karma by our own consciousness and efforts. But the suffering is simply a natural consequence of past errors, not a punishment, just as a burn is the natural consequence of playing with fire. It is part of the experience by which the soul through its instruments learns and grows until it is ready to turn to the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
“ Suffering is not inflicted as a punishment for sin or for hostility—that is a wrong idea. Suffering comes like pleasure and good fortune as an inevitable part of life in the ignorance. The dualities of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, good fortune and ill-fortune are the inevitable results of the ignorance which separates us from our true consciousness and from the Divine. Only by coming back to it can we get rid of suffering. Karma from the past lives exists, much of what happens is due to it, but not all. For we can mend our karma by our own consciousness and efforts. But the suffering is simply a natural consequence of past errors, not a punishment, just as a burn is the natural consequence of playing with fire. It is part of the experience by which the soul through its instruments learns and grows until it is ready to turn to the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
tackle ::: n. --> Apparatus for raising or lowering heavy weights, consisting of a rope and pulley blocks; sometimes, the rope and attachments, as distinct from the block.
Any instruments of action; an apparatus by which an object is moved or operated; gear; as, fishing tackle, hunting tackle; formerly, specifically, weapons.
The rigging and apparatus of a ship; also, any purchase where more than one block is used.
tackling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Tackle ::: n. --> Furniture of the masts and yards of a vessel, as cordage, sails, etc.
Instruments of action; as, fishing tackling.
The straps and fixures adjusted to an animal, by which he
Tangible User Interface ::: (interface) An attempt to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible by people. Tangible Interfaces instruments) and ambient media (e.g. light, sound, airflow, water-flow, kinetic sculpture) within physical environments. .(2003-10-17)
Tangible User Interface "interface" An attempt to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible by people. Tangible Interfaces will make bits accessible through augmented physical surfaces (e.g. walls, desktops, ceilings, windows), graspable objects (e.g. building blocks, models, instruments) and ambient media (e.g. light, sound, airflow, water-flow, kinetic sculpture) within physical environments. {MIT Tangible Media Group (http://tangible.media.mit.edu/)}. (2003-10-17)
Taoism, however, became too mystical, and Confucianism too formalistic. "Hundred schools" grew and flourished, many in direct opposition to Taoism and Confucianism. There was Mohism (Mo, founded by Mo Tzu, between 500 and 396 B.C.) which rejected formalism in favor of "benefit" and "utility" which are to be promoted through universal love (chien ai), practical observation and application, and obedience to the will of Heaven. There was Neo-Mohism (Mo che, 300 B.C.) which, in trying to prove the thesis of Mohism, developed an intricate system of logic. There was Sophism (ming chia, 400 B.C.) which displayed much sophistry about terms and concepts, particularly about the relationship between substance and quality (chien pai). There was Legalism (fa chia, 500-200 B.C.) which advocated law, statecraft, and authority as effective instruments of government. finally, there was the Yin Yang school (400-200 B.C.) which emphasized yin and yang as the two fundamental principles, always contrasting but complementary, and underlying all conceivable objects, qualities, situations, and relationships. It was this school that provided a common ground for the fusion of ancient divergent philosophical tendencies in medieval China.
tease ::: v. t. --> To comb or card, as wool or flax.
To stratch, as cloth, for the purpose of raising a nap; teasel.
To tear or separate into minute shreds, as with needles or similar instruments.
To vex with importunity or impertinence; to harass, annoy, disturb, or irritate by petty requests, or by jests and raillery; to plague.
Telepathy [from Greek tele far off, at a distance + pathos feeling] The transference of thought or feeling from mind to mind independently of ordinary modes of communication. This very interesting and common fact may be noted as not only existing between human beings, and humans and animals, but likewise between animals and insects — the last being one of the commonest phenomena of natural history — and in the plant kingdom. People have always known that they talk to each other through the air, or through air vibrations, and that these strike the ear and are conveyed to the brain. The notion of transference from one mind to another across a distance is a physical conception, and its applicability to minds is questionable. Mind can hardly be regarded as physical, and though our brains are physical and separated by distances, the mind is not synonymous with the brain, for if it were telepathy would be impossible because brain does not physically touch brain in the transference of thought, therefore it is not brains which send and receive except as instruments, but it is minds which touch or interpenetrate along the inner planes.
Texas Instruments ::: (company) (TI) A US electronics company.A TI engineer, Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958. Three TI employees left the company in 1982 to start Compaq.The COOL and OATH C++ class libraries were developed at TI, as were PDL2 and the ASC computer, PC-Scheme and Texas Instruments Pascal. . (1994-09-26)
Texas Instruments "company" (TI) A US electronics company. A TI engineer, {Jack Kilby} invented the {integrated circuit} in 1958. Three TI employees left the company in 1982 to start {Compaq}. The {COOL} and {OATH} {C++} {class} libraries were developed at TI, as were {PDL2} and the {ASC} computer, {PC-Scheme} and {Texas Instruments Pascal}. {(ftp://ti.com/)}. (1994-09-26)
The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Sbakti, Shraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments. The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things and happenings is n support and background to existence, a silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme ::: it is not itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit. Superior to all activi- ties and not bound by any of them, it is the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all activities. All activities proceed from this supreme Self and are determined by it ; all are its operations, processes of its own conscious force and not ot something alien to Self, some power other than this Spirit.
The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or
reference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments. The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things and happenings is a support and background to existence, a silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme: it is not itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit. Superior to all activities and not bound by any of them, it is the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all activities. All activities proceed from this supreme Self and are determined by it; all are its operations, processes of its own conscious force and not of something alien to Self, some power other than the Spirit. In these activities is expressed the conscious Will or Shakti of the Spirit moved to manifest its being in infinite ways, a Will or Power not ignorant but at one with its own self-knowledge and its knowledge of all that it is put out to express. And of this Power a secret spiritual will and soul-faith in us, the dominant hidden force of our nature, is the individual instrument, more nearly in communication with the Supreme, a surer guide and enlightener, could we once get at it and hold it, because profounder and more intimately near to the Identical and Absolute than the surface activities of our thought powers. To know that will in ourselves and in the universe and follow it to its divine finalities, whatever these may be, must surely be the highest way and truest culmination for knowledge as for works, for the seeker in life and for the seeker in Yoga.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 289-90
"The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate. The Life Divine
The psychic part oS us is something that comes direct from the Divine and is in touch with the Divine. In its origin Jt is the nucleus pregnant with divine possibilities that supports this lower triple ma^estation of mind, life and body. There is this divine element in all living beings, but it stands bidden behind the ordinary cemsdousness, is not at first developed and, even when developed, is not always or often in the front ; it expresses itself so far as the imperfection of the instruments anon’s, by their means and imdcr their limitations. It grows in the cons- ciousness by Godward experience, gaining strength every time there is a Wgher movement in us, and, finally, by the accumu- lation of these deeper and higher movements, there is developed a psychic individuality, — that which we call usually the psychic being, ft is afways tius p^-chic hem? ffcif £f c&e reaf, often the secret cause of man’s turning to the spiritual life and his greatest help in it.
..the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functioning of the body must be among the ultimate results of a supramental change.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 330 ::: .Supraphysical Worlds ::: This organisation includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance, but a substance other than ours, a subtle substance tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter. These worlds and beings may have nothing to do with ourselves and our life, they may exercise no action upon us; but often also they enter into secret communication with earth-existence, obey or embody and are the intermediaries and instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we have a subjective experience, or themselves act by their own initiation upon the terrestrial world’s life and motives and happenings. It is possible to receive help or guidance or harm or misguidance from these beings; it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either character, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those that strive to deflect, depress or prevent or even shatter our upward evolution or the soul’s self-expression in the material universe. Some of these Beings, Powers or Forces are such that we think of them as divine; they are luminous, benignant or powerfully helpful: there are others that are Titanic, gigantic or demoniac, inordinate Influences, instigators or creators often of vast and formidable inner upheavals or of actions that overpass the normal human measure. There may also be an awareness of influences, presences, beings that do not seem to belong to other worlds beyond us but are here as a hidden element behind the veil in terrestrial nature. As contact with the supraphysical is possible, a contact can also take place subjective or objective—or at least objectivised— between our own consciousness and the consciousness of other once embodied beings who have passed into a supraphysical status in these other regions of existence. It is possible also to pass beyond a subjective contact or a subtle-sense perception and, in certain subliminal states of consciousness, to enter actually into other worlds and know something of their secrets. It is the more objective order of other-worldly experience that seized most the imagination of mankind in the past, but it was put by popular belief into a gross-objective statement which unduly assimilated these phenomena to those of the physical world with which we are familiar; for it is the normal tendency of our mind to turn everything into forms or symbols proper to its own kind and terms of experience.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22 Page: 806-07
The soul, on the contrary, is something. that comes down into birth and passes through death — although it does not itself die, for it is immortal — from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth'cxisteoce. ft goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolu- tion which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that sup- ports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil showing something of its divine self only in so far as the imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, take command and turn all the instru- mental nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human — it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. _ ,
“The soul or spark is there before the development of an organised vital and mind. The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light. It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments. It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.” Letters on Yoga
timbre ::: n. --> See 1st Timber.
The crest on a coat of arms.
The quality or tone distinguishing voices or instruments; tone color; clang tint; as, the timbre of the voice; the timbre of a violin. See Tone, and Partial tones, under Partial.
timbre: the quality of a musical tone that distinguishes voices and instruments
TIP ::: 1. Texas Instruments Pascal.2. A Unix program for interactive communication via serial lines.Unix manual page: tip(1).
TIP 1. {Texas Instruments Pascal}. 2. A {Unix} program for interactive communication via {serial lines}. {Unix manual page}: tip(1).
TMS 9900 ::: (processor) One of the first true 16-bit microprocessors, released by Texas Instruments in June 1976 (the first are probably National Semiconductor General mN601 were both one chip versions of Data General's Nova. Unlike the IMS 6100, however, the TMS 9900 had a mature, well thought out design.It had a 15-bit address space and two internal 16 bit registers. One unique feature was that all user registers were actually kept in memory - this included CPUs which required dozens or more register saves before acknowledging a context switch.This was feasible at the time because RAM was often faster than the CPUs. A few modern designs, such as the INMOS transputer, use this same design using caches of the time, such as the 650x series had a similar philosophy, using index registers, but the TMS 9900 went the farthest in this direction.That wasn't the only positive feature of the chip. It had good interrupt handling features and very good instruction set. Serial I/O was available had smaller and faster programs. The only disadvantage was the small address space and need for fast RAM.Despite very poor support from Texas Instruments, the TMS 9900 had the potential at one point to surpass the Intel 8086 in popularity. (1994-11-30)
TMS 9900 "processor" One of the first true 16-bit {microprocessors}, released by {Texas Instruments} in June 1976 (the first are probably {National Semiconductor} {IMP-16} or {AMD-2901} {bit slice processors} in 16-bit configuration). It was designed as a single chip version of the {TI 990} {minicomputer} series, much like the {Intersil 6100} was a single chip {PDP-8}, and the {Fairchild 9440} and {Data General mN601} were both one chip versions of {Data General}'s {Nova}. Unlike the IMS 6100, however, the TMS 9900 had a mature, well thought out design. It had a 15-bit {address space} and two internal 16 bit {registers}. One unique feature was that all user {registers} were actually kept in memory - this included {stack pointers} and the {program counter}. A single workspace {register} pointed to the 16 {register set} in {RAM}, so when a subroutine was entered or an {interrupt} was processed, only the single workspace register had to be changed - unlike some {CPUs} which required dozens or more register saves before acknowledging a {context switch}. This was feasible at the time because {RAM} was often faster than the {CPUs}. A few modern designs, such as the {INMOS} {transputer}, use this same design using {caches} or {rotating buffers}, for the same reason of faster {context switch}es. Other chips of the time, such as the {650x} series had a similar philosophy, using {index registers}, but the TMS 9900 went the farthest in this direction. That wasn't the only positive feature of the chip. It had good {interrupt} handling features and very good instruction set. Serial I/O was available through address lines. In typical comparisons with the {Intel 8086}, the TMS9900 had smaller and faster programs. The only disadvantage was the small {address space} and need for fast {RAM}. Despite very poor support from Texas Instruments, the TMS 9900 had the potential at one point to surpass the {Intel 8086} in popularity. (1994-11-30)
Todaiji. (東大寺). In Japanese, "Great Monastery of the East"; a major monastery in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara affiliated with the Kegon (HUAYAN) school of Buddhism, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The monastery was founded by the Hossoshu (FAXIANG ZONG) monk GYoGI (668-749). The monastery is renowned for its colossal buddha image of VAIROCANA (J. Birushana nyorai), which is commonly known as the NARA DAIBUTSU; at forty-eight feet (fifteen meters) high, this image is the largest extant gilt-bronze image in the world and the Daibutsuden where the image is enshrined is the world's largest wooden building. The Indian monk BODHISENA (J. Bodaisenna) (704-760), who traveled to Japan in 736 at the invitation of Emperor Shomu (r. 724-749), performed the "opening the eyes" (KAIYAN; NETRAPRATIstHĀPANA) ceremony for the 752 dedication of the great buddha image. Todaiji was founded on the site of Konshusenji by order of Emperor Shomu and became the headquarters of a network of provincial monasteries and convents in the Yamato region. The first abbot, Ryoben (689-773), is commemorated in the kaisando (founder's hall; see KAISHAN). Other halls include the inner sanctuary of the hokkedo (lotus hall), which was probably once Konshusenji's main hall. The hall enshrines the Fukukensaku Kannon, a dry lacquer statue of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA, which dates from 746. The monastery was renamed Konkomyoji in 741 and, in 747 when major construction began on the large compound, it finally became known as Todaiji, the name it retains today. The Todaiji complex was completed in 798; monastery records state that 50,000 carpenters, 370,000 metal workers, and 2.18 million laborers worked on the compound, its buildings, and their furnishings, almost bankrupting the country. Entering the monastery through the Great Gate to the South (Nandaimon), itself a Japanese national treasure, a visitor would have passed through two seven-storied, 328-foot high pagodas to the east and west (both subsequently destroyed by earthquakes), before passing through the Inner Gate to the Daibutsuden. North of the Daibutsuden, which is flanked by a belfry and a SuTRA repository, is the kodo (lecture hall), which is surrounded on three sides by the monk's quarters. An ordination hall displays exceptional clay-modeled shitenno (four heavenly kings; see LOKAPĀLA) dating from the Tenpyo Era (729-749). Of the eighth-century buildings, only the tegaimon (the western gate) and the Hokkedo's inner sanctuary have survived. After a conflagration in 1180, then-abbot Chogen (1121-1206) spearheaded a major reconstruction in a style he had seen in Southern Song-dynasty China. This style is exemplified by the south gate, which is protected by two humane-kings statues, both twenty-eight feet in height, carved in 1203. The Tokugawa Shogunate sponsored a second reconstruction after another fire in 1567 and the current Daibutsuden dates from about 1709. The Shosoin repository at the monastery, itself a Japanese national treasure (kokuho), contains over nine thousand precious ornamental and fine-art objects that date from the monastery's founding in the eighth century, including scores of objects imported into Japan via the SILK ROAD from all over Asia, including cut-glass bowls and silk brocade from Persia, Byzantine cups, Egyptians chests, and Indian harps, as well as Chinese Tang and Korean Silla musical instruments, etc. Every spring, the two-week long Omizutori (water-drawing) festival is conducted at Todaiji, which is thought to cure physical ailments and cleanse moral transgressions.
toothdrawer ::: n. --> One whose business it is to extract teeth with instruments; a dentist.
transformation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Transformation means that the higher consciousness or nature is brought down into the mind, vital and body and takes the place of the lower. There is a higher consciousness of the true self, which is spiritual, but it is above; if one rises above into it, then one is free as long as one remains there, but if one comes down into or uses mind, vital or body — and if one keeps any connection with life, one has to do so, either to come down and act from the ordinary consciousness or else to be in the self but use mind, life and body, then the imperfections of these instruments have to be faced and mended — they can only be mended by transformation.” *Letters on Yoga
"‘Transformation" is a word that I have brought in myself (like ‘supermind") to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them. Purification of the nature by the ‘influence" of the Spirit is not what I mean by transformation; purification is only part of a psychic change or a psycho-spiritual change — the word besides has many senses and is very often given a moral or ethical meaning which is foreign to my purpose.” *Letters on Yoga
"It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all. Into that truth we shall be freed and it will transform mind and life and body. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit. The obscurations of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit conquer. All may not open to the fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The Mother: "Transformation. The change by which all the elements and all the movements of the being become ready to manifest the supramental Truth.”
"One thing you must know and never forget: in the work of transformation all that is true and sincere will always be kept; only what is false and insincere will disappear.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.
transformation ::: “Transformation means that the higher consciousness or nature is brought down into the mind, vital and body and takes the place of the lower. There is a higher consciousness of the true self, which is spiritual, but it is above; if one rises above into it, then one is free as long as one remains there, but if one comes down into or uses mind, vital or body—and if one keeps any connection with life, one has to do so, either to come down and act from the ordinary consciousness or else to be in the self but use mind, life and body, then the imperfections of these instruments have to be faced and mended—they can only be mended by transformation.” Letters on Yoga
transient ::: 1. (electronics) A sudden, brief increase in current or voltage in a circuit that can damage sensitive components and instruments.(2003-06-12)2. (software) A software object with a short and limited lifetime which is not saved for later reuse. (1998-04-19)
transient 1. "electronics" A sudden, brief increase in {current} or {voltage} in a circuit that can damage sensitive components and instruments. (2003-06-12) 2. "software" A software object with a short and limited lifetime which is not saved for later reuse. (1998-04-19)
Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) A common semiconductor technology for building discrete digital logic integrated circuits. It originated from {Texas Instruments} in 1965. There have been several series of TTL logic: 7400: 10 ns propagation time, 10 mW/gate power consumption, obsolete; 74L00: Low power: higher resistances, less dissipation (1 mW), longer propagation time (30 ns); 74H00: High power: lower resistances, more dissipation: less sensitivity for noise; 74S00: Schottky-clamped: faster switching (3 ns, 19 mW) by using Schottky diodes to prevent the transistors from saturation; 74LS00: Low power, Schottky-clamped (10 ns, 2 mW); 74AS00: Advanced Schottky: faster switching, less dissipation, (1.5 ns, 10 mW); 74ALS00: Advanced Low power Schottky (4 ns, 1.3 mW). For each 74xxx family there is a corresponding 54xxx family. The 74 series are specified for operation at 0 - 70 C whereas the 54 (military) series can operate at -55 - 125 C See also {CMOS}, {ECL}.
Transistor-Transistor Logic ::: (TTL) A common semiconductor technology for building discrete digital logic integrated circuits. It originated from Texas Instruments in 1965.There have been several series of TTL logic: 7400: 10 ns propagation time, 10 mW/gate power consumption,obsolete; are specified for operation at 0 - 70 C whereas the 54 (military) series can operate at -55 - 125 CSee also CMOS, ECL.
trio ::: n. --> Three, considered collectively; three in company or acting together; a set of three; three united.
A composition for three parts or three instruments.
The secondary, or episodical, movement of a minuet or scherzo, as in a sonata or symphony, or of a march, or of various dance forms; -- not limited to three parts or instruments.
trombone ::: n. --> A powerful brass instrument of the trumpet kind, thought by some to be the ancient sackbut, consisting of a tube in three parts, bent twice upon itself and ending in a bell. The middle part, bent double, slips into the outer parts, as in a telescope, so that by change of the vibrating length any tone within the compass of the instrument (which may be bass or tenor or alto or even, in rare instances, soprano) is commanded. It is the only member of the family of wind instruments whose scale, both diatonic and chromatic, is
trumpetwood ::: n. --> A tropical American tree (Cecropia peltata) of the Breadfruit family, having hollow stems, which are used for wind instruments; -- called also snakewood, and trumpet tree.
tune ::: n. --> A sound; a note; a tone.
A rhythmical, melodious, symmetrical series of tones for one voice or instrument, or for any number of voices or instruments in unison, or two or more such series forming parts in harmony; a melody; an air; as, a merry tune; a mournful tune; a slow tune; a psalm tune. See Air.
The state of giving the proper, sound or sounds; just intonation; harmonious accordance; pitch of the voice or an instrument;
tuner ::: n. --> One who tunes; especially, one whose occupation is to tune musical instruments.
tutti: all; all together, usually used in an orchestral or choral score when the orchestra or all of the voices come in at the same time, also seen in Baroque-era music where two instruments share the same copy of music, after one instrument has broken off to play a more advanced form: they both play together again at the point marked tutti.
tweeze ::: n. --> A surgeon&
twisted pair "hardware" A type of cable in which pairs of conductors are twisted together to randomise possible {cross-talk} from nearby wiring. Inadequate twisting is detectable using modern cable testing instruments. (1995-02-23)
twisted pair ::: (hardware) A type of cable in which pairs of conductors are twisted together to randomise possible cross-talk from nearby wiring. Inadequate twisting is detectable using modern cable testing instruments. (1995-02-23)
una corda: one string; i.e., in piano music, depress the soft pedal, altering, and reducing the volume of, the sound. In some pianos, this literally results in the hammer striking one string rather than two or three. (For most notes on modern instruments, in fact it results in striking two rather than three strings.) Its counterpart, tre corde (three strings; see in this list), is the opposite: the soft pedal is to be released.
useful ::: a. --> Full of use, advantage, or profit; producing, or having power to produce, good; serviceable for any end or object; helpful toward advancing any purpose; beneficial; profitable; advantageous; as, vessels and instruments useful in a family; books useful for improvement; useful knowledge; useful arts.
Vajrakīlaya. (T. Rdo rje phur pa). In Sanskrit, "Vajra Dagger," a tantric buddha worshipped primarily by the RNYING MA and BKA' BRGYUD sects of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the deification of the KĪLA (see PHUR PA), the ritual dagger used in tantric ceremonies. In the rituals involving the use of the kīla, the tantric dagger is typically used to subdue a ritual site, to subjugate the local demon by pinning him or her to the ground; the MAndALA is thus planted and established on top of the offending demon. The dagger may be stabbed into a three-sided box, the triangle representing the violent tantric activity of liberation, or into an effigy. As a deity, Vajrakīlaya originally held the same duties as the ritual dagger: to protect the borders of ritual space and to pin down and destroy enemies, human or otherwise. This tradition may derive in part from the ancient Indian myth of Indrakīla, in which the serpent Vṛtra is pinned and stabilized by a mythic "peg" (kīla). Vajrakīlaya is found in the major early tantra systems as well as the GUHYASAMĀJATANTRA and the SARVATATHĀGATATATTVASAMGRAHA, which contains his mantra and places him in the center of a MAndALA, although throughout his status is inferior to that of the buddhas and bodhisattvas. It is only in the Vajrakīlaya tantras that the deity attains the status of a buddha. These texts are reputed to be eighth-century translations from Indic languages, transmitted in Tibet by PADMASAMBHAVA. The tantras form a substantial section of the RNYING MA'I RGYUD 'BUM, but BU STON rejected the Indian origin of the tantras and left them out of the BKA' 'GYUR. Defenders of the tradition cite the fact that 'BROG MI SHĀKYA YE SHES wrote that he saw the eight-syllable Vajrakīla MANTRA at the BODHGAYĀ STuPA. In addition, SA SKYA PAndITA discovered a Sanskrit fragment of the Vajrakīlamulatantrakhanda at BSAM YAS, and sĀKYAsRĪBHADRA confirmed that the cycle had existed in India. Although no East Asian tradition of Vajrakīlaya exists, some scholars have suggested an identification with Vajrakumāra; tantras concerning this deity were brought to China in the eighth century by AMOGHAVAJRA, but this identification is disputed. Vajrakīlaya is wrathful, with three faces with three eyes each, and six or more hands holding various instruments in addition to the kīla. He is said to dispel obstacles to progress on the path to enlightenment and to the swift attainment of both mundane and supramundane goals.
Vina (Sanskrit) Vīṇā An ancient musical instrument of the guitar family, still in use in India. Although generally termed a lute, its construction is quite different, having two gourds for its sounding boards rather than the single one used in the lute and modern musical instruments. In playing the vina, the performer places one gourd on the shoulder and the other on the hip. It usually has seven strings, and a long finger board containing 19 and occasionally 21 frets or supports. There are many varieties classed according to the number of strings. Its invention is attributed to Narada, one of the seven great rishis.
vīnā ::: a variety of lute, the vīnā is one of the most important musical instruments of India, often considered as sacred. Contemporary designs have four playing strings and three drone strings. The body is generally carved from wood, and the upper removable resonator is either carved or made from a gourd.
"We. . . become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“We. . . become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.” The Synthesis of Yoga
weinuo. [alt. weina] (S. *karmadāna/*karmādāna; T. las su bsko ba; J. ina/ino; K. yuna 維那/唯那). In Chinese, "rector"; a term designating either the process of overseeing, or the specific supervisor of, such crucial monastic activities as apportioning dwellings, managing the refectory, arranging sleeping quarters, cleaning the monastery grounds, etc. According to various VINAYA codes and Chinese pilgrimage accounts such as YIJING's NANHAI JIGUI NEIFA ZHUAN, it was the rector's duty to strike instruments, such as gongs or chimes (GHAntA), to remind others of the monastic schedule. Assemblies, meals, and services were conducted with the help of the rector's announcements. Because of his formal role in maintaining the monastic schedule, the rector may have thus come to serve as the principal supervisor or manager of daily activities in the monastery. The Sanskrit term *karmadāna does not appear in the extant corpus of Indian Buddhist literature, although it is attested in the MAHĀVYUTPATTI Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon, and the reconstruction is confirmed in Chinese transcriptions. In India, however, karmadāna may not necessarily have referred to a specific monastic office, but rather to the general act of "assigning" (lit. giving, DĀNA) "duties" (lit. action, viz., KARMAN) within the monastery. The Chinese term weinuo, however, clearly refers to a monastic office. The term is typically parsed as a combination of a lexical translation and phonetic transcription, and means something like "regulating (wei) the [dā]na," an interpretation related to the literal sense of the Sanskrit term as "assigning duties," and becomes used in East Asian Buddhism as the specific title of a monastic administrator who delegates responsibilities within the monastery-and thus a "rector." According to the Chinese monastic codes (QINGGUI), the rector was responsible for all matters regarding the SAMGHA and especially the saMgha hall (SENGTANG). The rector not only was in charge of the physical maintenance of the hall itself, but he also was called upon to settle issues, such as the determination of relative seniority or the appropriate punishment for transgressions committed by residents of the saMgha hall. The rector had the responsibility for appointing various low-ranking positions within the monastery, such as attendants, and conducted the tea ceremony. The weinuo also was in charge of leading the formal chanting at daily services, which involved much use of gongs and percussion instruments; weinuo is thus sometimes translated as functionally equivalent to the Western monastic office of "precentor," the leader of the monastic choir. In Korean monasteries, the yuna serves as a "rector" in that he has formal responsibility for enforcing discipline, making work assignments, and arranging the time for group work; in addition, however, he also serves as nominal head of the meditation compound in the monastery and spiritual advisor to the meditation monks.
Well Monitoring ::: Measurement, by on-site instruments or laboratory methods, of the quality of water in a well.
“were the instruments of magic divination and oracular communication — theurgic and astrological. This is shown in the following well-known facts: — (1) upon each of the twelve precious stones was engraved the name of one of the twelve sons of Jacob, each of these ‘sons’ personating one of the signs of the zodiac; (2) both were oracular images, like the teraphim, and uttered oracles by a voice, and both were agents for hypnotisation and throwing the priests who wore them into an ecstatic condition. The Urim and Thummim were not original with the Hebrews, but had been borrowed, like most of their other religious rites, from the Egyptians, with whom the mystic scarabaeus, worn on the breast by the Hierophants, had the same functions. . . . when the Jewish ‘Lord God was called upon to manifest his presence and speak out his will through the Urim by preliminary incantations, the modus operandi was the same as that used by all the Gentile priests the world over” (TG 334).
When there is an attack from the human instruments of adverse forces, one should try to overcome it not in a spirit of personal hatred or anger or wounded egoism, but with a calm spirit of strength and equality and a call to the Divine Force to act.
workbox ::: n. --> A box for holding instruments or materials for work.
Yoga Slddhl ; The perfection that comes from the practice ot yoga can be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments. There is, first, the knowledge of the truths, princi- ples, powers and processes that govern the realisation — sdstra.
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1 Étienne de La Boétie
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1:Faith is only a will aiming at greater truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
2:The gods use instruments,
Not ask their consent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Short Stories - I, Act Five,#KEYS
3:Fear is more even of a nervous sensation than an emotion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #KEYS
4:The main business of the heart, its true function is love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
5:But the instruments of divine JUSTICE for punishing do act upon a soul which resists ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (DV 26.1ad13)., #KEYS
6:By 'heart' I do not mean the piece of flesh situated in the left of our bodies, but that which uses all the other faculties as its instruments and servants. ~ Bahauddin, #KEYS
7:The heart's love allies itself readily with a vital desire in the body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #KEYS
8:Our tasks are given, we are but instruments; Nothing is all our own that we create; The Power that acts in us is not our force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
9:One enjoys real freedom when one realizes that God is the sole actor in the universe and we are only instruments in His hands. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
10:Wrong will engenders wrong action of all these instruments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #KEYS
11:Friends or foes, they are all instruments in Her hands to help us work out our own Karma, through pleasure or pain. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VI. 435), #KEYS
12:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I don't know what instruments; what harps, tamboura,and drums inside me. I sound and clash inside myself. I only know myself as a symphony ~ Fernando Pessoa, #KEYS
13:The pure psychic being is of the essence of Ananda, it comes from the delight-soul in the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
14:The Purusha has that capacity; for the spirit within can always change and perfect the working of its nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
15:Man is not and cannot be wholly governed either in his thought or his action by the reason alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #KEYS
16:The future like the past presents itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of the preknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #KEYS
17:The worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, The Refusal of the Ascetic, #KEYS
18:To get the universal Ananda all our instruments must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential joy of all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #KEYS
19:The heart's faith and will in good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent in all things and leading the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
20:All harmony proceeds upon seen or given lines and carries with it a constant pulsation and rhythmic recurrence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #KEYS
21:We don’t need wine to get drunk,
or instruments and singing to feel ecstatic.
No poets, no leaders, no songs,
yet we jump around totally wild.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path#KEYS
22:Just as you practice much in order to sing, dance, and play on instruments, so one should practice the art of fixing the mind on God. One should practice regularly such disciplines as worship, japa, and meditation. ~ Sri Ramakrishnan, #KEYS
23:Ethics deals only with the desire-soul and the active outward dynamical part of our being; its field is confined to character and action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #KEYS
24:Reason and intelligence and mind and sense and life and body, all that we vaunt or take for our own, are Nature's instruments and creations. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Fullness of Spiritual Action, #KEYS
25:There is a oneness native and occult
That needs no instruments and erects no form;
In unison it grows with all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Birth and Childhood of the Flame,#KEYS
26:On a certain level all knowledge presents itself as a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of supermind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #KEYS
27:The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
28:The Spirit created the world for Ananda, enjoyment and possession of the many by the One, of the One by the many and of the many too by the many. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #KEYS
29:A divine quietism discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine kinetism adds to it the right pure undeviating action of the soul, mind and body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #KEYS
30:The body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #KEYS
31:One should know a little of everything. If a man starts a grocery-shop, he keeps all kinds of articles there, including a little lentil and tamarind. An expert musician knows how to play a little on all instruments. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
32:Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
Nothing is all our own that we create:
The Power that acts in us is not our force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute,#KEYS
33:In the navel lotus' broad imperial range
Its proud ambitions and its master lusts
Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway
To do a work of God on earthly soil. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
34:But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, 23, #KEYS
35:In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
~ Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence,#KEYS
36:In attempting to construct such (artificially intelligent) machines we should not be irreverently usurping His (God's) power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,' Turing had advised. 'Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
~ Alan Turing,#KEYS
37:The senses and the mind seek to convince thee, sova in are they, that they are the end of all things. The senses and the mind are only instruments and play things. Behind the feelings and the thoughts, my brother; there dwells a more puissant master, an unknown sage; it is called the Self. ~ Nietzsche Zarathustra, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
38:Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
~ Jorge Luis Borges,#KEYS
39:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
40:If you think for yourself or feel for yourself or act for yourself, you become a misappropriator, a dishonest trustee-a thief of force.
Let the Divine think through you, feel through you and act through you. Then only right and perfect use will be made of the instruments that compose your being.
Let the Divine's Thoughts shine in your mind, let the Divine's Love swell in your heart, let the Divine's Energy impel your limbs. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Towards The Light,#KEYS
41:377. God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these things are turned on what is evil or harmful & ill-regulated within thee, then it is well; but if they attack thy very sources of life & strength, then seize & expel them or thou diest.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
42:Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. ~ Étienne de La Boétie #KEYS
43:Faith in its essence is a light in the soul which turns towards the truth even when the mind doubts or the vital revolts or the physical consciousness denies it. When this extends itself to the instruments, it becomes a fixed belief in the mind, a sort of inner knowledge which resists all apparent denial by circumstances or appearances, a complete confidence, trust, adhesion in the vital and in the physical consciousness, an invariable clinging to the truth in which one has faith even when all is dark around and no cause of hope seems to be there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, #KEYS
44:Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking. Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect. As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, The Birth of Thought, 186, #KEYS
45:In reality, thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide but not command or effectuate. The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
46:the lord of the sacrifice and the measure of our works :::
The Divine, the Eternal is the Lord of our sacrifice of works and union with him in all our being and consciousness and in its expressive instruments is the one object of the sacrifice; the steps of the sacrifice of works must therefore be measured, first, by the growth in our nature of something that brings us nearer to the Divine Nature, but secondly also by an experience of the Divine, his presence, his manifestation to us, an increasing closeness and union with that Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Sacrifice, The Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#KEYS
47:For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and senses are dis- pensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.03, #KEYS
48:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form-all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #KEYS
49:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #KEYS
50:Out of all the sciences... the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those who were to be educated. These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher. For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind's complete knowledge of philosophic truth. Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by certain ways (viae), a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom. ~ Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, #KEYS
51:... All the works of mind and intllect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 149, #KEYS
52:We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
~ R Buckminster Fuller,#KEYS
53:[the four aids ::: YOGA-SIDDHI, the perfection that comes from the practice of Yoga, can be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments. There is, first, the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern the realisation - sastra. Next comes a patient and persistent action on the lines laid down by this knowledge, the force of our personal effort - utsaha. There intervenes, third, uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher - guru. Last comes the instrumentality of Time - kala; for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of the divine movement.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Four Aids, 53 [T0],#KEYS
54:what is meant by the psychic :::
What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#KEYS
55:Here is a man to whom all others are not-self: at bottom his own personality alone is real to him, the others in truth only phantasms: he recognises an existence in them, but it is relative, they can serve him as instruments of his designs or can come in his way and that is all: in short between his own personality and all of them there is a deep gulf, an immense distance. Look upon this man confronted by death: it seems to him as if with him all reality, the whole world were disappearing. Then look upon this other who recognises in all that are his like, more, in all that lives, himself, his own essence : he casts his existence into the existence of all living beings and by death he loses only a feeble portion of that existence, for he subsists in all the others in whom he has always recognised, has always loved his own being, his own essence, and it is only the illusion that is now about to fall away from him, the illusion which separated his consciousness from all others. ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
56:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #KEYS
57:But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result. And afterwards you will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, 12, #KEYS
58:The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowledge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a Goddirected seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the greatest vision of all, God-knowledge and God-vision. Its aim is to see, know and be the Divine. Works, action selects for its instrument the will of the doer of works; it makes life an offering of sacrifice to the Godhead and by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of subjection to the divine Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all Godward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Principle of the Integral Yoga, 610 [T3],#KEYS
59:five schools of yoga :::
For if, leaving aside the complexities of their particular processes, we fix our regard on the central principle of the chief schools of Yoga still prevalent in India, we find that they arrange themselves in an ascending order which starts from the lowest rung of the ladder, the body, and ascends to the direct contact between the individual soul and the transcendent and universal Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth, Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.Its method is a direct commerce between the human Purusha in the individual body and the divine Purusha who dwells in everybody and yet transcends all form and name.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,#KEYS
60:on cultivating equality :::
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [103-104],#KEYS
61:JOSH
hmm. its so upsetting.. it seems like the book is a perfect symbol for something terribly wrong. I constantly avoid anything Donald Trump related because I find him so repulsive its upsetting. like its too disgusting of a corruption and i just avoid it. but maybe this book is a lukewarm symbol so I can learn to move towards and fight such darknesses.. I dont know.. so upsetting.
and people buy into such double-thought inconscience? I cant even comprehend how this can be like this. I guess its like I turn away from disgust it allows people to turn away from reason through that infantile pre-rational regression or something. I mean we all want safety but..
the book itself goes against itself from the title.. like its bashing the left for wanting to divide america but thats what the book is doing by attacking them. so I guess if people cant catch the deception from the title they wont catch it in the book? ayah
ALAN
Yeah it's the whole white male fragility persecution envy trip. Donny Jnr was so triggered he had to write a whole book (I pity the ghostwriter).
And yes it is upsetting, we live in a world where the Lord of Falsehood is on the ascendant, through instruments like Trump, Koch, and Murdoch. Some people are particularly susceptible, others are immune. This is the battle for the Earth ~ M Alan Kazlev, Facebook,#KEYS
62:To prepare for Astral Magic a temple or series of temples needs to be erected on the plane of visualized imagination. Such temples can take any convenient form although some magicians prefer to work with an exact simulacrum of their physical temple. The astral temple is visualized in fine detail and should contain all the equipment required for ritual or at least cupboards where any required instruments can be found.
Any objects visualized into the temple should always remain there for subsequent inspection unless specifically dissolved or removed. The most important object in the temple is the magician's image of himself working in it. At first it may seem that he is merely manipulating a puppet of himself in the temple but with persistence this should give way to a feeling of actually being there. Before beginning Astral Magic proper, the required temple and instruments together with an image of the magician moving about in it should be built up by a repeated series of visualizations until all the details are perfect. Only when this is complete should the magician begin to use the temple. Each conjuration that is performed should be planned in advance with the same attention to detail as in Ritual Magic. The various acts of astral evocation, divination, enchantment, invocation and illumination take on a similar general form to the acts of Ritual Magic which the magician adapts for astral work. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Kaos [T2],#KEYS
63:challenge for the Integral Yogin :::
Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members. He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and with each other, -- integrally, omitting no grain or strand or vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. All exclusive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary convenience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which he must labour.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 78, [T9],#KEYS
64:THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOGA
Initial Definitions and Descriptions
Yoga has four powers and objects, purity, liberty, beatitude and perfection. Whosoever has consummated these four mightinesses in the being of the transcendental, universal, lilamaya and individual God is the complete and absolute Yogin.
All manifestations of God are manifestations of the absolute Parabrahman.
The Absolute Parabrahman is unknowable to us, not because It is the nothingness of all that we are, for rather whatever we are in truth or in seeming is nothing but Parabrahman, but because It is pre-existent & supra-existent to even the highest & purest methods and the most potent & illimitable instruments of which soul in the body is capable.
In Parabrahman knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes an inexpressible identity. Become Parabrahman, if thou wilt and if That will suffer thee, but strive not to know It; for thou shalt not succeed with these instruments and in this body.
In reality thou art Parabrahman already and ever wast and ever will be. To become Parabrahman in any other sense, thou must depart utterly out of world manifestation and out even of world transcendence.
Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure. Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
65:Nati is the submission of the soul to the will of God; its acceptance of all touches as His touches, of all experience as His play with the soul of man. Nati may be with titiksha, feeling the sorrow but accepting it as God's will, or with udasinata, rising superior to it and regarding joy and sorrow equally as God's working in these lower instruments, or with ananda, receiving everything as the play of Krishna and therefore in itself delightful. The last is the state of the complete Yogin, for by this continual joyous or anandamaya namaskara to God constantly practised we arrive eventually at the entire elimination of grief, pain etc, the entire freedom from the dwandwas, and find the Brahmananda in every smallest, most trivial, most apparently discordant detail of life & experience in this human body. We get rid entirely of fear and suffering; Anandam Brahmano vidvan na bibheti kutaschana. We may have to begin with titiksha and udasinata but it is in this ananda that we must consummate the siddhi of samata. The Yogin receives victory and defeat, success and ill-success, pleasure and pain, honour and disgrace with an equal, a sama ananda, first by buddhi-yoga, separating himself from his habitual mental & nervous reactions & insisting by vichara on the true nature of the experience itself and of his own soul which is secretly anandamaya, full of the sama ananda in all things. He comes to change all the ordinary values of experience; amangala reveals itself to him as mangala, defeat & ill-success as the fulfilment of God's immediate purpose and a step towards ultimate victory, grief and pain as concealed and perverse forms of pleasure. A stage arrives even, when physical pain itself, the hardest thing for material man to bear, changes its nature in experience and becomes physical ananda; but this is only at the end when this human being, imprisoned in matter, subjected to mind, emerges from his subjection, conquers his mind and delivers himself utterly in his body, realising his true anandamaya self in every part of the adhara.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Record Of Yoga,#KEYS
66:If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.
The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
67:requirements for the psychic :::
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on will and strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that surpasses the mere practical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, -- for it prefers rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, -- on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or with its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery as instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,#KEYS
68:they are acting all the while in the spirit of rajasic ahaṅkara, persuade themselves that God is working through them and they have no part in the action. This is because they are satisfied with the mere intellectual assent to the idea without waiting for the whole system and life to be full of it. A continual remembrance of God in others and renunciation of individual eagerness (spr.ha) are needed and a careful watching of our inner activities until God by the full light of self-knowledge, jñanadı̄pena bhasvata, dispels all further chance of self-delusion. The danger of tamogun.a is twofold, first, when the Purusha thinks, identifying himself with the tamas in him, "I am weak, sinful, miserable, ignorant, good-for-nothing, inferior to this man and inferior to that man, adhama, what will God do through me?" - as if God were limited by the temporary capacities or incapacities of his instruments and it were not true that he can make the dumb to talk and the lame to cross the hills, mūkaṁ karoti vacalaṁ paṅguṁ laṅghayate girim, - and again when the sadhak tastes the relief, the tremendous relief of a negative santi and, feeling himself delivered from all troubles and in possession of peace, turns away from life and action and becomes attached to the peace and ease of inaction. Remember always that you too are Brahman and the divine Shakti is working in you; reach out always to the realisation of God's omnipotence and his delight in the Lila. He bids Arjuna work lokasaṅgraharthaya, for keeping the world together, for he does not wish the world to sink back into Prakriti, but insists on your acting as he acts, "These worlds would be overpowered by tamas and sink into Prakriti if I did not do actions." To be attached to inaction is to give up our action not to God but to our tamasic ahaṅkara. The danger of the sattvagun.a is when the sadhak becomes attached to any one-sided conclusion of his reason, to some particular kriya or movement of the sadhana, to the joy of any particular siddhi of the yoga, perhaps the sense of purity or the possession of some particular power or the Ananda of the contact with God or the sense of freedom and hungers after it, becomes attached to that only and would have nothing else. Remember that the yoga is not for yourself; for these things, though they are part of the siddhi, are not the object of the siddhi, for you have decided at the beginning to make no claim upon God but take what he gives you freely and, as for the Ananda, the selfless soul will even forego the joy of God's presence, ... ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #KEYS
69:INVOCATION
The ultimate invocation, that of Kia, cannot be performed. The paradox is that as Kia has no dualized qualities, there are no attributes by which to invoke it. To give it one quality is merely to deny it another. As an observant dualistic being once said:
I am that I am not.
Nevertheless, the magician may need to make some rearrangements or additions to what he is. Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which one is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation. Alternatively, the process of invocation may be seen as adding to the magician's psyche any elements which are missing. It is true that the mind must be finally surrendered as one enters fully into Chaos, but a complete and balanced psychocosm is more easily surrendered.
The magical process of shuffling beliefs and desires attendant upon the process of invocation also demonstrates that one's dominant obsessions or personality are quite arbitrary, and hence more easily banished.
There are many maps of the mind (psychocosms), most of which are inconsistent, contradictory, and based on highly fanciful theories. Many use the symbology of god forms, for all mythology embodies a psychology. A complete mythic pantheon resumes all of man's mental characteristics. Magicians will often use a pagan pantheon of gods as the basis for invoking some particular insight or ability, as these myths provide the most explicit and developed formulation of the particular idea's extant. However it is possible to use almost anything from the archetypes of the collective unconscious to the elemental qualities of alchemy.
If the magician taps a deep enough level of power, these forms may manifest with sufficient force to convince the mind of the objective existence of the god. Yet the aim of invocation is temporary possession by the god, communication from the god, and manifestation of the god's magical powers, rather than the formation of religious cults.
The actual method of invocation may be described as a total immersion in the qualities pertaining to the desired form. One invokes in every conceivable way. The magician first programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature. In the most elaborate form of ritual he may surround himself with the sounds, smells, colors, instruments, memories, numbers, symbols, music, and poetry suggestive of the god or quality. Secondly he unites his life force to the god image with which he has united his mind. This is accomplished with techniques from the gnosis. Figure 5 shows some examples of maps of the mind. Following are some suggestions for practical ritual invocation.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
70:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.
And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga,#KEYS
71:It is then by a transformation of life in its very principle, not by an external manipulation of its phenomena, that the integral Yoga proposes to change it from a troubled and ignorant into a luminous and harmonious movement of Nature. There are three conditions which are indispensable for the achievement of this central inner revolution and new formation; none of them is altogether sufficient in itself, but by their united threefold power the uplifting can be done, the conversion made and completely made. For, first, life as it is is a movement of desire and it has built in us as its centre a desire-soul which refers to itself all the motions of life and puts in them its own troubled hue and pain of an ignorant, half-lit, baffled endeavour: for a divine living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive-power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide and mentor; for a divine life the mind and the life-impulse must cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic being must take their place as the leader on the path and the indicator of a divine guidance. Last, life as it is is turned towards the satisfaction of the separative ego; ego must disappear and be replaced by the true spiritual person, the central being, and life itself must be turned towards the fulfilment of the Divine in terrestrial existence; it must feel a Divine Force awaking within it and become an obedient instrumentation of its purpose.
There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, - to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 176,#KEYS
72:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.
This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
73:[desire and its divine form:]
Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be aught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for eveR But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and the desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
When once the object of concentration has possessed and is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the heart and the will,-a consummation fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law,-the perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the divine work. For that work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action,-and that will be when personal desire and egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind and life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves,- all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom, Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of the Spirit's terrestrial adventure.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83] [T1],#KEYS
74:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, anı̄sa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216, #KEYS
75:In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, 'Forth now and push forward also in other fields.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
76:It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisation, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own movement, much less have any true control over the vast life around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, perception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and newmodels increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their significance, become master of our own minds and active to shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We begin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces, detect the origin and law of our feelings, emotions, sensations, passions, are free to accept, reject, new-create, open to wider, rise to higher planes of Life-Power. We begin to perceive too the key to the enigma of Matter, follow the interplay of Mind and Life and Consciousness upon it, discover more and more its instrumental and resultant function and detect ultimately the last secret of Matter as a form not merely of Energy but of involved and arrested or unstably fixed and restricted consciousness and begin to see too the possibility of its liberation and plasticity of response to higher Powers, its possibilities for the conscious and no longer the more than half-inconscient incarnation and self-expression of the Spirit. All this and more becomes more and more possible as the working of the Divine Shakti increases in us and, against much resistance or labour to respond of our obscure consciousness, through much struggle and movement of progress and regression and renewed progress necessitated by the work of intensive transformation of a half-inconscient into a conscious substance, moves to a greater purity, truth, height, range. All depends on the psychic awakening in us, the completeness of our response to her and our growing surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 183, #KEYS
77:The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all powers of our human existence into a means of reaching the divine Being. In an ordinary Yoga one main power of being or one group of its powers is made the means, vehicle, path. In a synthetic Yoga all powers will be combined and included in the transmuting instrumentation.
In Hathayoga the instrument is the body and life. All the power of the body is stilled, collected, purified, heightened, concentrated to its utmost limits or beyond any limits by Asana and other physical processes; the power of the life too is similarly purified, heightened, concentrated by Asana and Pranayama. This concentration of powers is then directed towards that physical centre in which the divine consciousness sits concealed in the human body. The power of Life, Nature-power, coiled up with all its secret forces asleep in the lowest nervous plexus of the earth-being,-for only so much escapes into waking action in our normal operations as is sufficient for the limited uses of human life,-rises awakened through centre after centre and awakens, too, in its ascent and passage the forces of each successive nodus of our being, the nervous life, the heart of emotion and ordinary mentality, the speech, sight, will, the higher knowledge, till through and above the brain it meets with and it becomes one with the divine consciousness.
In Rajayoga the chosen instrument is the mind. our ordinary mentality is first disciplined, purified and directed towards the divine Being, then by a summary process of Asana and Pranayama the physical force of our being is stilled and concentrated, the life-force released into a rhythmic movement capable of cessation and concentrated into a higher power of its upward action, the mind, supported and strengthened by this greater action and concentration of the body and life upon which it rests, is itself purified of all its unrest and emotion and its habitual thought-waves, liberated from distraction and dispersion, given its highest force of concentration, gathered up into a trance of absorption. Two objects, the one temporal, the other eternal,are gained by this discipline. Mind-power develops in another concentrated action abnormal capacities of knowledge, effective will, deep light of reception, powerful light of thought-radiation which are altogether beyond the narrow range of our normal mentality; it arrives at the Yogic or occult powers around which there has been woven so much quite dispensable and yet perhaps salutary mystery. But the one final end and the one all-important gain is that the mind, stilled and cast into a concentrated trance, can lose itself in the divine consciousness and the soul be made free to unite with the divine Being.
The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowledge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a Goddirected seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the greatest vision of all, God-knowledge and God-vision. Its aim is to see, know and be the Divine. Works, action selects for its instrument the will of the doer of works; it makes life an offering of sacrifice to the Godhead and by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of subjection to the divine Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all Godward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Self-Perfection, The Principle of the Integral Yoga, 609,#KEYS
78:64 Arts
1. Geet vidya: art of singing.
2. Vadya vidya: art of playing on musical instruments.
3. Nritya vidya: art of dancing.
4. Natya vidya: art of theatricals.
5. Alekhya vidya: art of painting.
6. Viseshakacchedya vidya: art of painting the face and body with color
7. Tandulakusumabalivikara: art of preparing offerings from rice and flowers.
8. Pushpastarana: art of making a covering of flowers for a bed.
9. Dasanavasanangaraga: art of applying preparations for cleansing the teeth, cloths and painting the body.
10. Manibhumikakarma: art of making the groundwork of jewels.
11. Aayyaracana: art of covering the bed.
12. Udakavadya: art of playing on music in water.
13. Udakaghata: art of splashing with water.
14. Citrayoga: art of practically applying an admixture of colors.
15. Malyagrathanavikalpa: art of designing a preparation of wreaths.
16. Sekharapidayojana: art of practically setting the coronet on the head.
17. Nepathyayoga: art of practically dressing in the tiring room.
18. Karnapatrabhanga: art of decorating the tragus of the ear.
19. Sugandhayukti: art of practical application of aromatics.
20. Bhushanayojana: art of applying or setting ornaments.
21. Aindrajala: art of juggling.
22. Kaucumara: a kind of art.
23. Hastalaghava: art of sleight of hand.
24. Citrasakapupabhakshyavikarakriya: art of preparing varieties of delicious food.
25. Panakarasaragasavayojana: art of practically preparing palatable drinks and tinging draughts with red color.
26. Sucivayakarma: art of needleworks and weaving.
27. Sutrakrida: art of playing with thread.
28. Vinadamurakavadya: art of playing on lute and small drum.
29. Prahelika: art of making and solving riddles.
30. Durvacakayoga: art of practicing language difficult to be answered by others.
31. Pustakavacana: art of reciting books.
32. Natikakhyayikadarsana: art of enacting short plays and anecdotes.
33. Kavyasamasyapurana: art of solving enigmatic verses.
34. Pattikavetrabanavikalpa: art of designing preparation of shield, cane and arrows.
35. Tarkukarma: art of spinning by spindle.
36. Takshana: art of carpentry.
37. Vastuvidya: art of engineering.
38. Raupyaratnapariksha: art of testing silver and jewels.
39. Dhatuvada: art of metallurgy.
40. Maniraga jnana: art of tinging jewels.
41. Akara jnana: art of mineralogy.
42. Vrikshayurvedayoga: art of practicing medicine or medical treatment, by herbs.
43. Meshakukkutalavakayuddhavidhi: art of knowing the mode of fighting of lambs, cocks and birds.
44. Sukasarikapralapana: art of maintaining or knowing conversation between male and female cockatoos.
45. Utsadana: art of healing or cleaning a person with perfumes.
46. Kesamarjanakausala: art of combing hair.
47. Aksharamushtikakathana: art of talking with fingers.
48. Dharanamatrika: art of the use of amulets.
49. Desabhashajnana: art of knowing provincial dialects.
50. Nirmitijnana: art of knowing prediction by heavenly voice.
51. Yantramatrika: art of mechanics.
52. Mlecchitakutarkavikalpa: art of fabricating barbarous or foreign sophistry.
53. Samvacya: art of conversation.
54. Manasi kavyakriya: art of composing verse
55. Kriyavikalpa: art of designing a literary work or a medical remedy.
56. Chalitakayoga: art of practicing as a builder of shrines called after him.
57. Abhidhanakoshacchandojnana: art of the use of lexicography and meters.
58. Vastragopana: art of concealment of cloths.
59. Dyutavisesha: art of knowing specific gambling.
60. Akarshakrida: art of playing with dice or magnet.
61. Balakakridanaka: art of using children's toys.
62. Vainayiki vidya: art of enforcing discipline.
63. Vaijayiki vidya: art of gaining victory.
64. Vaitaliki vidya: art of awakening master with music at dawn.
~ Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger, Sexual Secrets,#KEYS
79:CHAPTER XIII
OF THE BANISHINGS: AND OF THE PURIFICATIONS.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The wand is not a wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.
That is a mere logical commonplace: in magick one must go much farther than this. One finds one's analogy in electricity. If insulation is imperfect, the whole current goes back to earth. It is useless to plead that in all those miles of wire there is only one-hundredth of an inch unprotected. It is no good building a ship if the water can enter, through however small a hole.
That first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.
If one littlest thought intrude upon the mind of the Mystic, his concentration is absolutely destroyed; and his consciousness remains on exactly the same level as the Stockbroker's. Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother. If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it.> {101}
The Magician must therefore take the utmost care in the matter of purification, "firstly", of himself, "secondly", of his instruments, "thirdly", of the place of working. Ancient Magicians recommended a preliminary purification of from three days to many months. During this period of training they took the utmost pains with diet. They avoided animal food, lest the elemental spirit of the animal should get into their atmosphere. They practised sexual abstinence, lest they should be influenced in any way by the spirit of the wife. Even in regard to the excrements of the body they were equally careful; in trimming the hair and nails, they ceremonially destroyed> the severed portion. They fasted, so that the body itself might destroy anything extraneous to the bare necessity of its existence. They purified the mind by special prayers and conservations. They avoided the contamination of social intercourse, especially the conjugal kind; and their servitors were disciples specially chosen and consecrated for the work.
In modern times our superior understanding of the essentials of this process enables us to dispense to some extent with its external rigours; but the internal purification must be even more carefully performed. We may eat meat, provided that in doing so we affirm that we eat it in order to strengthen us for the special purpose of our proposed invocation.> {102}
By thus avoiding those actions which might excite the comment of our neighbours we avoid the graver dangers of falling into spiritual pride.
We have understood the saying: "To the pure all things are pure", and we have learnt how to act up to it. We can analyse the mind far more acutely than could the ancients, and we can therefore distinguish the real and right feeling from its imitations. A man may eat meat from self-indulgence, or in order to avoid the dangers of asceticism. We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose.
It is ceremonially desirable to seal and affirm this mental purity by Ritual, and accordingly the first operation in any actual ceremony is bathing and robing, with appropriate words. The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous to antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the fame of mind suitable to that one thought.
A similar operation takes place in the preparation of every instrument, as has been seen in the Chapter devoted to that subject. In the preparation of theplace of working, the same considerations apply. We first remove from that place all objects; and we then put into it those objects, and only those {103} objects, which are necessary. During many days we occupy ourselves in this process of cleansing and consecration; and this again is confirmed in the actual ceremony.
The cleansed and consecrated Magician takes his cleansed and consecrated instruments into that cleansed and consecrated place, and there proceeds to repeat that double ceremony in the ceremony itself, which has these same two main parts. The first part of every ceremony is the banishing; the second, the invoking. The same formula is repeated even in the ceremony of banishing itself, for in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper.
In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that force ... ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
80:The Two Paths Of Yoga :::
14 April 1929 - What are the dangers of Yoga? Is it especially dangerous to the people of the West? Someone has said that Yoga may be suitable for the East, but it has the effect of unbalancing the Western mind.
Yoga is not more dangerous to the people of the West than to those of the East. Everything depends upon the spirit with which you approach it. Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. It is not dangerous, on the contrary, it is safety and security itself, if you go to it with a sense of its sacredness, always remembering that the aim is to find the Divine.
Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. if you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.
There are two paths of Yoga, one of tapasya (discipline), and the other of surrender. The path of tapasya is arduous. Here you rely solely upon yourself, you proceed by your own strength. You ascend and achieve according to the measure of your force. There is always the danger of falling down. And once you fall, you lie broken in the abyss and there is hardly a remedy. The other path, the path of surrender, is safe and sure. It is here, however, that the Western people find their difficulty. They have been taught to fear and avoid all that threatens their personal independence. They have imbibed with their mothers' milk the sense of individuality. And surrender means giving up all that. In other words, you may follow, as Ramakrishna says, either the path of the baby monkey or that of the baby cat. The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it and cry ma ma.
If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more danger or serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere. If you are not sincere, do not begin Yoga. If you were dealing in human affairs, then you could resort to deception; but in dealing with the Divine there is no possibility of deception anywhere. You can go on the Path safely when you are candid and open to the core and when your only end is to realise and attain the Divine and to be moved by the Divine. There is another danger; it is in connection with the sex impulses. Yoga in its process of purification will lay bare and throw up all hidden impulses and desires in you. And you must learn not to hide things nor leave them aside, you have to face them and conquer and remould them. The first effect of Yoga, however, is to take away the mental control, and the hungers that lie dormant are suddenly set free, they rush up and invade the being. So long as this mental control has not been replaced by the Divine control, there is a period of transition when your sincerity and surrender will be put to the test. The strength of such impulses as those of sex lies usually in the fact that people take too much notice of them; they protest too vehemently and endeavour to control them by coercion, hold them within and sit upon them. But the more you think of a thing and say, "I don't want it, I don't want it", the more you are bound to it. What you should do is to keep the thing away from you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible and, even if you happen to think of it, remain indifferent and unconcerned. The impulses and desires that come up by the pressure of Yoga should be faced in a spirit of detachment and serenity, as something foreign to yourself or belonging to the outside world. They should be offered to the Divine, so that the Divine may take them up and transmute them. If you have once opened yourself to the Divine, if the power of the Divine has once come down into you and yet you try to keep to the old forces, you prepare troubles and difficulties and dangers for yourself. You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires. There are many self-appointed Masters, who do nothing but that. And then when you are off the straight path and when you have a little knowledge and not much power, it happens that you are seized by beings or entities of a certain type, you become blind instruments in their hands and are devoured by them in the end. Wherever there is pretence, there is danger; you cannot deceive God. Do you come to God saying, "I want union with you" and in your heart meaning "I want powers and enjoyments"? Beware! You are heading straight towards the brink of the precipice. And yet it is so easy to avoid all catastrophe. Become like a child, give yourself up to the Mother, let her carry you, and there is no more danger for you.
This does not mean that you have not to face other kinds of difficulties or that you have not to fight and conquer any obstacles at all. Surrender does not ensure a smooth and unruffled and continuous progression. The reason is that your being is not yet one, nor your surrender absolute and complete. Only a part of you surrenders; and today it is one part and the next day it is another. The whole purpose of the Yoga is to gather all the divergent parts together and forge them into an undivided unity. Till then you cannot hope to be without difficulties - difficulties, for example, like doubt or depression or hesitation. The whole world is full of the poison. You take it in with every breath. If you exchange a few words with an undesirable man or even if such a man merely passes by you, you may catch the contagion from him. It is sufficient for you to come near a place where there is plague in order to be infected with its poison; you need not know at all that it is there. You can lose in a few minutes what it has taken you months to gain. So long as you belong to humanity and so long as you lead the ordinary life, it does not matter much if you mix with the people of the world; but if you want the divine life, you will have to be exceedingly careful about your company and your environment.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:The hands are the instruments of man‚Äôs intelligence. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 2:We are but the instruments or assistants, by whom God works. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 3:All of us our but his instruments who do our part and pass by. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 4:In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 5:Our own lives are the instruments with which we experiment with truth. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 6:Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 7:Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 8:The chief objection of playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 9:To know and not to do is in fact not to know. We need to be active instruments against evil. We need to do. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 10:If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 11:To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 12:The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 13:There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 14:He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 15:I'm for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children? ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 16:Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 17:Golf: An ineffectual attempt to direct an uncontrollable sphere into an inaccessible hole with instruments ill-adapted to the purpose. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 18:The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 19:[The poets' role is that of] capturing on their instruments the secret stir of life in the air and giving it voice in the music of prophecy ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 20:The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 21:Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet ; two clarinets. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 22:Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 23:Friends or foes, they are all instruments in Her hands to help us work out our own karma, through pleasure or pain. As such, & 24:Music is the medium for expressing emotion. Music kindles love and infuses hope. It has countless voices and instruments. Music is in the hearts of all men and women ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 25:Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the instruments of love. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 26:A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 27:If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 28:Within the body there is played Music unending, though without stringed instruments That music of the Word pervades the entire creation Who listens to it is freed from all illusion ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove 29:If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments [if] one suffices. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 30:If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments [if] one suffices. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 31:None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 32:The power is with the silent ones, who only live and love and then withdraw their personality. They never say ‚Äúme‚Äù and ‚Äúmine‚Äù; they are only blessed in being instruments ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 33:The woman is at the heart of the home. Let us pray that we women realize the reason for our existence: to love and be loved and through this love become instruments of peace in the world. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 34:The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 35:I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So... I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 36:But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 37:A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes& 38:I believe in corporations. They are indispensable instruments of our modern civilization. But I believe they should be so regulated that they shall act for the interests of the community as a whole. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 39:Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favourite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 40:If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 41:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 42:If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 43:Cannons and fire-arms are cruel and damnable machines; I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the Devil. If Adam had seen in a vision the horrible instruments his children were to invent, he would have died of grief. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 44:This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 45:For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 46:In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 47:When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 48:We are gripped by God’s will of love, and must help carry out that will in this world, in small things as in great things, in saving as in pardoning. To be glad instruments of God‚Äôs love in this imperfect world is the service to which we are called. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 49:We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention, totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 50:I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 51:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 52:Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 53:Naturally, selfishness is always destructive. Desire and fear, both are self-centred states. Between desire and fear anger arises, with anger hatred, with hatred passion for destruction. War is hatred in action, organised and equipped with all the instruments of death. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 54:God, the supreme artist, uses our life for the creation of art. We are the instruments through which the force of life expresses itself. We express our art in everything we say, everything we feel, and everything we do. The creation is ongoing, it is endless, it is happening in every moment. ~ don-miguel-ruiz, @wisdomtrove 55:The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means. ~ reinhold-niebuhr, @wisdomtrove 56:Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, and seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 57:The body is a sensing instrument of consciousness. Without the body and mind, the trees could not see themselves. Usually we think that we are looking at a tree, but the tree is looking at itself through us. Without this instrument, the tree does not get to see itself. We are sensing instruments of the Divine. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 58:The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not... yet, I occurred. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 59:Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your eyes, kindness in your face, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greetings. We are all but His instruments who do our little bit and pass by. I believe that the way in which an act of kindness is done is as important as the action itself. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 60:Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 61:A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 62:[I]t must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 63:Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 64:Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 65:If our poor die of hunger, it is not because God does not care for them. Rather, it is because neither you nor I are generous enough. It is because we are not instruments of love in the hands of God. We do not recognize Christ when once again He appears to us in the hungry man, in the lonely woman, in the child who is looking for a place to get warm. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 66:To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support - to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective - to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak - and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 67:Those who have overcome self-will and become instruments to do God's work can accomplish tasks which are seemingly impossible, but they experience no feeling of self achievement. I now know myself to be a part of the infinite cosmos, not separate from other souls or God. My illusory self is dead; the real self controls the garment of clay and uses it for God's work. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 68:I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 69:Oh, Brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 70:Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 71:The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 72:The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 73:I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 74:More than ever before, in our country, this is the age of the individual. Endowed with the accumulated knowledge of centuries, armed with all the instruments of modern science, he is still assured personal freedom and wide avenues of expression so that he may win for himself, his family and his country greater material comfort, ease and happiness; greater spiritual satisfaction and contentment. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 75:M: Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 76:So if we’re not in touch with the multiple dimensions of our own being (and there are many hidden dimensions to being embodied in a human lifetime for an unbelievably short period of time) then in fact we’re in some way trying to get somewhere and get all this doing done without tuning the apparatus. The greatest musicians with the greatest instruments in the world still tune first –to themselves and to each other. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 77:Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 78:You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 79:We have two main instruments: the mind and the heart. The mind finds it difficult to be happy, precisely because the mind consciously enjoys the sense of separativity. It is always judging and doubting the reality in others. This is the human mind, the ordinary physical mind, the earth-bound mind. But we also have the aspiring heart, the loving heart. This loving heart is free from insecurity, for it has already established its oneness with the rest of the world. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 80:I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 81:Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 82:The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 83:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being? ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 84:Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 85:Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 86:In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 87:There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience: they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power - God, history, fate, nation, or humanity. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 88:We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 89:Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people& 90:I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:We are all but instruments of God. ~ Stonewall Jackson, #NFDB
2:We need to play each others instruments. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
3:Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
4:I don't play any instruments, but I do read a lot. ~ Deep Roy, #NFDB
5:God values clean instruments to work through. ~ Sylvia Gunter, #NFDB
6:The instruments of darkness tells us truth. ~ Kerri Maniscalco, #NFDB
7:Histories are instruments of oppression. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
8:Safety and Security Instruments out of San Diego. ~ Vince Flynn, #NFDB
9:And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
10:God has His own way of choosing His instruments. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
11:The instruments of darkness tell us truths. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
12:The violin - that most human of all instruments. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
13:…the violin — that most human of all instruments… ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
14:Christmas music,” said Nick, “or instruments of torture? ~ Alan Russell, #NFDB
15:The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
16:We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time ~ John Green, #NFDB
17:We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time. ~ John Green, #NFDB
18:Attack your instruments. Don't let them attack you. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong, #NFDB
19:The Earliest Electromagnetic Instruments, by Robert A. Chipman ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
20:and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
21:very young people are true but not resounding instruments. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, #NFDB
22:We are but the instruments or assistants, by whom God works. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
23:All of us our but his instruments who do our part and pass by. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
24:Give the instruments a chance - their sounds are quite beautiful. ~ John Marin, #NFDB
25:I mix Indian instruments with Western instruments all the time. ~ Satyajit Ray, #NFDB
26:see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
27:Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies. ~ Ismail Kadare, #NFDB
28:The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
29:I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
30:There are two instruments worse than a clarinet - two clarinets. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
31:Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays. ~ George Balanchine, #NFDB
32:Firmness of purpose is one of the best instruments of success. ~ Lord Chesterfield, #NFDB
33:Modern instruments were designed to throw sound all in one direction. ~ Marc Ribot, #NFDB
34:Our own lives are the instruments with which we experiment with truth. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
35:In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
36:Respect your curses, for they are the instruments of your destiny. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
37:War is progressive because all instruments of war are progressive. ~ Ulysses S Grant, #NFDB
38:Providence makes use of instruments I'd not touch with a ten-foot pole. ~ Owen Wister, #NFDB
39:Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
40:God gave me the gift to be able to play instruments and I have to play. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
41:The organ is in my eyes and ears the king of all instruments. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, #NFDB
42:You can be enticed by food, wooed by food, sex, money, or instruments. ~ Bernie Worrell, #NFDB
43:Diplomacy without military might is like music without instruments. ~ Frederick The Great, #NFDB
44:Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
45:The instruments of darkness tell us truths.
Act I Scene iii ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
46:I learned to play the instruments of war," he said, "and paint in blood. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
47:Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight. ~ Richard de Bury, #NFDB
48:I wish I were more musically gifted, more intuitive in playing instruments. ~ Edward Norton, #NFDB
49:There's a humble beauty about listening to period instruments that I like. ~ Park Chan wook, #NFDB
50:My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano. ~ Tod Machover, #NFDB
51:All music is is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
52:Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling. ~ Ted Lange, #NFDB
53:The instruments for the quest for Truth are as simple as they are difficult. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
54:To my eyes and ears the organ will ever be the King of Instruments. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, #NFDB
55:Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
56:Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
57:Phone are wonderful instruments, but I wouldn't want our daughter to marry one. ~ Erma Bombeck, #NFDB
58:We are all children of blood and bone. All instruments of vengeance and virtue. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
59:It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas. ~ Ezra Koenig, #NFDB
60:Human beings are much more complex than just being instruments for making money. ~ Muhammad Yunus, #NFDB
61:We are all children of blood and bone.
All instruments of vengeance and virtue. ~ Tomi Adeyemi,#NFDB
62:Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise. ~ Samuel Lover, #NFDB
63:You were playing your instruments? Or do you have tape recorders under your seats? ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
64:Blunt tools are are sometimes found of use, where sharper instruments would fail. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
65:The Mortal Instruments series is a story world that I love to live in. Beautiful! ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
66:Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments. – Frederick the Great ~ George F Will, #NFDB
67:I believe we should encourage children to sing and play instruments from an early age. ~ Mick Jagger, #NFDB
68:Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
69:The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
70:When to mischief mortals bend their will, how soon they find it instruments of ill. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
71:Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments. ~ Benny Goodman, #NFDB
72:All means prove but blunt instruments, if they have not behind them a living spirit. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
73:Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them ~ Bruno Latour, #NFDB
74:A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
75:Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1837), #NFDB
76:Words are blunt instruments, better suited to murder than to making sense of the world. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
77:I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano. ~ Leo Kottke, #NFDB
78:Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly. ~ Gavin Bryars, #NFDB
79:Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
80:That most sensitive, most delicate of instruments -- the mind of a little child! ~ Henry Handel Richardson, #NFDB
81:The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
82:Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters. ~ George F Kennan, #NFDB
83:I think the voice does that perfectly adequately without being imitated by other instruments. ~ Evan Parker, #NFDB
84:Harlem felt like a big black band with so many heavy instruments, the city stage was collapsing. ~ Yaa Gyasi, #NFDB
85:All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
86:I play a whole lot of instruments pretty badly, instead of playing one instrument really well. ~ Mikal Cronin, #NFDB
87:while they were not very subtle instruments, modern Chinese folk songs can be played on them. By ~ Ian Morris, #NFDB
88:Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more. ~ Neville Marriner, #NFDB
89:Physical space between us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time ~ John Green, #NFDB
90:Being a musician is very easy. My house is full of musical instruments. There's a lot of music, always. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
91:I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. ~ John Darnielle, #NFDB
92:The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
93:I thought I might be a band instructor, someone who plays all the instruments and teaches others. ~ Adrian Belew, #NFDB
94:Don't screech like that. You'll wake the dead." - Jace - The Mortal Instruments - City Of Bones ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
95:Love thine enemies for the strengths they call up in us make them the instruments of our destiny. ~ Harriet Rubin, #NFDB
96:Men like M. de Talleyrand are like sharp instruments with which it is dangerous to play. ~ Klemens von Metternich, #NFDB
97:The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
98:Know the names of past and current artists who are most famous for playing their instruments. ~ Marilyn vos Savant, #NFDB
99:The lights flickered. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quiety for the door. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
100:Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools. He uses them only when he has no choice. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
101:Faith is only a will aiming at greater truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
102:I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard. ~ John Wesley, #NFDB
103:investments, in real estate and financial instruments, that account for the bulk of private wealth, ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
104:I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction... ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
105:Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that. ~ Pat Metheny, #NFDB
106:So great and boundless is God's wisdom that he knows right well how to use evil instruments to do good. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
107:The gods use instruments,
Not ask their consent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Short Stories - I, Act Five,#NFDB
108:You play 30 instruments. What's the toughest? Drums, just because I don't get to play them a whole lot. I ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
109:I believe God rules all by his divine providence and that the stars by his permission are instruments. ~ William Lilly, #NFDB
110:I don't think I'm even a musician. I don't play a lot of instruments, not really a soloist or anything. ~ Cass McCombs, #NFDB
111:Sword and fist are the instruments of primitive; non-violence is the instrument of developed man! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
112:The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
113:I was always jealous of my violinist friends and cellist friends who traveled with their instruments. ~ Christian McKay, #NFDB
114:Nor was it the bewildering array of instruments that crowded the long circumferential wall around them. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
115:the cult of Same is all the chic; by instruments, both span and spic, are justly measured Spic and Span: ~ E E Cummings, #NFDB
116:The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
117:The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
118:Yes, I love to play drums and bass and guitar and piano. Those are the main instruments I play. That is it. ~ Jeff Lynne, #NFDB
119:In a way records are like paintings. Instead of using paints and brushes we use sounds and instruments. ~ John McLaughlin, #NFDB
120:I think it will be fun to not only play new music, but to get to play different instruments on-stage. ~ Bethany Cosentino, #NFDB
121:Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
122:Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions. ~ John Ortberg, #NFDB
123:Everything is the will of God - we are only instruments of her will and we learn to just love and accept. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
124:Our prayers cannot force God to do anything, but He uses them as His own instruments to bring about His will. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
125:To know and not to do is in fact not to know. We need to be active instruments against evil. We need to do. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
126:Fishes should not be taken from the deep; instruments for the profit of a state should not be shown to the people. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
127:Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
128:I am the first instrument. I am the voice. I do not imitate other instruments. Other instruments imitate me. ~ Abbey Lincoln, #NFDB
129:Luckily, languages are like musical instruments: the more you know, the easier it is to pick up new ones. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
130:Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
131:"Concepts that are too broad usually prove to be unsuitable instruments because they are too vague and nebulous." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
132:I combine aspects of many styles of music and create my own musical forms by way of electronic instruments. ~ John Frusciante, #NFDB
133:I'm a musician. I play instruments. I dabble in the hip-hop field. That doesn't take vocal ability necessarily. ~ Nick Cannon, #NFDB
134:Some instruments seemed like they were held together with duct tape and prayers. Everything looked out of date. ~ Eoin Colfer, #NFDB
135:The cello is not one of my favourite instruments. It has such a lugubrious sound, like someone reading a will. ~ Irene Thomas, #NFDB
136:band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments. ~ Sebastian Barry, #NFDB
137:We have all become conductors of an immense orchestra whose players and instruments are scattered about the globe. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
138:We’re only instruments of love, flowing through heaps of pain hoping one day we’d hatch a passion of our own. ~ Robert M Drake, #NFDB
139:Ne détruisons point les instruments du bonheur parce que les méchants s'en servent quelquefois à nuire. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
140:. . the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are our instruments of self-exploration. ~ Michael Dirda, #NFDB
141:Fear is more even of a nervous sensation than an emotion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #NFDB
142:How come the term 'threesome' is always used in a sexual context? What, nobody plays string instruments any more? ~ Dov Davidoff, #NFDB
143:I play, like, 12 instruments. Guitar, piano, harmonica, African drums... I'm working on mastering the accordion. ~ Lucas Grabeel, #NFDB
144:The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law. ~ Gene Wolfe, #NFDB
145:The main business of the heart, its true function is love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
146:Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas. ~ George Gershwin, #NFDB
147:Our future and our fate lie in our wills more than in our hands, for our hands are but the instruments of our wills. ~ B C Forbes, #NFDB
148:The child was born at a quarter to eight, emerging so easily that neither chloroform nor instruments were needed. ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
149:the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
150:And who are the greater criminals-those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them and use them? ~ Robert E Sherwood, #NFDB
151:Piano was - well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young. ~ Hugh Laurie, #NFDB
152:As we hang beneath the heavens, and we hover over hell, our hearts become the instruments we learn to play so well. ~ Dan Fogelberg, #NFDB
153:But ‘tis strange; And oftentimes to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
154:Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments. ~ David Del Tredici, #NFDB
155:If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
156:Providence controlled everything. Men were simply instruments of destiny, driven by desire and hate. The ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, #NFDB
157:I'd shift disciplines, whether it was musical instruments or sports or whatever, and it's the same with that. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch, #NFDB
158:I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired. ~ Sean Lennon, #NFDB
159:It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement. ~ Walter J Phillips, #NFDB
160:At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
161:Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay, #NFDB
162:Friends or foes, they are all instruments in Her hands to help us work out our own Karma, through pleasure or pain. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
163:It takes a kind of arrogance to think everything in the world can be measured and weighed with our scientific instruments. ~ Eowyn Ivey, #NFDB
164:We have issued financial instruments in the past, and there is a strong demand for them, it is simply unnecessary now. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
165:Every artist is different - the pop mentality is different than bands for me, because I'm playing a lot of the instruments. ~ Matt Squire, #NFDB
166:In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano. ~ Evan Parker, #NFDB
167:Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way. ~ Evelyn Glennie, #NFDB
168:I came from an era when we didn't use electronic instruments. The bass wasn't even amplified. The sound was the sound you got. ~ Stan Getz, #NFDB
169:My instrument is the studio. When I play my instrument, I'm creating music using the studio. All the other instruments serve it. ~ Son Lux, #NFDB
170:Occasional war is one of the rigorous instruments in the hands of Providence to give tone to the character of nations. ~ John Quincy Adams, #NFDB
171:When I came to power, I did not want the concentration camps to become old age pensioners homes, but instruments of terror. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
172:Words are powerful instruments. Handle them and your understanding level of new information will grow in a spectacular way. ~ Kim Kiyosaki, #NFDB
173:Your mind, emotions and body are instruments and the way you align and tune them determines how well you play life. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
174:After I retired and came off the road, I gathered up all my musical instruments and suddenly, I wanted them all to be perfect. ~ Tom T Hall, #NFDB
175:Always turn to God in the midst of your struggle and view people who offended you as an instruments of divine sovereignty. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
176:I much prefer making music to talking about it. There's something visceral about instruments and voices that transcends words. ~ Mark Heard, #NFDB
177:I never felt that I had enough music, - I wanted more instruments playing together; I wanted voices to be fuller and deeper. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
178:Satan mostly employs comparatively moral instruments and the language of ethics to give his aims an air of respectability. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
179:To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
180:My father had all kinds of instruments in the house that he would hide from my mother. He bought them through mail order! ~ Cassandra Wilson, #NFDB
181:I always try not to overload my music with orchestration and to use only those instruments that are absolutely necessary. ~ Abel Korzeniowski, #NFDB
182:The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
183:This band is metal in that we have a lot of metal in our instruments, and there's quite a lot of metal on my belt buckle as well. ~ Mikey Way, #NFDB
184:...hell was a great fiery-hot music hall, he thought, where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolical cacophany... ~ Annie Proulx, #NFDB
185:In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer. ~ Nellie McKay, #NFDB
186:Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education. ~ John Henry Newman, #NFDB
187:The heart’s love allies itself readily with a vital desire in the body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #NFDB
188:I walk into a kids' store, and it's amazing, the types of instruments - little squeaky things, rattling things, spinning tops. ~ Evelyn Glennie, #NFDB
189:No matter what instruments [man] uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
190:Nothing, I believe, inspires a man with such eagerness to begin his day’s work as the sight of his instruments neatly laid out ~ Susanna Clarke, #NFDB
191:The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
192:I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place. ~ Steven Millhauser, #NFDB
193:I see God in the instruments and the mechanisms that work reliably, more reliably than the limited sensory departments of ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
194:There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
195:Murdoch's gun was the only thing in my life, the only thing worth living for. It gets like that sometimes, with instruments of death. ~ Jeff Noon, #NFDB
196:"No matter what instruments he uses, at some point [man] reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
197:She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone . ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
198:She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone . ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, #NFDB
199:The wicked do not die in that way: God seems to take them under his protection to use them as the instruments of his vengeance. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
200:We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara, #NFDB
201:I now understand more of our calling. The weakest instruments are chosen to do the greatest works so that the glory might go to God. ~ Paul Washer, #NFDB
202:Males have been groomed since birth, according to the specifications of a sick and perverse society, to become instruments of war. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
203:Spiritual instruments suffer in their potency when their use is taught through non-spiritual messages which are self-propagating. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
204:People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
205:Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
206:I am officially a doctor, and believe it or not, I can save lives and tune certain instruments and can beat peasants with a stick. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar, #NFDB
207:Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education. ~ Saint John Henry Newman, #NFDB
208:The instruments, glassware, and chemical reagents necessary for my project were the same as my 19th-century predecessors had. ~ Rita Levi Montalcini, #NFDB
209:We're dealing with music that is being played by traditional instruments in a specifically built building called a concert hall. ~ Esa Pekka Salonen, #NFDB
210:The guys in my band buy instruments and sell and trade them. But if I have something I hang onto it. Everything is sentimental to me. ~ Gary Clark Jr, #NFDB
211:When I first tried to get a record deal for my original music, labels didn’t understand what these instruments were meant to be doing ~ Suzanne Ciani, #NFDB
212:Arms are instruments of ill omen, not the instruments of the gentleman. When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
213:For each film, you try to create a whole world sonically, having a sense of identity through instruments used, or recording techniques. ~ Trent Reznor, #NFDB
214:He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
215:I'm for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children? ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
216:In the studio you have pretty much carte blanche with whatever you're doing. You can turn natural instruments into electronic instruments. ~ John Cale, #NFDB
217:And instruments of evil,” another man said. “They tear up the earth with their mining and refine her fruits into weapons of war.” The ~ Jaclyn Dolamore, #NFDB
218:Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
219:No rock and roll ensemble, however inspired, can deliver the kind of musical variety obtainable with the resources of 110 instruments. ~ Nicholas Meyer, #NFDB
220:Wrong will engenders wrong action of all these instruments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #NFDB
221:Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
222:My big break was becoming the spokesperson for Texas Instruments. Casting directors really started giving me a chance to read for projects. ~ Bella Thorne, #NFDB
223:Compelled to become instruments of war, to kill and be killed, child soldiers are forced to give violent expression to the hatreds of adults ~ Olara Otunnu, #NFDB
224:Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
225:They do that to you, demons. They know your intentions, your needs, your desires, and they play them like musicians play their instruments. ~ Pippa DaCosta, #NFDB
226:God, the supreme artist, uses our life for the creation of art. We are the instruments through which the force of life expresses itself. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz, #NFDB
227:The instruments were all half desired, half forgotten. It was as if they were left behind by a ghost right in the middle of playing. ~ Hannah Lillith Assadi, #NFDB
228:Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
229:The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth. ~ Jules Michelet, #NFDB
230:The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
231:Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
232:Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
233:When I get intimate with my paintings, it's a real good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release. ~ Ronnie Wood, #NFDB
234:Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
235:I used to play until 4 o'clock in the morning.My dad would go nuts - he'd scream and say the cops are gonna come and break our instruments. ~ Kamasi Washington, #NFDB
236:Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
237:The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
238:I am, by nature, a guitar player... I learned all of these other instruments around that, and around the theory that I built learning the guitar. ~ Hunter Hayes, #NFDB
239:There are times when I feel like I'm a traveling minister. I'm trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world. ~ Dave Grohl, #NFDB
240:Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
241:Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. ~ Walter Pater, #NFDB
242:[The poets' role is that of] capturing on their instruments the secret stir of life in the air and giving it voice in the music of prophecy ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
243:I got my MacBook in the first year at university, and that's really when I stopped playing live instruments and started geeking out on my laptop. ~ Ryan Hemsworth, #NFDB
244:I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass. ~ Billy Sheehan, #NFDB
245:I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments. ~ Kaki King, #NFDB
246:Soldering iron, Max.”
Tim cauterised the severed veins. Medical instruments were often just precision variations of the same tools handymen used. ~ Nick Cutter,#NFDB
247:The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture. ~ Jennifer Echols, #NFDB
248:If the EU and its 25 member states make a clever use of all policy instruments, broadband for all Europeans is certainly not out of reach by 2010. ~ Viviane Reding, #NFDB
249:Involuntarily, she stopped, jerked up her head, looked around her like a frightened woman. They weren’t car horns: they were wind instruments ~ Stephen R Donaldson, #NFDB
250:The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
251:The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way. ~ Antonin Artaud, #NFDB
252:Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well. ~ David Ives, #NFDB
253:Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
254:Friends or foes, they are all instruments in Her hands to help us work out our own karma, through pleasure or pain. As such, 'Mother' bless all. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
255:God was as visible in this affair as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool which he wills. He is not responsible to men. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
256:Having decided to follow my own intuitive path I began to write music on the basis of harmonized spoken words, for new instruments and in new scales. ~ Harry Partch, #NFDB
257:I have always been drawn to percussion and drums, to bass and piano, in music much more then I am drawn to the guitar and the other lead instruments. ~ Dave Matthews, #NFDB
258:Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices. ~ Rodrigue Tremblay, #NFDB
259:When people come together around common vision, they can accomplish great things. We need the instruments that pull our people together, not apart. ~ Nainoa Thompson, #NFDB
260:Pipes are not to be used for teaching, nor any artificial instruments, as the harp, or the like: but whatsoever will make the hearers good men. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
261:Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
262:The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
263:The instruments of war can be manufactured ... human blood cannot be; and the lack of just one pint could mean the life of an American serviceman. ~ George C Marshall, #NFDB
264:Wall Street got drunk and now it's got a hangover. And the question is, how long will it sober up and not try to do those fancy financial instruments? ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
265:And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
266:I get a lot of joy from playing instruments, and I have a different personality on each instrument. I like to let that come out. I get kind of selfish. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
267:When Simplicity is broken up, it is made into instruments. Evolved individuals who employ them, are made into leaders. In this way, the Great System is United. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
268:Yeah, I’ve played a lot of instruments, and I played in a lot of bands growing up and I’ve even had to play music in a lot of films that I’ve done. ~ Alessandro Nivola, #NFDB
269:Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
270:The driver had the radio on low – listening to music that sounded like someone had tied percussion instruments to a cow and set it running down an alley. ~ Russell Blake, #NFDB
271:The pure psychic being is of the essence of Ananda, it comes from the delight-soul in the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
272:We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune. ~ William Ralph Inge, #NFDB
273:I clean up, putting all the tools and instruments back where they belong, remembering that a tool in the wrong place is no better than a tool we don’t have. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
274:Maybe the same instruments and tools that have been used to keep people in slavery and ignorance could potentially be used to liberate and awaken them. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck, #NFDB
275:Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
276:There is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhaps there's no moment in life that's not musical... All instruments, musical or not, become instruments. ~ George Brecht, #NFDB
277:The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello. ~ Nicholas Christopher, #NFDB
278:He turned around to see the bass drum popping and the horn sections pointing their instruments to the balconies and sending glorious notes to the rooftops. ~ Hunter Murphy, #NFDB
279:If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~ John Cage, #NFDB
280:I love doing shows. I love rocking shows. I love playing instruments. I love singing. If I can find a way to do that and feed my family, then I'm a happy man. ~ Bruno Mars, #NFDB
281:I love traditional instruments, though of course they are anachronisms. Satellites run around our planet, but we still play bassoons. It's ridiculous! ~ Witold Lutoslawski, #NFDB
282:Like in the animal kingdom, where every creature has its defenses and weapons, humans also possess powerful instruments for camouflage, defense and attack. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
283:Percussion is physical, as most instruments are. The body must function well in order to play the instruments well. Last year I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. ~ Evelyn Glennie, #NFDB
284:The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
285:Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there's more than 808s in the universe. ~ Babatunde Adebimpe, #NFDB
286:All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
287:An instrument s a tool that is actively used to change something, and God has called all of his people to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
288:I have a lot of guitars. Yeah, I'm not like a guitar collector, I don't have all vintage instruments. I don't even own a Strat or Les Paul. I don't have one. ~ John Petrucci, #NFDB
289:She had an intense feeling for structure, the way things were put together – whether they were human bodies, or plants, or scientific instruments or machines. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
290:Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech. ~ Alan Dershowitz, #NFDB
291:I'm a huge fan of the series of books by Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments. I'm a fan myself, so to be cast as the lead heroine is completely incredible. ~ Lily Collins, #NFDB
292:Like architecture, all paraphernalia of warfare are PC objects: the most rational possible instruments at the service of the most irrational possible pursuit.) ~ Rem Koolhaas, #NFDB
293:There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum make instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
294:Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me. ~ Joan Miro, #NFDB
295:CLARIONET, n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet—two clarionets. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
296:Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them. ~ Robert Payne, #NFDB
297:I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
298:She did not acknowledge that her brain was warped, for the brain itself must assist in that acknowledgement, and she was disordering the very instruments of life. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
299:The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
300:All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change. ~ Osman Baydemir, #NFDB
301:Music is the medium for expressing emotion. Music kindles love and infuses hope. It has countless voices and instruments. Music is in the hearts of all men and women ~ Sivananda, #NFDB
302:Remember, Caleb, words are weak instruments of love. They can do many things, but they do not carry the truth like your hands do. People need to be shown, not told. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
303:Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
304:There are places on a man's head that are as hard as a rock. Your head's actually stronger than your body. And you don't have too many instruments up there workin'. ~ Joe Frazier, #NFDB
305:And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
306:I'm a self-taught musician, so I never really had the restrictions of any one instrument. I would always just sort of pick up instruments and make noise with 'em. ~ Adrian Grenier, #NFDB
307:Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin. ~ Michael Stipe, #NFDB
308:The Purusha has that capacity; for the spirit within can always change and perfect the working of its nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
309:Weapons are not proper instruments for gentle people; they use them only when they have no other choice. Peace and quiet are what they value. They do not glory in victory. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
310:Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age, because there wasn't any live music around my town and no one in my family played instruments. ~ Alan Jackson, #NFDB
311:I'm a member of the Primitive Baptist Church, and they will buy every CD that I have released, but they don't me just to bring the instruments much into the church. ~ Ralph Stanley, #NFDB
312:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will . . . than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
313:Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
314:The seemingly most hateful, those on the front lines of despair, are mere instruments of sinister forces, which pull the manipulative strings of manufactured supremacy. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
315:With his manifold instruments of personal power, he was mercilessly hounding all those who expressed differences of opinion with him, but he was always the victim. ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
316:But when my other untalented friends and I got together with some instruments it was like our world opened up. It was like zero and zero got together and made infinity. ~ Inio Asano, #NFDB
317:Everybody's got their tools or their instruments, and it's fun to see how people expose themselves to their profession or their profession becomes who they are. ~ David Gordon Green, #NFDB
318:I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music. ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
319:Major instruments of social stability. Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
320:The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
321:What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality? ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
322:A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
323:He often chooses weak instruments in order that His power might be manifested; otherwise it would seem that the good was done by the clay, rather than by the Spirit. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
324:If I don't have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
325:Let me alone: I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it's off the better. ~ Horatio Nelson, #NFDB
326:Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the instruments of love. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
327:One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
328:Skiffle was blues featuring a washboard and acoustic instruments. It encompassed blues, with elements of folk, jazz, and, at times, American country-and-western music. ~ Van Morrison, #NFDB
329:Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Est s, #NFDB
330:During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes. ~ Walter Kohn, #NFDB
331:The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
332:You know, it comes from my mother's side of the family. She had seven sisters and one brother, and all of them could play instruments. I suppose I picked it up from that. ~ Mel Tillis, #NFDB
333:Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
334:Instruments fascinate me because they're completely awkward. When I picked up a guitar for the first time I was like, "What is this?" because it's so foreign and unknown. ~ Brie Larson, #NFDB
335:Man is not and cannot be wholly governed either in his thought or his action by the reason alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #NFDB
336:The art of life is to live in the present moment, and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God Himself. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
337:The bass is the link between harmony and rhythm. It is the foundation of a band. It is what all the other instruments stand upon, but it is rarely recognized as that. ~ Victor Wooten, #NFDB
338:Artemis might have the most perfect instruments, the finest guns, the best ammunition ever made, but they were useless without clear heads and steady hands and keen eyes. ~ C S Forester, #NFDB
339:But tis strange: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the Instruments of Darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray's in deepest consequence. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
340:For the resolving powers of our scientific instruments decide, at a given moment, of the size and the vision of our Universe, and of the image we then make of ourselves. ~ Albert Claude, #NFDB
341:I saw with regret, (and all scientific men have shared this feeling) that whilst the number of accurate instruments was daily increasing, we were still ignorant ~ Alexander von Humboldt, #NFDB
342:Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope. ~ Tom Head, #NFDB
343:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
344:These instruments can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed when they enshrined the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
345:We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
346:And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, 135 The instruments of darkness tell us truths, 136 Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s 137 In deepest consequence.— 138 ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
347:The future like the past presents itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of the preknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #NFDB
348:We must realize our own talents and, having realized, accept them; and play on them like a symphony in which all other instruments are harmonized to make a better universe. ~ Jeane Dixon, #NFDB
349:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
350:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
351:The worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, The Refusal of the Ascetic, #NFDB
352:What I enjoy most about being on stage is that the natural instruments give you a greater freedom with texture. When you use natural instruments they have their own resonance. ~ John Cale, #NFDB
353:good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
354:If we want to eliminate bad qualities like hatred, envy, pride and ostentation, we have to employ Sathya, Dharma, Santhi and Prema and Ahimsa as the cleaning instruments. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
355:The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
356:In turning from the smaller instruments in frequent use to the larger and more important machines, the economy arising from the increase of velocity becomes more striking. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
357:I think the world is ready for some rock 'n' roll. Some real time guys that play their own instruments, write their own songs, and sing the music and have a good time doing it. ~ Vince Neil, #NFDB
358:Rafferty [Law] plays three or four instruments. He is very gifted. Whereas I pick instruments up and kind of stare at them and go, "I can't ever possibly play this." And I don't! ~ Jude Law, #NFDB
359:The instruments for the quest of truth are as simple as they are difficult. They may appear quite impossible to an arrogant person, and quite possible to an innocent child. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
360:The power is with the silent ones, who only live and love and then withdraw their personality. They never say “me” and “mine”; they are only blessed in being instruments ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
361:There is a oneness native and occult
That needs no instruments and erects no form;
In unison it grows with all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Birth and Childhood of the Flame,#NFDB
362:The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity. ~ Steve Lacy, #NFDB
363:If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
364:In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. ~ Shane Claiborne, #NFDB
365:Drummers shouldn't just think of themselves as drummers. If you're going to be a musician, you should expand your horizons, compose things, and work with other instruments. ~ Stewart Copeland, #NFDB
366:Freedom and democracy are nothing but instruments, just like stability. The goal is called progress and growth. Anyone who puts freedom ahead of stability is hurting growth. ~ Bashar al Assad, #NFDB
367:suffering can serve as instruments to teach us the value of dependence, and unless we learn dependence we will never experience grace. The apostle Paul gave the Corinthians an ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
368:Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
369:All methods and techniques - and of course all human beings who propound them - are merely instruments to help the student obtain a methodless, technique-free, teacherless state. ~ Paul Brunton, #NFDB
370:A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
371:For me, I work very self-contained. It's literally just me sitting in a room doing it until the very end of the process when other musicians come in and instruments are recorded. ~ Steven Price, #NFDB
372:I still think that I'm playing instruments, not just pushing buttons and there it goes. It's interactive and alive with the sound and the manipulation and it plays like instruments. ~ Ikue Mori, #NFDB
373:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
374:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
375:To get the universal Ananda all our instruments must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential joy of all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #NFDB
376:I really am a firm believer that if you're going to do something musically, you really need to know what that music would have sounded like, what those instruments would have been. ~ John Debney, #NFDB
377:My brother, Mario, is in show business and so are all my cousins on my dad's side. We come from a family of musicians. My grandmother's sister in Puerto Rico plays five instruments. ~ Irene Cara, #NFDB
378:Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority. ~ Justin Kaplan, #NFDB
379:Right where you are, without instruments, you can lift up your hands, your voice and your heart, and worship Him and give thanks for His finished work and His grace in your life. ~ Joseph Prince, #NFDB
380:Shout! Play instruments! Praise our God and King; sing praises to Him who is worthy. 7For He is the King of all the earth. Sing praise, all who can. Put words to music, and then sing ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
381:We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour. ~ Thomas Clarkson, #NFDB
382:None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
383:Sometimes it's nice to try different instruments because they have a different sound to offer and therefore your approach changes a little bit. But, I always come back to the piano. ~ McCoy Tyner, #NFDB
384:The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
385:I had grown up idolizing Prince, who played over twenty instruments on his debut album, which featured the amazing credit line “written, composed, performed, and recorded by Prince. ~ Duff McKagan, #NFDB
386:"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony." ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
387:Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope. ~ Thomas Head Raddall, #NFDB
388:Many of the white people [who] have been instruments in the hands of God for our good, even such as have held us in captivity, are now pleading our cause with earnestness and zeal. ~ Richard Allen, #NFDB
389:My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to read and set the instruments, as well as the basics of taking off and landing. ~ Leigh Newman, #NFDB
390:The heart’s faith and will in good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent in all things and leading the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
391:Type designers are, at their best, the Stradivarii of literature: not merely makers of salable products, but artists who design and make the instruments that other artists use. ~ Robert Bringhurst, #NFDB
392:When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
393:It is essential that policy instruments be developed that would firmly establish democratization on the basis of social consensus and enable transformation on stable grounds. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan, #NFDB
394:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments with fiddle-strings & harps, drums & tambourines, I sound & clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
395:She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. ~ Thomas Love Peacock, #NFDB
396:SIMON LEWIS, ERIC HILLCHURCH, KIRK DUPLESSE, AND MATT CHARLTON
"THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS"
MAY 19, PROSPECT PARK BAND SHELL
BRING THIS FLYER, GET $5 OFF YOUR ENTRANCE FEE! ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
397:The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological effect, nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape, stands alone among the instruments of noise. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
398:The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war. ~ Rosa Luxemburg, #NFDB
399:All harmony proceeds upon seen or given lines and carries with it a constant pulsation and rhythmic recurrence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #NFDB
400:I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm. ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
401:The hellish instruments of war must be smoked out while there is still peace. The Trade Union Movement must be compelled not to allow their old resolutions to fade in the files. ~ Carl von Ossietzky, #NFDB
402:If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments [if] one suffices. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
403:In the old law, God was praised both with musical instruments, and human voices. But the church does not use musical instruments to praise God, lest she should seem to judaize. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
404:I want kids to understand that making pictures is similar to making music; there are so many instruments and so many tunes that the possibilities for how you play are truly limitless. ~ Jerry Pinkney, #NFDB
405:Multinational corporations and a market economy have transformed human beings into instruments of making money. Human beings should be the end. And money should be the means to an end. ~ Satish Kumar, #NFDB
406:My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
407:The clocks had nothing to do with time but were merely instruments, the clicking and ticking of silver and gold and bronze and pinchbeck arrows, a droll and slapstick rhapsody of lies. ~ Tabitha King, #NFDB
408:The gourney, the big file drawers of the dead, the instruments of dissection - this sure looked like the morgues in the movies. Something had gone seriously wrong while she slept. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
409:The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB
410:Incredible things are happening in the world," he said to Úrsula. "Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
411:I worked really hard to develop me as an artist and as a musician. I have so many different influences and play so many different instruments, I don't think anyone knew what to do with me! ~ Elle King, #NFDB
412:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ~ Friedrich Engels, #NFDB
413:The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with. ~ William Trevor, #NFDB
414:Although the paranoiacs make the great leaders, it's the resenters who make their best instruments because the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins. ~ Richard Condon, #NFDB
415:Every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this. ~ Gordon Cooper, #NFDB
416:Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies. ~ Lord Chesterfield, #NFDB
417:I didn't follow the standard rules of bass playing, and many musicians on many different instruments who became noteworthy for their unique or particular style did a very similar thing. ~ Billy Sheehan, #NFDB
418:Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
419:I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand, and villainy on the other, as this writ of assistance is. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
420:Measuring nuclear yield depends on multiple parameters - the location and number of instruments, the geology of the area, the location of the seismic station in relation to the test site. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
421:There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, grass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
422:And then the last album, "Get It", was done over a shorter period of time and I started using other musicians, as opposed to playing all the instruments myself like I did on the other two. ~ Dave Edmunds, #NFDB
423:His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
424:I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So, I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
425:Some of the most significant discoveries in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their beliefs. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
426:The woman is at the heart of the home. Let us pray that we women realize the reason for our existence: to love and be loved and through this love become instruments of peace in the world. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
427:This is the love that does all things; that brings to pass even the evils we suffer; so shaping them that they are but instruments of preparing the good which, as yet, has not arrived. ~ Francois Fenelon, #NFDB
428:A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader. ~ The Edge, #NFDB
429:The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
430:16David also commanded the chiefs of the Levites to appoint their brothers as the singers who should play loudly on p musical instruments, on harps and lyres and cymbals, to raise sounds of joy ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
431:Dreams, stories, art- they were, and are, instruments of divine intervention that molded you into a woman who dwells in possibility: who now feels herself serene with comfort and strength. ~ Marjorie M Liu, #NFDB
432:I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So... I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
433:I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students. ~ Rafe Esquith, #NFDB
434:The inspector, though well educated, had been raised in very modest circumstances and therefore treated his staff as human beings and not instruments put on this earth to do his bidding. ~ Emily Brightwell, #NFDB
435:Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
436:With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
437:I have tried to improve telescopes and practiced continually to see with them. These instruments have play'd me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours. ~ William Herschel, #NFDB
438:I use the words gods and goddesses principally, I think, to mean beautiful bodies - bodies that are absolute instruments. And I believe in discipline, I believe in a very definite technique. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
439:The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the related Accra Agenda for Action, are useful policy instruments that set out the mutual responsibilities of donors and recipient countries. ~ Margaret Chan, #NFDB
440:The Spirit never makes men the instruments of converting others until they feel that they cannot do it themselves; that their skill in argument, in persuasion, in management, avails nothing. ~ Charles Hodge, #NFDB
441:Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
442:Making a movie is the same as an orchestra; it's moving all the different instruments and the sounds, the kinetic and the auditory and the visual all together. I'm probably the trombone. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB
443:Thou and I are but the blind instruments of some irresistible fatality, that hurries us along, like goodly vessels driving before the storm, which are dashed against each other, and so perish. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
444:We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but I was old enough then to believe we don’t know half as much as we think we do, and old enough now to believe we never will. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
445:Ethics deals only with the desire-soul and the active outward dynamical part of our being; its field is confined to character and action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #NFDB
446:Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges. ~ Anna Lindh, #NFDB
447:I feel dirty. I feel tarnished. I feel befouled. Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
448:Most of my guitars have been instruments that look cool. I'm not picky. I never think, 'Oh, this neck isn't made of ebony,' or, 'These strings don't feel correct.' It doesn't matter too much. ~ James Hetfield, #NFDB
449:No! Once the music plays, it creates me. The instruments move me, through me, they control me. Sometimes I'm uncontrollable and it just happens - boom, boom, boom! - once it gets inside you. ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
450:The feeling ' I am the doer ' is the outcome of ignorance . But the feeling that God does everything is due to knowledge. God alone is the Doer; all others are mere instruments in His hands. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
451:As I passed alongside it, I prayed for a future in which the peoples of the Holy Land can live together in peace and harmony without the need for such instruments of security and separation ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
452:Signs of economic crisis in the offing promoted a renewed interest in guns as decisive instruments in domestic politics, a renewed attraction to the protection afforded by aggressive leagues of men ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
453:The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece. ~ Elliott Carter, #NFDB
454:But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments. ~ John Boyne, #NFDB
455:I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook—what I want the track to be about melodically—and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments. ~ Avicii, #NFDB
456:After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate. ~ Michael Mandelbaum, #NFDB
457:A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I'm very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time. ~ Eddie Van Halen, #NFDB
458:For a moment or two the old man didn’t reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
459:If we use our policy instruments wisely with regard to broadband, we can do some very practical things to make 'growth and jobs' a reality in the less-developed and rural regions of Europe, too. ~ Viviane Reding, #NFDB
460:I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
461:Reason and intelligence and mind and sense and life and body, all that we vaunt or take for our own, are Nature’s instruments and creations. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Fullness of Spiritual Action, #NFDB
462:Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
463:State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
464:The guitar is my favorite and the one, I guess, I'm best at. But I play enough of the different instruments to be able to write with them and to, hopefully, to make myself look impressive on stage. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
465:We are God’s gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully. ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
466:At bottom, Conan Doyle for the Defense is a story about class identification: those snap judgments, themselves dark diagnostic instruments, that in every age are wielded to separate 'us' from 'them. ~ Margalit Fox, #NFDB
467:I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments - guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums. ~ Imogen Heap, #NFDB
468:On a certain level all knowledge presents itself as a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of supermind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #NFDB
469:A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
470:...Instruments of God. We are the hammer, but our Father is the carpenter. Do not thank the hammer for a carpentry job well done.
Snelling, Lauraine. An Untamed Heart (Red River of the North) ~ Lauraine Snelling,#NFDB
471:I play a bunch of instruments, like piano, drums, guitar and bass. And the kazoo every now and then. I'm trying to learn how to play the trumpet and the saxophone. That's what I'm learning how to play. ~ Mac Miller, #NFDB
472:I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content. ~ Ken Burns, #NFDB
473:Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
474:... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. ~ Jean Fran ois Lyotard, #NFDB
475:Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
Nothing is all our own that we create:
The Power that acts in us is not our force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute,#NFDB
476:The Bassbone is just what I have been looking for... I can maintain the integrity of two instruments on stage or in the studio with control over the balance and keep my high standards for my low notes! ~ Nathan East, #NFDB
477:The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
478:The reason that some singers go on to become great artists has very little to do with their voices, but rather with the fact that they have used their instruments as tools for detailed communication. ~ Renee Fleming, #NFDB
479:The songs, if I write alone in a room, end up being a little more quiet, a little more subdued. If I play with other musicians or percussive instruments, it might end up being a little more upbeat. ~ Marketa Irglova, #NFDB
480:In China, remember, the the banks are arms of state policy. They loan because the local party official or regional party official tells them we need a new stadium. They are instruments of state policy. ~ James Chanos, #NFDB
481:Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
482:the instruments of power - arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets - always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
483:The Spirit created the world for Ananda, enjoyment and possession of the many by the One, of the One by the many and of the many too by the many. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #NFDB
484:Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
485:Music to me is a voice, my voice, it's my way of expressing what colours can I bring in, what emotions, what feel. What ideas can I bring out from these instruments that would make this song come alive. ~ Saint Jerome, #NFDB
486:But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
487:Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen. ~ John Kao, #NFDB
488:I can strip down basic principles of certain things and apply it to everything else. And that keeps you interested, changing the art form, making it more avant-garde. Because I can't play any instruments. ~ Lupe Fiasco, #NFDB
489:I believe in corporations. They are indispensable instruments of our modern civilization. But I believe they should be so regulated that they shall act for the interests of the community as a whole. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
490:I once donated a pint of my finest red corpuscles to the great American Red Cross and the doctor opined my blood was very helpful; contained so much alcohol they could use it to sterilize their instruments. ~ W C Fields, #NFDB
491:I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered. ~ Yo Yo Ma, #NFDB
492:Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one of the means through which they conserve their supremacy. ~ Sheila Rowbotham, #NFDB
493:Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
494:So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own. ~ Luc Ferrari, #NFDB
495:Watching the infinite horizons gives you infinite dreams, infinite ideas, infinite paths! Choose a great target and then you will see that great instruments will appear for you to reach that target! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
496:We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but I was old enough then to believe we don't know half as much as we think we do, and old enough now to believe we never will. Holmes ~ John Joseph Adams, #NFDB
497:Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. ~ Serhii Plokhy, #NFDB
498:an orchestra is unified not because all the instruments are the same, but because the different instruments are playing the same song. They are using their unique sounds to create beautiful harmonic textures. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
499:I like big shows, a lot of volume and a lot of energy. I love electric instruments. But I do love mixing those with bluegrass instruments and cranking those up, too, with a little bit of that rock energy. ~ Dierks Bentley, #NFDB
500:I use both instruments with their strengths in mind. Mandolin - no sustain and attack of the right hand, for rhythm. Fiddle - use sustain of the bow and the ability to slide the non-fretted notes, like singing. ~ Sam Bush, #NFDB
501:My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.” ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
502:There's quite an overlap between musicians - especially drummers - who have an affection and a proclivity towards comedy and comedians who fantasize about being in a band. And a lot of comics play instruments. ~ David Cross, #NFDB
503:Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock. ~ Dave Grohl, #NFDB
504:I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do. The fun of playing an assassin is that I've never killed anybody. The fun of playing a brilliant musician is that I don't actually play any instruments. ~ Eric McCormack, #NFDB
505:He took with him a bag in which were many instruments and drugs, 'the ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade', as he once called, in one of his lectures, the equipment of a professor of the healing craft. ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
506:The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. ~ Hector Berlioz, #NFDB
507:This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
508:I am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created. ~ Romano Prodi, #NFDB
509:We are all children of blood and bone. All instruments of vengeance and virtue. This truth holds me close, rocking me like a child in a mother’s arms. It binds me in its love as death swallows me into its grasp. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
510:We are not to throw away those things which can benefit our neighbor. Goods are called good because they can be used for good: they are instruments for good, in the hands of those who use them properly. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
511:In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
512:In the navel lotus’ broad imperial range
Its proud ambitions and its master lusts
Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway
To do a work of God on earthly soil. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#NFDB
513:O Supreme Lord of the universe, we implore Thee, give us the strength and beauty, the harmonious perfection needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth."
Works Of The Mother, Notes On The Way vol.11, p.91 ~ The Mother,#NFDB
514:A divine quietism discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine kinetism adds to it the right pure undeviating action of the soul, mind and body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Instruments of the Spirit, #NFDB
515:The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
516:You do not recognize what truth is, so you call it a trick. That is why you are not wise, Jenna Zan Arbor. Wisdom is something you cannot identify because you cannot measure it with your instruments. - Qui-Gon Jinn ~ Jude Watson, #NFDB
517:...All the shops have been smashed open. There was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?"
"Yeah," said Rincewind. "...Luters, I expect. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
518:If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
519:Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
520:I'm seeing and hearing lots of B to B instruments, and everybody isn't, you know, using them... a lot of these guys are trying to do it on conventional guitars, although that has its own sound, and maybe its okay. ~ John Sebastian, #NFDB
521:No, it's the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing? ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
522:The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology. ~ Antonio Damasio, #NFDB
523:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
524:If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
525:It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
526:It reminded him of the cacophony of an orchestra as it tuned its instruments: dissonance, suddenly resolving into harmony. It was the rumble, not of thunder, but its low, rolling precursor, trembling on the horizon. ~ Courtney Milan, #NFDB
527:It’s good to have a melting pot of friends. You need a little variety in your life. It’s like music. We’re all different and play our own instruments, but to make music, real, beautiful music, you gotta blend together. ~ Johan Twiss, #NFDB
528:Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets. ~ Michael J Sandel, #NFDB
529:The tune here is an old-fashioned town-crowd melody--kind of like how the people from the town in The Music Man might sound if Harold Hill had brought an infant homosexual to town instead of wind instruments. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
530:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
531:The body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Power of the Instruments, #NFDB
532:Charlie Parker was the greatest individual musician that ever lived. Every instrument in the band tried to copy Charlie Parker, and in the history of jazz there had never been one man who influenced all the instruments. ~ Gary Giddins, #NFDB
533:I always think of a voice as an instrument, whether a voice is a trumpet, or violin, or bass. You know what I mean? A horn or wind instrument versus a string instrument. Horn instruments are definitely more toward jazz. ~ Debbie Harry, #NFDB
534:In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls….Rather we are…instruments of His will, providing mansions for the souls that He creates. —ALAN TURING, 1950 ~ Daniel H Wilson, #NFDB
535:In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments ~ John Green, #NFDB
536:It was a ridiculous question. Did I love Char? Did I feel about Char the same way I feel about the Beatles, string instruments in pop songs, the way Little Anthony sang high notes, the way Jerry Lee Lewis played piano? ~ Leila Sales, #NFDB
537:Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
538:One should know a little of everything. If a man starts a grocery-shop, he keeps all kinds of articles there, including a little lentil and tamarind. An expert musician knows how to play a little on all instruments. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
539:So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world! ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
540:Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety,
moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess,' whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex? ~ Jean Paul Sartre,#NFDB
541:I think the world is very much embracing this whole concept of musicians going out and playing their instruments and playing music for music as opposed to music that has something to do with some form of image or imagery. ~ Les Claypool, #NFDB
542:Sorrow is sent by Him, not by men. Men are His instruments, they are not to blame. If you think someone has wronged you, forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish. And then you will know the happiness of forgiving. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
543:We pray with our hands and often communicate with them. We use them to eat, work, and make love. We employ them as marvelously sophisticated instruments of flexibility and strength, and when they are damaged, we anguish. ~ Keith L Moore, #NFDB
544:I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration. ~ Talib Kweli, #NFDB
545:I used to play a few instruments including guitar and snare drums, but I think a musical background is an important part of a career. If you start out playing instruments you create a better instinct and feeling for music. ~ Nicky Romero, #NFDB
546:There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
547:The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces. ~ James Clerk Maxwell, #NFDB
548:I just have some restaurants to just go and eat there. Do mean places to watch people? I like to go shopping look for guitars and stuff with my friends. Look at Meyer, great old instruments, talk about pedals and stuff ~ Jason Schwartzman, #NFDB
549:Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
550:Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety,
moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of
excess,' whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex? ~ Jean Paul Sartre,#NFDB
551:God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job. ~ John Bertram Phillips, #NFDB
552:I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret, overruling decree, that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open. ~ Daniel Defoe, #NFDB
553:Before the Man is able to master, control, and direct the things belonging to him—his tools and instruments—he must awaken to a realization of Himself. He must be able to distinguish between the "I" and the "Not I. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
554:Georg Hegel viewed the "great men" as instruments of something far greater. Hegel believes that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist for a moment, but also that the individual isn't always clear they are doing so. ~ Emmanuel Macron, #NFDB
555:Science is only ‘one’ of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy and too dangerous to be left on its own. ~ Paul Feyerabend, #NFDB
556:There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
557:A seventh-century Coptic bishop would later describe her as “devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music” who “beguiled many people through [her] Satanic wiles,” which sounds like a compliment to me. SOPHIA ~ Sam Maggs, #NFDB
558:I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated. ~ Joanna Newsom, #NFDB
559:I sometimes wish taste wasn't ever an issue, and the sounds of instruments or synths could be judged solely on their colour and timbre. Judged by what it did to your ears, rather than what its historical use reminds you of. ~ Jonny Greenwood, #NFDB
560:It's quite a trick to use three instruments to tell the story of two people, but Vores carried it off; three, for once, is not a crowd. Each member of the trio gets important solos, but there is also a real ensemble character. ~ Richard Dyer, #NFDB
561:The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
562:What grieves me is that I am constantly forgetting to recognize God’s hand in the little, everyday trials of life, and instead of receiving them as from Him, find fault with the instruments by which He sends them. ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, #NFDB
563:All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor! ~ Ren Daumal, #NFDB
564:I have just begun a work in which an important part is given to a large chorus and with it I want to use several of your instruments - augmenting their range as in those I used for my Equatorial - especially in the high range. ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
565:It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman's body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will. ~ Naomi Wolf, #NFDB
566:We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. ~ David Sarnoff, #NFDB
567:A breeze lifted off the ocean and several hundred notes from the wind chimes tinkled like ice shaken in silver cups. They altered the mood of the forest the way an orchestra does a theater when it begins tuning up its instruments. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
568:An all-wise Providence permits not sinners to escape thus easily from the punishment they have merited on earth, but reserves them to aid his own designs, using them as instruments whereby to work his vengeance on the guilty. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
569:Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
570:We live in the dark ages. If an intelligent society can destroy itself in large numbers and places the largest amount of revenues in instruments of destruction, it is certainly not an evolved society or an intelligent society. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
571:In most places that are rich in guitar culture, everyone uses their fingers, like in Spain or Africa. In Japan there are string instruments played that way. It is not until you get in the States that you find people using picks. ~ Kevin Eubanks, #NFDB
572:Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
573:The standard texts are powerful instruments of disorientation; for confusing the mind and preparing it for the acceptance of myths of growing complexity and unreality. —Guy Routh, The Origin of Economic Ideas ========== Culture Jam: ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
574:I didn't want to try and borrow kudos from Indonesian culture. I was trying to get a fresh perspective on these instruments. I'm not doing a Paul Simon Gracelands and stealing all this African music and not give anyone any credit. ~ Squarepusher, #NFDB
575:What he had no disagreement about with either former president was that political parties were instruments of bad governance; they were manifestations of individual or group self-interest that would undermine republican government. ~ Fred Kaplan, #NFDB
576:Cannons and fire-arms are cruel and damnable machines; I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the Devil. If Adam had seen in a vision the horrible instruments his children were to invent, he would have died of grief. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
577:I do like choral music a lot, the voice is a pretty strong instrument - out of all the instruments, it's the most intimate. There's nothing you can do about it, it just feels so good when you hear a bunch of voices sing together. ~ Patrick Watson, #NFDB
578:If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained? ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
579:Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!” “You burn prettily,” I said. ~ Roger Zelazny, #NFDB
580:We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
581:Growing up in Louisiana, my grandmother gave me an accordion because of our Cajun heritage. What ended up happening was I started learning about more instruments, so I just kind of went that route. Music's really all I've ever done. ~ Hunter Hayes, #NFDB
582:Headbangers' are people who like heavy-metal music, which is performed by skinny men with huge hair who stomp around the stage, striking their instruments and shrieking angrily, apparently because somebody has stolen all their shirts. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
583:I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers. ~ Leon Golub, #NFDB
584:Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them. ~ Brian McKnight, #NFDB
585:String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions. So, as experimentalists we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us. ~ Fabiola Gianotti, #NFDB
586:The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
587:When my YouTube videos started to get really big, I was like, 'Man, this is pretty sweet.' It started as my hobby, and then I started traveling and learning how to play different instruments, and then it just kind of became my life. ~ Austin Mahone, #NFDB
588:By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
589:I admire the artists that work everyday to attest things for themselves... In the act of transforming the objects of the everyday they transform the passage of time and analyze the economics and politics of the instruments of living. ~ Gabriel Orozco, #NFDB
590:Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
591:In the Sixties, the hippies said "Make love, not war," and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say "Make music, not war," in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
592:As good surgical doctor works on a patient in the theater with varied kinds of surgical instruments, so a true leader also needs a clean bag of leadership characters that vary from task to task. One-way leaders are obvious failures! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
593:Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature. ~ Antonio Damasio, #NFDB
594:Cycles are the heartbeats of understanding. A thing perceived is just an event. Repeated, it opens up to the instruments of science, the ruminations of philosophers, the imaginations of shamans. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind, #NFDB
595:I was in a Led Zeppelin cover band in high school, and my highlight was playing "Misty Mountain Hop" at a coffee house in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I wasn't allowed to play any instruments; I could only be the singer because I was a girl. ~ Victoria Legrand, #NFDB
596:The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that. ~ Wynton Marsalis, #NFDB
597:The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse; because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
598:I'm making a record that's half stripped down acoustic which is the way I perform a lot and half of it is very produced. It's really hard to keep music simple but I was trying to keep it simple and focus on one or two instruments and vocals. ~ Lisa Loeb, #NFDB
599:This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
600:I'll try any guitar just to see if it's different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I'm trying to have a guitar built. What's needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better. ~ Jerry Garcia, #NFDB
601:It is remarkable that Providence has given us all things for our advantage near at hand; but iron, gold, and silver, being both the instruments of blood and slaughter and the price of it, nature has hidden in the bowels of the earth. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
602:The Cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord. The fact that the Lord knows how to work and to act even with inadequate instruments comforts me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
603:The problem of physics is how the actual phenomena, as observed with the help of our sense organs aided by instruments, can be reduced to simple notions which are suited for precise measurement and used of the formulation of quantitative laws. ~ Max Born, #NFDB
604:There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort. ~ Yo Yo Ma, #NFDB
605:I can play a bunch of instruments but drums? My brothers a drummer and Ive always been jealous that hes such a good drummer. I always try to play but its always kinda just bashing. I can keep time but no one really wants to hear me play drums. ~ Nat Wolff, #NFDB
606:Now if I do anything it is to tune souls instead of instruments. To harmonize people instead of notes. If there is anything in my philosophy, it is the law of harmony: that one must put oneself in harmony with oneself and with others. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
607:The moment we give in, no machine in the world can help us. But as long as we do not lose the feeling that calls out to every valiant man, ’You are born to rule,’ we shall always know how to create the best instruments of power of our time. ~ Ernst J nger, #NFDB
608:I was never a singer, I can't play any instruments, I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn't have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
609:What people want to read often seems incongruous. A pair of biker-types taking away Thoughts of the Dalai Lama. People without access to instruments requesting sheet music. Aspiring poets sharing their work and then borrowing horror stories. ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB
610:For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
611:I come from a sense of struggle, a sense of using the instruments that were given to me to manipulate the environment in which I found myself, and joined up with those who are equally as skillful at manipulating that environment, as was I. ~ Harry Belafonte, #NFDB
612:Organisation, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders. ~ Errico Malatesta, #NFDB
613:The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
614:To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared. ~ Edward Said, #NFDB
615:The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased. ~ Charles Hodge, #NFDB
616:There is the sheer amount of Franklin's wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation's leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
617:There were some initial instruments I had when I was young and made some trade-offs. Maybe a guitar I bought in a flea market. They weren't the greatest guitar but they would be cool to still have them. Other than that, not as a professional. ~ John Petrucci, #NFDB
618:It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
619:Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man. ~ John Henry Newman, #NFDB
620:This process of conquest could be described as progress for the kingdom of life. It journeyed on through one success to another by dealing with the laws of Nature through the help of the invention of new instruments. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, #NFDB
621:Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
622:The Immaculate alone has from God the promise of victory over Satan. She seeks souls that will consecrate themselves entirely to her, that will become in her hands forceful instruments for the defeat of Satan and the spread of God's kingdom. ~ Maximilian Kolbe, #NFDB
623:I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. ~ Edward R Murrow, #NFDB
624:The greatest thing in the world is love. And if we keep that always in our hearts, and give it as a message to those about us, we will be blessed and will be instruments in blessing those with whom we associate. ~ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, #NFDB
625:So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love. ~ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, #NFDB
626:Artificial and forced, instruments themselves of repression, the borders were their obstacle, having wiped away what was best about the Arab world. They hewed to no certain logic; a glimpse at any map suggests as much. The lines are too straight, ~ Anthony Shadid, #NFDB
627:In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism. ~ John Bolton, #NFDB
628:In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
629:In so far as I make a world exist as a complex of instruments which I use for the ends of my human reality, I cause myself to be determined in my being by a being who makes the world exist as a complex of instruments for the ends of his reality. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
630:I put in the sounds of instruments such as the guitar and piano, which everybody hears often, and tried to go with melodies that would sound familiar. Rather than trying to do music that I want to do, I focused on doing music that I want my fans to hear. ~ Seungri, #NFDB
631:Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success - his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. ~ Chief Dan George, #NFDB
632:Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn't have - until recently - were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That's what the 'kids for cash' judges were apparently experimenting with. ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
633:Therefore we are taught here that true vengeance is carried out, not by our passion but by God’s command and on account of God. We are only the instruments of the avenging God, and we arrogate nothing of the vengeance to ourselves, as you see here. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
634:You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
635:If men make war in slavish observance of rules, they will fail. No rules will apply to conditions of war as different as those which exist in Europe and America...War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive. ~ Ulysses S Grant, #NFDB
636:Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man. ~ Saint John Henry Newman, #NFDB
637:I actually prefer to hear small groups of instruments. Orchestras seem to lack a texture for me, or variety of texture. There's only about ten things you can do with one note in a string section. But a lone violin is continuously changing textures. ~ Stephin Merritt, #NFDB
638:If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
639:It is terrifying when God takes out the instruments for the surgery for which no human being has the strength: to take away a person’s human zest for life, to slay him – in order that he can live as one who has died to the world and to the flesh. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
640:When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
641:Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page, or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor and it comes alive, in a way that you didn't expect. ~ Kelly Masterson, #NFDB
642:I give myself different roles. I think in different ways on different days. Sometimes I think of it as cooking - different flavors and different ingredients. Sometimes I think of it like orchestrating a piece of music with all the different instruments. ~ Joe Bradley, #NFDB
643:My philosophy is, honestly never collected anything that I don't play. I know a lot of people that collect guitars, but for me, I want instruments that I play. And if I don't play them, I don't' want to have them sitting in a closet collecting dust. ~ Ronnie Montrose, #NFDB
644:Mendelssohn I consider the first musician of the day; I doff my hat to him as my superior. He plays with everything, especially with the grouping of the instruments in the orchestra, but with such ease, delicacy and art, with such mastery throughout. ~ Robert Schumann, #NFDB
645:There are benefits in the sense that there's still a certain level of confidence. But there are liabilities because you can coordinate and manipulate better as the instruments of oversight are more under your control. You don't have so many rogue operations. ~ Ted Gup, #NFDB
646:Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
647:A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can’t quite measure or understand. Because we’re these incredibly blunt instruments. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
648:Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
649:The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder - deserted, motionless, dead. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
650:We are gripped by God’s will of love, and must help carry out that will in this world, in small things as in great things, in saving as in pardoning. To be glad instruments of God’s love in this imperfect world is the service to which we are called. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
651:As players of instruments, it is our duty to reach out and give light to those in the dark in whatever way that we can. All my actions are a fulfilment of all the African music genres - I'm only trying to maintain the culture and the tradition. I am a musician. ~ Sizzla, #NFDB
652:For a long time in the 1970s, I was experimenting to build musical instruments and use them. I did a lot of ethnic music studies and other things, like electronic music. Making homemade musical instruments and performing was my major activity from the time. ~ Yoshi Wada, #NFDB
653:Music is formed by instruments, framed with notes, paced by our hands playing with Time, but above all, it is made up of emotions. It transports you back to moments when you felt most alive. If it doesn’t release your locked feelings, music is just air. ~ Joseph Legaspi, #NFDB
654:Stupid to keep cash, there was no reason for it other than his dislike of credit cards and checks and stocks and instruments of transfer, all the tempting chains that tied people to America’s overwhelming and ultimately destructive debt-and-spend machine. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
655:Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything. ~ K Eric Drexler, #NFDB
656:Our children should be taught to beware of everything foreign and not to disclose any state or party secrets to foreigners... for foreigners are eyes for their countries, and some of them are counterrevolutionary instruments [in the hands of imperialism]. ~ Saddam Hussein, #NFDB
657:Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
658:We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention, totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
659:Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
660:More than ever before, crisis management, reconstruction and development demand a new level of cooperation between nations, and between nations and international organisations, where military and civilian instruments are applied in a coordinated way. ~ Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, #NFDB
661:You know, the truth is that us actors would all like to believe we re-invent the wheel, every time we play a character. But, we're human beings and our instruments are not violins, they are our bodies and our consciousness and our collective life experience. ~ John C Reilly, #NFDB
662:In the case of a meltdown, the regulatory authorities may find themselves obliged to step in to preserve the integrity of the system. It is in that light that the authorities have both a right and an obligation to supervise and regulate derivative instruments. ~ George Soros, #NFDB
663:Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment. ~ Charles A Reich, #NFDB
664:I guess I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of the cello without giving up on the idea of playing the cello, if that makes any sense. I have no real interest in putting the cello through different effects to make it sound like a guitar or other instruments. ~ Okkyung Lee, #NFDB
665:These instruments are now made in bulk and used by doctors and chemists all over France, while my father’s name is forgotten, but a hundred years ago the “instruments de chimie” designed at la Brûlonnerie were sought after by all the apothecaries in Paris. ~ Daphne du Maurier, #NFDB
666:To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama. ~ Junichiro Koizumi, #NFDB
667:Everyone’s talents and involvement are needed to redress the damage caused by human abuse of God’s creation”.22 All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
668:God can appreciate our differences and still create unity. It is like a conductor who can orchestrate extremely different instruments into producing a harmonious, unified sound. Together we produce a sound of harmony that expresses the multifaceted character of God. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
669:I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
670:The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
671:We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
672:I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm. ~ Jack White, #NFDB
673:Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties. ~ Chad Harbach, #NFDB
674:Dramatic and sudden changes in the body's frequency result in great pain and damage. In such cases, treatment must involve equal or stronger frequencies to be effective -- often having to do with the scalpel. Sharp instruments, by nature, have a higher frequency... ~ Masaru Emoto, #NFDB
675:But let us imagine RIGHT NOW that we find out about a world where there are artists who paint without brushes, make music without instruments, and write without pen and paper. The very thought makes me happy. That this world could be ours, right here and now. ~ L szl Krasznahorkai, #NFDB
676:DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work. ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB
677:The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
678:The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time sixty years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
679:All my adult life I have deplored violence and war as instruments for achieving solutions to mankind’s problems. I am firmly committed to the creative power of nonviolence as the force which is capable of winning lasting and meaningful brotherhood and peace. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
680:Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?” “Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
681:We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling "Lift-off" in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll! ~ Michael Collins, #NFDB
682:[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. ~ Hal Abelson, #NFDB
683:Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. ~ E L Doctorow, #NFDB
684:The chemistry was still there. To me, that was the biggest thing: Would the chemistry be there? Can we really go ahead and do this? And it was obvious within the first moment of plugging in the instruments that the magic was still there. It was a fantastic feeling. ~ Christine McVie, #NFDB
685:The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
686:All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
687:I would love to compose more fantasy music, whether it's for a film or a game. That genre has so much opportunity for harmonic experimentation, not to mention all the interesting instruments that become available when composing music for alien species and other worlds. ~ Jason Graves, #NFDB
688:I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger. ~ Rostam Batmanglij, #NFDB
689:Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it's hard to hear the song at all. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
690:The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them. ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
691:They start setting up on a little left stage playing my secret favorite song: the rustling of sheet music and set lists, the coughing and quiet warm-up, the tuning of instruments, squeak of speakers and amps, the last rags on cigarettes and popping of knuckles. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
692:Living in Cape Breton, it's really all about fiddle music, so it's not like there were other instruments out there that tempted me and it was like I had to decide which one. It was automatically fiddle, because it's the predominant instrument in Cape Breton Island. ~ Natalie MacMaster, #NFDB
693:My whole view of music completely flipped over on its head. I grew up listening to punk rock, SST. I liked people that were making music that weren't necessarily very good at their instruments, it was more about the ideas they had than how well they could play and sing. ~ Doug Martsch, #NFDB
694:It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
695:Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
696:Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
697:I grant more: thieves and murderers and other evildoers are the instruments of divine providence, and the Lord himself uses these to carry out the judgments that he has determined with himself. Yet I deny that they can derive from this any excuse for their evil deeds. Why? ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
698:The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent indivisual intelligence...The individual, in order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
699:Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
700:But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, 23, #NFDB
701:We are merely instruments of the Almighty's will and therefore ignorant of what helps us forward and what acts as an impediment. We must thus rest satisfied with the knowledge only of the means and if these are pure, we can fearlessly leave the end to take care of itself. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
702:As surgeons keep their instruments and knives always at hand for cases requiring immediate treatment, so shouldst thou have thy thoughts ready to understand things divine and human, remembering in thy every act, even the smallest, how close is the bond that unites the two. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
703:I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
704:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
705:I like what Gary Thomas, the author of Every Body Matters, says: we need to “stop treating our bodies like ornaments — with all the misguided motivations often displayed by those who build their bodies out of pride and ambition — and start treating our bodies like instruments ~ Joshua Becker, #NFDB
706:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
707:The control of events has been taken out of our hands...we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles-invisible forces-which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
708:We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night... ~ Andrea Gibson, #NFDB
709:Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
710:As it fades, I see the truth - in plain sight, yet hidden all along. We are all children of blood and bone. All instruments of vengeance and virtue. This truth holds me close, rocking me like a child in a mother's arms. It binds me in its love as death swallows me in its grasp. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
711:and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
712:The technology of making this happen was what was known as tantric methods. That is, learning to use your body, your mind, and your energies just as instruments of life, so that you become available to a much higher possibility, an intelligence which is way beyond human capabilities. ~ Sadguru, #NFDB
713:You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
714:Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
715:Just the actual physical ability to hold four instruments simultaneously and do some of the things that Vivien was able to do is mind blowing to any surgeon. He never went to medical school and he became one of the great teachers of medicine himself, people are just amazed. ~ Mary Queen of Scots, #NFDB
716:Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
717:Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments, and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved - and while the reverence given to guitars annoys me, I shall miss it. ~ Jonny Greenwood, #NFDB
718:Weapons are inauspicious instruments, not the tools of the enlightened. When there is no choice but to use them, it is best to be calm and free from greed, and not celebrate victory. Those who celebrate victory are bloodthirsty, and the bloodthirsty cannot have their way with the world. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
719:Arjuna, fair or unfair, the results of any action depend on five things: the body, the mind, the instruments, the method and divine grace (luck? fate?). Only the ignorant think they alone are responsible for any outcome.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 18, verses 13 to 16 (paraphrased). ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
720:Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
721:Health care can be made more affordable for the poor without requiring major new scientific developments, just the smart application of current technologies. We have seen a $25 incubator and diagnostic instruments that are built tough, cheap, and reusable for the developing world. ~ Muhammad Yunus, #NFDB
722:Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
723:The world changes! So we're in a situation today where the only policymakers that have flexibility are central banks. But they don't have the instruments! So they've had to experiment, and the more you experiment, the more uncertainty and the higher the risk of collateral damage. ~ Mohamed El Erian, #NFDB
724:As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests. ~ Carolina De Robertis, #NFDB
725:I'm a huge Hayao Miyazaki fan. He might be my favorite director of all time - the beauty that he sees in the world and the attention to detail. I try and focus on that while making music: trying to use as many real instruments as possible, have it feel as tactile and tangible as possible. ~ St Lucia, #NFDB
726:All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets-it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza-nor that of the women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
727:Music hath its land of origin; and yet it is also its own country, its own sovereign power, and all may take refuge there, and all, once settled, may claim it as their own, and all may meet there in amity; and these instruments, as surely as instruments of torture, belong to all of us. ~ M T Anderson, #NFDB
728:Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
729:I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
730:The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived. To avoid this they should be instructed to a certain degree. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
731:These are the Rad instruments that are dying out in India. So, it's going well and I think now we are increasing the number of kids we have taught and of course we are helping out with other things too. It's based in India now. [The idea is to] perfect it in one place and then we'll expand. ~ A R Rahman, #NFDB
732:We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
733:Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. “Werner?” Jutta whispers. He blinks; ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
734:The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
735:When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
736:Within a couple of years, I had gravitated towards a group of friends from the neighbourhood who had also discovered rock ’n’ roll, and it seemed an excellent idea to put a band together. The fact that none of us knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn’t have any instruments. ~ Nick Mason, #NFDB
737:If the original essence of the thing which we fear could confidently lodge itself within us by its own authority it would be the same in all men. For all men are of the same species and, in varying degrees, are all furnished with the same conceptual tools and instruments of judgement. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
738:I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instruments, their broken lives, and begin again. ~ Steve Goodier, #NFDB
739:This tune goes manly.
Come, go we to the King. Our power is ready;
Our lack is nothing but our leave. Macbeth
Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
Put on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may.
The night is long that never finds the day.
They exit. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
740:At the end of the day, we need to stop thinking about what we can make of ourselves and start thinking more about who God is, what he has done and is doing in Christ for us and for our neighbors, and how he can use us and our fellow brothers and sisters to be instruments of his gift-giving. ~ Michael Horton, #NFDB
741:I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
742:My father's a musician and my mother's a singer. My dad's originally from Brooklyn and he was a Latin percussionist so I've always had instruments around the house. He used to have a show like a 1950s rock and roll show with Little Richard music. They would do doo-wop songs and stuff like that. ~ Bruno Mars, #NFDB
743:People still talk about sampling as this new, progressive problem in music. There are technologies now where you can glean the polyphonic information out of a sample and then put that back in and then score it for five instruments. You don't need digital audio to sample; you can rewrite things. ~ Tim Hecker, #NFDB
744:The Jedi shackle themselves in chains of obedience: obedience to the Jedi Council; obedience to their Masters; obedience to the Republic. Those who follow the light side even believe they must submit themselves to the Force. They are merely instruments of its will, slaves to a greater good. ~ Drew Karpyshyn, #NFDB
745:Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasm or a hideous dream.
The genius and the moral instruments
Are then in council, and the state of a man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
746:Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
747:The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd. ~ Thomas Harris, #NFDB
748:Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
749:Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
750:Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions--these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term "experience. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
751:I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds. ~ Glenn Branca, #NFDB
752:Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use ~ K W Jeter, #NFDB
753:I miss the romance. I keep saying this over and over again, but dance follows music. And if the accent today is percussion and rhythm and loudness, then that is the way the dance numbers will be. But it is pretty hard on romance with seven guitars, three drums, and no melody instruments in the band. ~ Gene Kelly, #NFDB
754:I was fascinated by the machinations of performance back then and I still am now. A stage full of instruments awaiting a band is exciting to me. The sight of a guitar still turns me on. There is an unstated wonder in both of them: they hold the ability to transcend reality given the right set of players. ~ Slash, #NFDB
755:Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
756:The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
757:The senses and the mind seek to convince thee, sova in are they, that they are the end of all things. The senses and the mind are only instruments and play things. Behind the feelings and the thoughts, my brother; there dwells a more puissant master, an unknown sage; it is called the Self. ~ Nietzsche Zarathustra, #NFDB
758:Man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 92, #NFDB
759:One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. ~ Edward R Murrow, #NFDB
760:The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization.... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
761:They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
762:Whoever be the instruments of any good to us, of whatever sort, we must look above them, and eye the hand and counsel of God in it, which is the first spring, and be duly thankful to God for it. And whatever evil of crosses or afflictions befalls us, we must look above the instruments of it to God. ~ Thomas Boston, #NFDB
763:Don’t worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world’s harps should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing ~ Rumi, #NFDB
764:If you work with so many classical instruments... I mean, it still has this power, and it's still connected to the idea of techno. But it has its own quality, its own sound. It's in between, even more than the record before. You need to give every instrument, sound, and element the space it needs. ~ Pantha du Prince, #NFDB
765:Language is evidently one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
766:My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire and I find myself in the presence of love. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
767:There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn... No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely ~ Mary Leakey, #NFDB
768:All musical talent is absent in me, to the point of being unable to play board games that require you to hum a tune while others guess what it is, since all my humming sounds the same. Musical instruments have always seemed like alien artifacts to me, even as I really admire anyone who can play one. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
769:Victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of creating greater prosperity for all peoples. ~ Smedley D Butler, #NFDB
770:When we're true to ourselves, we become instruments of truth for the planet. Because we're all connected, we touch the lives of everyone around us, who then affect others. Our only obligation is to be the love we are and allow our answers to come from within in the way that's most appropriate for us. ~ Anita Moorjani, #NFDB
771:Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
772:His lip began to tremble and he covered his face with his hands. ‘My fault . . . if something were to happen to her . . .’ His shoulders shook silently, and Glokta raised his eyebrows. He was used to men crying in his presence of course. But I usually have at least to show them the instruments first. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
773:In the beginning you can think, "The world is like a stage. I am only an actor. God is the director. All are His instruments, all are just actors. He is directing everything." But do not always remain at that level. Move on. Think, "I am the unchanging Atma, not this changing personality and body." ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
774:In the cell was a rack, a winch, a furnace, a set of branding irons, a pot for melting wax, nails of different lengths. A thumbscrew, a pair of flesh-tongs, heavy tweezers, a set of surgical instruments, a series of small metal trays, ropes, wire, preparations of quicklime, a hood and a blindfold. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
775:The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching. ~ Paul Fleischman, #NFDB
776:By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more." ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
777:If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog? ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
778:I don’t like banging on noisy instruments, I don’t like songs that get stuck in my head,and I don’t like eyeballs staring at me. That’s how come I don’t like music class. The other kids at school like music a lot. That’s no biggie, though. Everybody’s different from everybody, and I’m different about music. ~ Emma Lesko, #NFDB
779:In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
~ Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence,#NFDB
780:Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers ~ John Irving, #NFDB
781:Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. ~ John Quincy Adams, #NFDB
782:State authority can never be an end in itself; for, if that were so, any kind of tyranny would be inviolable and sacred. If a government uses the instruments of power in its hands for the purpose of leading a people to ruin, then rebellion is not only the right but also the duty of every individual citizen. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
783:The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
784:At that time, 73 and 74, I became aware that there were a number of us making instruments. Max Eastley was a good friend and he was making instruments, Paul Burwell and I were making instruments, Evan Parker was making instruments, and we knew Hugh Davies, who was a real pioneer of these amplified instruments. ~ David Toop, #NFDB
785:Being the dependents of the general government, and looking to its treasury as the source of all their emoluments, the state officers, under whatever names they might pass and by whatever forms their duties might be prescribed, would in effect be the mere stipendiaries and instruments of the central power. ~ Andrew Jackson, #NFDB
786:For a long time religion made me feel guilty for being involved in music. Growing up, the religion I grew up in, the Church of Christ, encouraged a capella, but didn't allow musical instruments, so even though my parents allowed me to play trumpet in the band, and I was pretty good at it, it had this baggage. ~ Gary Panter, #NFDB
787:If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This is what we do all the time with other products-drugs, cars, electrical products and many others. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
788:It was a sunny day, and Einstein merrily played with the telescope’s dials and instruments. Elsa came along as well, and it was explained to her that the equipment was used to determine the scope and shape of the universe. She reportedly replied, “Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
789:The three of us [me, Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman] all learned how to play our instruments together. We had a common interest in bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. Bands who had different time signatures etc and for whatever reason, we morphed into Corrosion of Conformity. It's been about thirty years now. ~ Reed Mullin, #NFDB
790:Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your eyes, kindness in your face, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greetings. We are all but His instruments who do our little bit and pass by. I believe that the way in which an act of kindness is done is as important as the action itself. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
791:His response to them [women] as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
792:It happens to us quite often-it feels as though I'm not playing my instrument, something else is playing it and that same thing is playing all three of our instruments. That's what I mean when I say it's frightening sometimes. Maybe we'll all play the same phrase out of nowhere. It happens very often with us. ~ Ginger Baker, #NFDB
793:The revolution is ... the blow dealt ... agains the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty. ~ Voltairine de Cleyre, #NFDB
794:Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too - ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring earth. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
795:Such a man the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us. But he is gone. Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
796:Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
797:A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about. ~ Lawrence M Krauss, #NFDB
798:All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
799:I actually think that bass is probably the instrument that has evolved in a quantum leap compared to other instruments. It's the instrument that's evolved the most, especially with how it's perceived. And even how it's played, and how it's viewed from a point of view of commerce, like with the music industry. ~ Stanley Clarke, #NFDB
800:I believe that the position of the friends of peace is strengthening. The friends of peace are able to work in the open. They base themselves upon the force of public opinion. They have at their disposal such instruments as, for instance, the League of Nations. This is to the advantage of the friends of peace. ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
801:They wondered at her bruised and mysterious court: the raven-haired Squaller with her sharp tongue, the Ruined One with her black prayer shawl and hideous scars, the pale scholar who huddled away with his books and strange instruments. These were the sorry remnants of the Second Army—unfit company for a Saint. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
802:Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
803:Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one. ~ Paul Samuelson, #NFDB
804:We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
805:I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
806:He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape—everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
807:Many collectors died in process of searching for new species, and despite persistent reports that the men died from drowning, gunshot and knife wounds, snakebite, trampling by cattle, or blows in the head with blunt instruments, it is generally accepted that in each case the primary cause of death was orchid fever. ~ Eric Hansen, #NFDB
808:People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education. ~ Muriel Spark, #NFDB
809:I definitely enjoy working within different contexts, with different collaborators, and in different locations. I need to keep feeding myself as an artist by working with different people. I see continuing with that. I've also enjoyed getting to explore different kinds of music and instruments in the last couple of years. ~ Mirah, #NFDB
810:My father owned a music store when I was growing up in Rock Falls, Illinois. He could play all the instruments, which you had to do when you owned a music store back then. One day, when I was three years old, he took me to a parade. When the drums passed by, I got so excited I told him wanted to learn to play them. ~ Louie Bellson, #NFDB
811:Tell me something boss. What do you think is the highest form of art?
'Literature," he answered without hesitation. 'Painters and sculptors require elaborate supplies and tools. Dancers must have music. Musicians must have instruments. Literature needs nothing but a voice to speak it or sand to scrawl it in. ~ Tiffany Reisz,#NFDB
812:What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down by the community. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
813:Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
814:Holly is the bestselling author and co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles series and won a Newbery Honor for her novel Doll Bones. Cassie is the author of bestselling YA series, including The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices. They both live in Western Massachusetts, about ten minutes away from each other. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
815:The fans reacted very positively to me being cast [The Mortal Instruments] which, as a Twilight or Harry Potter franchise, when you read a book and you have someone in your mind or you have a vision and then they're cast in real life, it can go either way. So I was very, very honored and happy that they were excited. ~ Lily Collins, #NFDB
816:We have now in our possession three instruments of civilization, unknown to antiquity. These are the art of printing; free representative government; and, lastly, a pure and spiritual religion, the deep fountain of generous enthusiasm, the mighty spring of bold and lofty designs, the great sanctuary of moral power. ~ Edward Everett, #NFDB
817:When a school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
818:Do not believe that you can find a universal remedy for evil conditions or immoral practices in effecting a fundamental change in society (as by State Socialism). And do not pin too much faith in legislation. Remedial institutions are apt to fall under control of the enemy and to become instruments of oppression.6 ~ Raghuram G Rajan, #NFDB
819:How many believers really live a lifestyle that results from believing that God has graced them to be not just recipients of the work of his kingdom but instruments of the work of the kingdom as well? When you believe this, you live with a constant ministry mentality that results in an everyday ministry lifestyle. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
820:Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments... But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton, #NFDB
821:"The further art advances the closer it approaches science," said Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and inventor of the wheelbarrow, and other useful instruments from the speaking tube to a mechanically gyp-proof whore-house, "the further science advances the closer it approaches art." ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
822:The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
823:And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
824:The art of beautiful motion is far and away the oldest. Before man learned how to use any instruments at all, he moved the most perfect instrument of all, his body. He did this with such abandon that the cultural history of prehistoric and ancient man is, for the most part, nothing but the history of the dance. ~ Gerard van der Leeuw, #NFDB
825:The greatest flaw of human beings is to remain glued to the inventory of reason. Reason doesn't deal with man as energy. Reason deals with instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create energy. We are bubbles of energy. ~ Carlos Castaneda, #NFDB
826:Those who pretend to investigate the transcendental truths of the Being based on pure reasoning fall in the same mistake as someone who, ignoring how to use the science's modern instruments, tries to study the life of what is infinitely small with telescopes and the life of what is infinitely large with microscopes. ~ Samael Aun Weor, #NFDB
827:In attempting to construct such (artificially intelligent) machines we should not be irreverently usurping His (God's) power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. ~ Alan Turing, #NFDB
828:Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individual more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say "The music played the band ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
829:The Ramones couldn't play in my key. They couldn't switch keys, so Ed Stasium literally had to play all the instruments for my version of "Rock 'N' Roll High School," and I always thought that was so weird, because it's not the Ramones playing. It's the producer, who happened to just be a musician and could play everything. ~ P J Soles, #NFDB
830:There are only so many instruments you can layer on top of each other that aren't perfectly electronically programmed. "Long Vermont Roads" just cannot be performed live, because it's just too cluttered if it's played by humans. Synthesizers stay out of each other's way in a way that hand-played instruments never can. ~ Stephin Merritt, #NFDB
831:A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
832:Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
833:I play these sort of comical instruments I invented, like the electric rake and the electric plunger. I do a lot of almost stand-up comedy material. Just the juxtaposition of the different styles in itself sometimes is funny. Like, I do sort of an acoustic version of 'Purple Haze' that has some bluegrass licks in it. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, #NFDB
834:Le capitalisme, un certain capitalisme, existe depuis toujours, voir dès l'antique Babylone qui a connu des banquiers, des marchands engagés dans des affaires lointaines, et tous les instruments de crédit: lettre de change, billet à ordre, chèque... En ce sens, l'histoire du capitalisme va 'd'Hammourabi à Rockefeller'. ~ Fernand Braudel, #NFDB
835:we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision. I am not referring to telepathy or mind control or the other obsessions of fringe science; even in the depictions of believers these are blunt instruments compared to an ability that is uncontroversially present in every one of us. That ability is language. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
836:You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn't care anything about. That's a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking. ~ Louis Farrakhan, #NFDB
837:Today one can read the Gospel also on so many technological instruments. You can carry the whole Bible on your mobile phone, on your tablet. It is important to read the Word of God, by any means, but by reading the Word of God: Jesus speaks to us there! And welcome it with an open heart. Then the good seed will bear fruit! ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
838:To Norwegian and British governments, at least, the state-owned broadcasters appear to be the most flexible and appropriate instruments for realizing national digital ambitions. Private broadcasters, in contrast, neither have the capital nor are willing to take the risks involved in developing innovative content and services. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
839:In attempting to construct such (artificially intelligent) machines we should not be irreverently usurping His (God's) power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,' Turing had advised. 'Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
~ Alan Turing,#NFDB
840:To regard human beings as tools - as instruments - for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker - they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement. ~ Alfred Korzybski, #NFDB
841:Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might. ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
842:There's a really rough and relatively consistent hierarchy of concerns. My musical interests come first and principally my fascination with how notes and rhythms interlock. Then comes the technical side like programming, instruments and designing instruments. Next is production and mixing and beyond that I start to care less. ~ Squarepusher, #NFDB
843:My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
844:We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society. ~ Chief Dan George, #NFDB
845:All music is what awakes within us
when we are reminded by the instruments;
It is not the violins or the clarinets -
It is not the beating of the drums -
Nor the score of the baritone singing
his sweet romanza; not that of the men's chorus,
Nor that of the women's chorus -
It is nearer and farther than they ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
846:St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
847:Initially, when I was making the bagpipes and reed instruments, it was different from the other instruments. In terms of sound itself, it may not be different, but in performing with it, it was a necessity to build it if I was going to perform and make scores with it. By making the instruments, it helped me compose the way I want. ~ Yoshi Wada, #NFDB
848:O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of... ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
849:St. John’s eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people’s thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
850:...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue. This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day. I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me. 'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!' - Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
851:Through its complex orchestration of time and space, no less than through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instruments, give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality, could be achieved by any single piece. Cities ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
852:We must not cast away riches which can benefit our neighbor. Possessions were made to be possessed; goods are called goods because they do good, and they have been provided by God for the good of men: they are at hand and serve as the material, the instruments for a good use in the hand of him who knows how to use them. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
853:I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
854:Yes, yes,” said Bethan, sitting down glumly. “I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?” “Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
855:I would be doomed if I didn't invent humor in my life. When I was young, I had all these punk and performance-art bands, dressed in costumes and painting the room and getting kicked out by police. Now when I perform I still feel the stage is more than just where you put your instruments. It's where you can do whatever you feel like. ~ Nils Frahm, #NFDB
856:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
857:They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
858:Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
859:The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. ~ Walter Ciszek, #NFDB
860:The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labout once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
861:The why is what makes journalism an adult game. The why is what makes policy coherent and useful. The why is what transforms bureaucrats and foot soldiers and political leaders into viable instruments of rational and affirmative change. The why is everything and without it, the very suggestion of human progress becomes a cosmic joke. ~ David Simon, #NFDB
862:On Sunday, namely the day dedicated to music and song, the learned beings belonging to this group produced every kind of ‘melody’ on various ‘sound-producing instruments,’ as well as with their voices, and then explained to all the other learned beings how the knowledge they wished to transmit was indicated in these works of theirs. ~ G I Gurdjieff, #NFDB
863:When persons are present to one another they can function not merely as physical instruments but also as communicative ones. This possibility, no less than the physical one, is fateful for everyone concerned and in every society appears to come under strict normative regulation, giving rise to a kind of communication traffic order. ~ Erving Goffman, #NFDB
864:A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphereThe ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
865:Next Marx turns to capital. He states the view of classical economics, that capital consists of the raw materials, instruments of production, and means of subsistence which are used in further production. Since all these elements of capital are the creation of labour, even the classical economists hold that capital is accumulated labour. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
866:Roger Bacon, a disciple of the Arabs, also insisted on the primary necessity of Mathematics, without which no other science can be known; yet by Mathematics it is clear that he meant something very different from what we mean, including under that head even dancing, singing, gesticulation, and performance on musical instruments. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
867:The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
868:When I got back to my billet I found my farmer at table with his wife and niece.
“Tell me,” I said to him; “how many instruments do you think a pilot has to look after?”
“How should I know? Not my trade,” he answered. “Must be some missing, though, to my way of thinking. The ones you win a war with. Have some supper? ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry,#NFDB
869:A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
870:Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
871:Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destination. ~ Michael Taussig, #NFDB
872:She lifter the shade and bathed the room in silver. Moonlight glinted off the glass and metal instruments on her desk and vanished into the eaves. Moonlight skimmed over her floorboards and made Nero's eyes a shimmering green. It wasn't enough to work by. It wasn't enough to read by. But who needed to read? She knew them by heart. ~ Diana Peterfreund, #NFDB
873:The transition from subject to observer was instantaneous, sensations, sights, and sounds changing from instruments of torment to a fascinating display of electronic signals. The spectra included thousands of frequencies, visual, audio and psi bands alike, each customized for a specific effect, a pseudo symphony for an audience of one. ~ Marcha A Fox, #NFDB
874:They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great.
Together, all together, they are the instruments of change. ~ Keri Hulme,#NFDB
875:Arms are instruments of ill omen.... When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. There is no glory in victory, and to glorify it despite this is to exult in the killing of men.... When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe mourning rites. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
876:Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i’ the nose thus? FIRST MUSICIAN How, sir, how! CLOWN Are these, I pray you, wind instruments? FIRST MUSICIAN Ay, marry, are they, sir. CLOWN O, thereby hangs a tale. FIRST MUSICIAN Whereby hangs a tale, sir? CLOWN Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
877:As you gazed into the polished surface of the marble the vague forms of instruments became visible, and as you touched them the instruments materialized instantly under your hands. Looked at from the correct angles the mirrors appeared to reflect all the required data read-outs, though it was far from clear where they were reflected from. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
878:[I]t must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
879:This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
880:Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world! ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
881:...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.
This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.
I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.
'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!'
- Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher ~ Jim Butcher,#NFDB
882:Catgut is a type of surgical thread made from the intestines of cows or sheep.” “So why do they call it catgut?” asked Rizzoli. “It goes back to the Middle Ages, when gut strings were used on musical instruments. The musicians referred to their instruments as their kit, and the strings were called kitgut. The word eventually became catgut. ~ Tess Gerritsen, #NFDB
883:A lot of it starts with playing instruments and working with other people. Some of the new generation is doing it on computers and they don't have a clue as to how to play anything. That's probably one of the problems. They don't know how to make the melody, go through the chord changes. They're not starting from that same school of thought. ~ Ray Parker Jr, #NFDB
884:My father was able to play a number of musical instruments and I fell in love with classical music in my teens and I allowed it to influence me. I like to think I took and still do from classical music and various techniques, I have made classical albums and recorded seven different pieces of Bach on different albums and its all music too me. ~ Steve Hackett, #NFDB
885:Marine Salvage—A science of vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive experiments and performed with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and questionable mentality” —C. A. Bartholomew, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy, Department of Navy, 2010. ~ Tobias E Carlisle, #NFDB
886:The fight against terrorism is something very real and practical for us. This is a fight to preserve our territorial integrity, and in this sense we need to have the instruments and create an environment in Russia that would make it impossible for the international terrorist organisations to achieve the aims they have set for themselves here. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
887:We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease,” said Cole. “And it is, somewhat. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
888:Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which ‘real’ reality can be seen; we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
889:relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
890:if you study in order to instruct, and herbalize only to become author or professor, all its attractive charms vanish, and plants, being no longer considered but as instruments of our passions, no more real pleasure can result from the study of them. Our end, then, is not to gain knowledge, but to make others sensible of our acquirements; ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
891:I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track. ~ Petra Haden, #NFDB
892:The chemists work with inaccurate and poor measuring services, but they employ very good materials. The physicists, on the other hand, use excellent methods and accurate instruments, but they apply these to very inferior materials. The physical chemists combine both these characteristics in that they apply imprecise methods to impure materials. ~ Wolfgang Ostwald, #NFDB
893:We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease,” said Cole. “And it is, somewhat. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete. ~ Deborah Blum, #NFDB
894:In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
895:Jumping back into it was easy as apple pie, it was natural. Honestly, I'm not trying to be nostalgic and talk about the old days but I really believe wholeheartedly that the three of us, Woody Weatherman, Mike Dean & myself really learned how to play our instruments together and now that we are playing together again it can't be anything but natural. ~ Reed Mullin, #NFDB
896:Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Hal Abelson, #NFDB
897:When we offer ourselves as instruments for God’s purpose, we create opportunities for others to experience God through us. We become living lightning rods of God’s activity. Our lives become the X that marks the spot. Our obedience creates a spiritual epicenter through which God shakes up the world around us and others come to know Him. HIS ~ Erwin Raphael McManus, #NFDB
898:I've always wanted to be a communicator of ideas through music. Today, I wanna be the most effective musical communicator of social change I could be, so I try to find different ways to do it and I'm always challenging myself to find new things, learn new instruments. But I always try to find in my heart, what it is I really want to say with words. ~ Michael Franti, #NFDB
899:Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
900:And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
901:Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
902:Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
903:There's an expression in classical music. It goes, 'We went out to the meadow.' It's for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren't even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.
(Tom Waits quote)
pg 208 ~ John Green,#NFDB
904:What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves? ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
905:Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens - I don't know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
906:Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke, #NFDB
907:I could always hold a melody, but I was never like, I'm going to be a singer. So I'm able to use that when I write. I'm actually playing the beat with my voice. Instead of thinking about coming up with melodies, it's like filling in the instruments. So sometimes it's better to have beats with less melodies in them, because then I can play more with my vocals. ~ Kid Ink, #NFDB
908:If our poor die of hunger, it is not because God does not care for them. Rather, it is because neither you nor I are generous enough. It is because we are not instruments of love in the hands of God. We do not recognize Christ when once again He appears to us in the hungry man, in the lonely woman, in the child who is looking for a place to get warm. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
909:I have a variety of ways that I make music, but I'm working with the Thingamajigs in a particular way, which is: They are bringing to me their performance skills and their unusual instruments, which I'm relishing. They're really beautiful. The other thing is improvisation - these players improvise and they do it very beautifully, as a matter of fact. ~ Pauline Oliveros, #NFDB
910:The distinctions of personal merit and influence, so conspicuous in a republic, so feeble and obscure under a monarchy, were abolished by the despotism of the emperors; who substituted in their room a severe subordination of rank and office, from the titled slaves who were seated on the steps of the throne, to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
911:Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
912:In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
913:I never felt like that in my life. I didn't know human beings played these instruments. I heard them in Chicago and Louisville and St. Louis all my life, you know? But I didn't know human beings played them, you know? So the next day I went to Coontz Junior High School and I started on sousaphone, tuba, B-flat baritone, E-flat alto, French horn, trombone. ~ Quincy Jones, #NFDB
914:The human voice vibrates naturally - but in such a way - to such a degree that it all sounds beautiful - it is the nature of the voice. We imitate such effects not only on wind instruments, but also with violins - even on clavier - but as soon as you go beyond the natural limits, it no longer sounds beautiful - because it is contrary to nature. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, #NFDB
915:Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
916:I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it. ~ Petra Haden, #NFDB
917:I'm always scouring the universe for great old instruments from the '50s and early '60s. That's really, for me, the golden age of basses, when they had just been invented within 10 years of that period and they had just started to come into their own, especially the old Fender jazz basses and old Rickenbackers and Gibsons. I'm always on the lookout. It's fun. ~ Geddy Lee, #NFDB
918:n artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty. ~ William Dean Howells, #NFDB
919:The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages. ~ Christopher Morley, #NFDB
920:For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
921:My father had a phase of having jukeboxes all over the house. He was a music lover but he was also into musical machinery. Not instruments, he was never interested in playing particularly but there would be these odd objects, like valve amplifiers being dismantled on the kitchen table. My mum wasn't massively keen on that, but it was part of the environment. ~ Squarepusher, #NFDB
922:The real challenge is not to get people to remember more, but to get them to understand better. We're just now beginning to be able to show what we can implement with technological tools. I think our interest at Apple is to be the provider of the instruments that will help educators and students create and entirely new kind of learning than what we have now. ~ John Sculley, #NFDB
923:Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
924:An hour passed in preparation. Lighting and recording camera were rigged, equipment carried in from the work wagon, tarps spread over the sand, a folding table set up for the microscope and instruments, rubber suits and gloves put on. It was a definite relief to put on the filter helmets. Along with the dust and microbes they eliminated odors in the air. ~ Helen Mary Hoover, #NFDB
925:In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.... Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged.... Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
926:To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support - to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective - to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak - and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
927:As surgeons have ever their knives and instruments at hand for the sudden emergencies of their art, so do you keep ready the principles requisite for understanding things divine and human, and for doing all things, even the least important, in the remembrance of the bond between the two. For in neglecting this, you will scant your duty both to Gods and men. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
928:The Army and Navy Journal labeled the latest raids simply “one more chapter in the old volume,” the result of alternately feeding and fighting the tribes. “We go to them Janus-faced. One of our hands holds the rifle and the other the peace-pipe, and we blaze away with both instruments at the same time. The chief consequence is a great smoke—and there it ends. ~ Peter Cozzens, #NFDB
929:The Waste Stream
The collection & taking of pornographic material of any kind is strictly forbidden.
Magazines should immediately be placed in the paper chutes & all videos, toys,
or instruments
of a pornographic nature are to be put into the waste stream. Failure to comply
with these instructions
may lead to disciplinary action.
~ B. R. Dionysius,#NFDB
930:No tyranny is more cruel than the one practised in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. And since a tyrant never lacks instruments for his tyranny, Tiberius always found judges ready to condemn as many people as he might suspect. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
931:Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
932:I concluded that although instruments, whether empirical or conjectural, exist to prove that some object is false, every decision in the matter presupposes the existence of an original, authentic and true, to which the fake is compared. The truly genuine problem thus does not consist of proving something false but in proving that the authentic object is authentic. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
933:The ways of God are entirely different from our ways. To us it seems necessary to employ powerful means in order to produce great effects. This is not God's method; quite the contrary. He likes to choose the weakest instruments that He may confound the strong: "God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong - Infirma mundi elegit ut confundat fortia". ~ Columba Marmion, #NFDB
934:We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no Gods or Emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any saviour. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernisation. ~ Wei Jingsheng, #NFDB
935:He was woken by music. It beckoned him, lilting and insistent; delicate music, played by delicate instruments that he could not identify, with one rippling, bell-like phrase running through it in a gold thread of delight. There was in this music so much of the deepest enchantment of all his dreams and imaginings that he woke smiling in pure happiness at the sound. ~ Susan Cooper, #NFDB
936:Not only are we not using any programmed loops or computers onstage, we're also improvising with our instruments. We're playing our instruments probably more so than most people that I see play their instruments. I think we all sort of strive for that - we all want magical things to happen onstage. We don't say "mistakes" in this band, we call them "highlights." ~ Brendan Benson, #NFDB
937:the problem was that the instruments of Yahweh’s wrath were still men. And the taking of human life, though morally justified, was still the destruction of man created in the image of Yahweh. And once you had taken human life, it changed you. You were no longer an innocent. You had stepped into a polluted river of pain that cried out for redemption, for atonement. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
938:Mr. Berkowitz clicks open his black American Tourister rolling suitcase. Inside, his tools: a microscope, an old canister with the faded label “vegetable flakes,” and various instruments that look like my mother’s sewing kit after a genetic mutation. He spreads them out on my living room table. Mr. Berkowitz reminds me of an Orthodox CSI. God’s wardrobe detective. He ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
939:Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again. STE. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
940:The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
941:The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale. ~ Ernest Lawrence, #NFDB
942:I didn't decide to start to playing piano until I was almost 13 years old when my friends and I thought it would be fun to start a band. None of us actually played any instruments so the band never quite got off the ground, BUT it made me go home and ask my parents for piano lessons. That was really the beginning for me. Once I started, it was all I wanted to do. ~ Andrew Hollander, #NFDB
943:There are tons of people in the West who love fiddles, banjos and mandolins. If you got to any cowboy poetry and music gathering those are the instruments they use. It's acoustic music. We don't do that much modern country that has electric guitars and a lot of volume. It's a gentler form of music. It's from the land and comes from the ranchers and farmers. ~ Michael Martin Murphey, #NFDB
944:I think actually under scrutiny, Hillary's [Clinton] promotion of equal wages at poverty level and of healthcare for children but not for their families, of childcare when there are no jobs, it just doesn't cut it. I think women need a real agenda of justice because women are care-givers, because women are instruments of justice for our families and for our communities. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
945:Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. ~ John Taylor Gatto, #NFDB
946:The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited. ~ Thomas Malthus, #NFDB
947:I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
948:I was obsessed with the scientific instruments people were building and all the weird experiments they were doing. I did actually wind up working in some of that, but there were whole sections I'd written about these instruments that ultimately had to be abandoned when I realized that the book really was about Margaret Cavendish. I couldn't justify using all of them. ~ Danielle Dutton, #NFDB
949:Abba Moses asked Abba Sylvanus, Can a person lay a new foundation every day? The old man replied, If you work hard, you can lay a new foundation every moment. Abba Pimen said, To throw yourself before God, not to measure your progress, to leave behind all self-will; these are the instruments for the work of the soul. The desire to rule is the mother of heresies. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #NFDB
950:There was a band very early on in our class, and I played in that band and as a teenager, I continued. It was more from my own relationship with the instruments at this time, figuring out the instrument and then having to learn different pieces that I really got into music. I really discovered the almost transcending power of music. And I think that is why I am so into it. ~ Agnes Obel, #NFDB
951:Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don’t just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought’s original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated? ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
952:No man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of those relationships as instruments of his prime function in life. Yet every woman is raised, still, to believe that the fulfillment of these relationships is her prime function in life and, what's more, her instinctive choice. ~ Vivian Gornick, #NFDB
953:I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt.
It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console. ~ Elie Wiesel,#NFDB
954:Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities. ~ Joan Aiken, #NFDB
955:Stupid to keep cash, there was no reason for it other than his dislike of credit cards and checks and stocks and instruments of transfer, all the tempting chains that tied people to America’s overwhelming and ultimately destructive debt-and-spend machine. But the cash might be his salvation. Cash could be replaced. The notebooks, over a hundred and fifty of them, could not. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
956:The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
957:Oh, Brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
958:Perfect worlds do not exist. There are only the funny, strange, weeping, singing, truncated, and imperfect universes created by the gods of paintbrush and musical instruments, the gods who infuse their creations with their own blood, their own soul. When he looks at these worlds, the true Lord of Hosts, the creator of the universe, probably cannot help but smile mockingly ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB
959:To enter into that karaoke mindset, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means 'empty hand.' They're both 'empty' arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind--only courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain. ~ Rob Sheffield, #NFDB
960:The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
961:The breathing instruments inspire, Wake into voice each silent string, And sweep the sounding lyre! In a sadly pleasing strain, 2 Let the warbling lute complain: Let the loud trumpet sound, Till the roofs all around The shrill echoes rebound; While in more lengthen'd notes and slow, The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow. Hark! the numbers soft and clear Gently steal upon the ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
962:The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution. ~ Douglass North, #NFDB
963:Two orderlies pulled the soldier off the table and carried him on a stretcher to the recovery area while two more brought another wounded Union soldier onto the table. Rebecca quickly washed the instruments and sponges in cold water. The water was already bloody from a dozen previous operations, but she did her best to clean the tools before they started the next procedure. ~ James D Shipman, #NFDB
964:A reader does not suddenly comprehend what is being read or studied, in a snap, miraculously. Comprehension needs to be worked forged, by those who read and study; as subjects of the action, they must seek to employ appropriate instruments in order to carry out the task. For this very reason, reading and studying form a challenging task, one requiring patience and perseverance. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
965:can impose sanctions only in limited circumstances, and in the past was often paralysed by the power of veto possessed by each of its five permanent members. The United Nations General Assembly is not subject to the veto, but its resolutions are usually not legally binding (although they are an institutionalized form of public opinion and can be instruments of political pressure). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
966:If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war—even the munition makers. So ... I say, “TO HELL WITH WAR! ~ Smedley D Butler, #NFDB
967:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
968:I still go to that church now, and they don't believe in instruments in the church. But, my brothers and sisters in the church will listen to me. They will come out to a place to see me play. They will buy all of my records and everything, but they don't believe in bringing that instrument in the church. But, they'll come and watch me somewhere else. Why that is, I don't know. ~ Ralph Stanley, #NFDB
969:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
970:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
971:The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
972:There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
973:Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
974:If we admit instrumental musick in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews?—yea, dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions? or, how can we decline a whole rabble of church-officers, necessary to be introduced for instrumental musick, whereof our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us no manner of direction? ~ Cotton Mather, #NFDB
975:In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can look principally in two places. One is weapons and the other is musical instruments. My hypothesis is that instruments are usually ahead of weapons. In fact, I think you can find many examples of instruments being predecessors of weapons and very few in the reverse. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
976:This is how scientific research instruments are built. The creative process born from these necessities gives rise to delightfully quirky creations, unique as their creators. Like all art, they are a product of their period and an attempt to address the issues of their age. Also like art, they appear outmoded and antiquated when viewed from within the future that they helped create. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
977:I started piano lessons at age six but didn't take music seriously until I was a teenager, when I thought about a career in music. I studied classical music, and my instruments were guitar and piano. I played keyboards in bands, and after high school I went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Music. I also became a session player, which culminated in my work with Tangerine Dream. ~ Paul Haslinger, #NFDB
978:Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
979:When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system, which is characterized, better yet dominated, by profound inequalities. So we discard whatever is not useful to this logic; it is this attitude that discards children and older people, and is now affecting the young. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
980:Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
981:Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
982:As soon as I was born, my mom said I was humming 'When the Saints Go Marching In,' or something like that, you know? It's in the family. And in that neighborhood [Treme, in New Orleans], I think everybody in the neighborhood has some type of musical influence, even if they don't play instruments or anything. It's the way they talk to you, the way they say your name - it's all musical. ~ Troy Andrews, #NFDB
983:The whole language of nature informs us, that in animated beings there is something above our powers of investigation; something which employs, combines, and arranges the gross elements of matter - a spark of celestial fire, by which life is kindled and preserved, and which, if even the instruments it employs are indestructible in their essence, must itself, of necessity, be immortal. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
984:How can he possibly feel pity for men who are trying to destroy Belo Monte? Yes, at this moment, as he sees them fall to the ground, hears them moan, and aims at them and kills them, he does not hate them: he can sense their spiritual wretchedness, their sinful human nature, he knows they are victims, blind, stupid instruments, prisoners caught fast in the snares of the Evil One. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa, #NFDB
985:Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
986:They [leaders in Western Europe] do not misuse financial instruments, financial injections, but, first of all, seek structural change. This is urgent for our economy as well, maybe even more urgent bearing in mind the problem that we cannot yet deal with, namely the prevalence of the oil and gas sector in the Russian Federation and, as a result, dependence on revenue from oil and gas. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
987:to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
988:Lies can be wrung out of a witness as easily as truth. Yes, after a few hours with the Enquiry’s . . . instruments, I am sure she will be willing to swear that she had swallowed an antidote, or indeed that she had flown to the moon if that would make the pain stop. But, here and now, you can see she is telling the truth. There was no betrayal. There was no poison. There was no murder. ~ Frances Hardinge, #NFDB
989:My body is the temple of the Holy Spirit: redeemed, cleansed and sanctified by the blood of Jesus. My members are instruments of righteousness yielded to God for His service and for His glory. The devil has no place in me, no power over me, no unsettled claims against me. All has been settled by the blood of Jesus. I overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of my testimony. ~ Derek Prince, #NFDB
990:Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
991:Private property in the instruments of production is an institutional device both for dispersing power and for securing effective organization of production. The only simple property system is that of a slave society with a single slave owner - which, significantly, is the limiting case of despotism and of monopoly. Departure from such a system is a fair measure of human progress. ~ Henry Calvert Simons, #NFDB
992:It is absurd to be eternally mobile, positive and focused on the future, and to put the self at the centre of everything in life. Not only is it absurd, it also has adverse consequences for interpersonal relationships, as other people are quickly reduced to instruments to be used in the individual's pursuit of success, rather than an end in themselves, to whom we have moral obligations. ~ Svend Brinkmann, #NFDB
993:The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
994:The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
995:The earth has enough knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient scourge. Hunger has plagued the world for thousands of years. But ending it is a greater moral imperative now than ever before, because for the first time humanity has the instruments at hand to defeat this cruel enemy at a very reasonable cost. We have the ability to provide food for all within the next three decades. ~ George McGovern, #NFDB
996:Discontinuities, irregularities, and volatilities seem to be proliferating rather than diminishing. In the world of finance, new instruments turn up at a bewildering pace, new markets are growing faster than old markets, and global interdependence makes risk management increasingly complex. Economic insecurity, especially in the job market, makes daily headlines. The environment, health, ~ Peter L Bernstein, #NFDB
997:The science and technology which have advanced man safely into space have brought about startling medical advances for man on earth. Out of space research have come new knowledge, techniques and instruments which have enabled some bedridden invalids to walk, the totally deaf to hear, the voiceless to talk, and, in the foreseeable future, may even make it possible for the blind to "see." ~ Hubertus Strughold, #NFDB
998:Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
999:There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
1000:Because there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of destruction, when millions are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what is expended so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
1001:Europe was initially supposed to be primarily a political project! The EU never would have come about had it been up to experts or diplomats. It was created by people who had learned from the drama of our collective history. I am proposing a new beginning, not one in which it is first deliberated ad infinitum what instruments one needs, but one that follows from the goals we want to achieve. ~ Emmanuel Macron, #NFDB
1002:I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1003:Marconi said, "I see you have your instruments. Can any of you sing? The old spirituals work best."
John said, "I can sing."
I said, "No, you can't, John."
"Well, I play the guitar."
"So can I," said Big Jim. "We have two guitars."
I said, "This could not be any stupider."
John said, "Dave, you remember the words to 'Camel Holocaust'?"
"Ah, once again, you prove me wrong, John. ~ David Wong,#NFDB
1004:I read the Bible and know little of its history, but the human beings who wrote it were instruments of Divine Power, and Jesus forged a far stronger bond than the ten commandments: love. Birds and monkeys, or any of God's creatures, obey their instincts and merely do what they're programmed to do. In the case of the human being, things are more complicated because we know about love and its traps. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1005:There is always a piano in an hotel drawing-room, on which, of course, some one of the forlorn ladies is generally employed. I do not suppose that these pianos are, in fact, as a rule, louder and harsher, more violent and less musical, than other instruments of the kind. They seem to be so, but that, I take it, arises from the exceptional mental depression of those who have to listen to them. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
1006:You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time—you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
1007:Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1008:The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1009:Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings. ~ Joseph Story, #NFDB
1010:Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
1011:My body is the temple of the Holy Spirit: redeemed, cleansed and sanctified by the blood of Jesus. My members are instruments of righteousness yielded to God for His service and for His glory. The devil has no place in me, no power over me, no unsettled claims against me. All has been settled by the blood of Jesus. I overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of my testimony. Another one ~ Derek Prince, #NFDB
1012:Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1013:Britt stood outside and watched the regimental band straggling back to the barracks with their instruments in hand. Troopers of the new black Ninth Cavalry had been dismissed and were housing their guidons in the long leather cases. They walked back to the stables, leading their horses. All bays. Brown shoe polish had been used on those horses with white blazes or socks and so they all looked alike. ~ Paulette Jiles, #NFDB
1014:More than ever before, in our country, this is the age of the individual. Endowed with the accumulated knowledge of centuries, armed with all the instruments of modern science, he is still assured personal freedom and wide avenues of expression so that he may win for himself, his family and his country greater material comfort, ease and happiness; greater spiritual satisfaction and contentment. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
1015:The Hope & Glory would carry forty cases of muskets, 32,000 gunflints, coral necklaces, Aphrikan prints, bead jewellery, quills, papyrus, household objects such as kettles and musical instruments such as the talking drum, with which to barter for livestock. My host joked that the guns would encourage the Europanes to start more wars which would result in more prisoners offered up as slaves. ~ Bernardine Evaristo, #NFDB
1016:The seeds of Illumination's origin sprang from an idea lead singer Philip Bailey had of collaborating with new generation of soul artists for his next solo album. The idea of illumination is vibrant and positive. Earth Wind Fire collaborating with the new soul movement made sense because the thrust of their music is still about playing instruments and utilizing vintage sounds, only in today's setting. ~ Philip Bailey, #NFDB
1017:We see it was the Lord's purpose to deliver nothing in his sacred oracles which we might not learn for edification. Therefore, instead of dwelling on superfluous matters, let it be sufficient for us briefly to hold, with regard to the nature of devils, that at their first creation they were the angels of God, but by revolting they both ruined themselves, and became the instruments of perdition to others. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
1018:And there are many people, both Moslem and Christian, who have a good grasp of each others0 conceptions of surrender to God an other principles. But the widespread existence of bias, misinformation and lack of knowledge (…) militate against the effectiveness of dialogue, (…) by the most subtle and one of the most effective of instruments, the subconscious, almost the subliminal, introduction of hostility. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
1019:The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1020:If the Weather is sultry, and there appears the least Perspiration upon their Skins, when they come upon Deck, there are Two men attending with Cloths to rub them perfectly dry, and another to give them a little Cordial…. They are then supplied with Pipes and Tobacco…they are amused with Instruments of Music peculiar to their own country…and when tired of music and Dancing, they then go to Games of Chance. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
1021:It's a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn't blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn't shot. If it hadn't been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1022:As readers can probably tell from my books, I love the outdoors. I love to hike, kayak, and swim. I also love to read (which is probably not a surprise) and I love the theater and art museums. I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills. ~ Sharon Creech, #NFDB
1023:In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being's soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the 'singing dead,' who are ever present with us, make themselves heard. ~ Joscelyn Godwin, #NFDB
1024:Without you the instruments would die. One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss. The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself. Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone, that what died last night can be whole today. Why live some soberer way, and feel you ebbing out? I won't do it. Either give me enough wine or leave me alone, now that I know how it is to be with you in constant conversation. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1025:Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
1026:I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
1027:In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer. Even though singers, particularly singers who can play piano... If you go to the office of career development, you can get a gig much easier. Still, musicians tend to look down on you. I think they've got some nerve, because if they could sing, they would do it, but most of them can't. ~ Nellie McKay, #NFDB
1028:The irony was that the "great men" who were now humiliated and writing reports on their own mistakes were never the source of those errors. They only believed they were. And the underlings who had really originated the problems saw themselves as merely instruments of their commanders' will. But it was in the nature of underlings to use power recklessly, since blame could always be passed either upward or downward. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1029:Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1030:I slipped into the music room and, with my backpack still in my lap like a shield. I took a seat at a piano old enough to have been carried over the ark. The room was small, quiet.
A sanctuary.
It was always this way for me. Teh stored instruments in the closets called out like old friends. The bent and scratched black music stands welcomed me to thier home. The oily smell, a perfume. It was like...church. ~ Jenny B Jones,#NFDB
1031:One correspondent, who is into psychology, notes that in his experience people who are hoplophobes are nearly always nutty in other ways, too. Hoplophobia [fear of guns], of course, is not simply an attitude but rather an aberration in which the sufferer clings to an idea which he himself knows to be unsound, such as the idea that inanimate instruments have a will of their own or that lawbreakers abide by the law. ~ Jeff Cooper, #NFDB
1032:And I take this opportunity to declare, that... I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand, and villainy on the other, as this writ of assistance is. It appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, - the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
1033:For AERO, I wanted to revisit in 5.1 some existing tracks in order to give them that space I had imagined when I originally composed them, and also to compose some new tracks for this new technology. All of the existing tracks in AERO have been performed with the original instruments, re-recorded and spatially arranged/spatialised for this new dimensional sound experience without betraying their very essence. ~ Jean Michel Jarre, #NFDB
1034:The purpose of finance is to enable business to acquire the ownership of capital instruments before it has saved the funds to buy and pay for them. The logic used by business in investing is things that will pay for themselves is not today available to the 95% born without capital. Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to "save" our way to capital ownership. ~ Louis O Kelso, #NFDB
1035:Our hearts resonate at the same frequency as the earth and the universe. Therefore, we are all valuable instruments in the orchestration of the world and its harmony. We must always be aware of the vibrations we emit individually and collectively. Always be in command of your music. Only you can control and shape its tone. If life throws you a few bad notes or vibrations, don't let them interrupt or alter your song. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1036:Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1037:Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album... Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days... As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read. ~ Peter Bradshaw, #NFDB
1038:I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
1039:Some of the guys I played with .. didn't go around learning more about their instruments from an intellectual point of view. All they wanted was to play hot jazz, and the instrument was just a means. I'd imagine that a lot of them criticized me-said my technique was too good. Something like that. But I've always wanted to know what made music. How you do it, and why it sounds good. I always practiced, worked like hell. ~ Benny Goodman, #NFDB
1040:JULY 25 – RECIPE FOR SPREADING THE PLAGUE
In the fourteenth century fanatical custodians of the Catholic faith declared war on cat in Europe’s cities. These diabolical animals, instruments of Satan, were crucified, skewered, skinned alive or chucked into bonfires.
Then the rats, liberated from their worst enemies, came to rule the cities. And the Black Death, transmitted by rats, killed thirty million Europeans. ~ Eduardo Galeano,#NFDB
1041:Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1042:That’s why an artist must be a warrior and, like all warriors, artists over time acquire modesty and humility. They may, some of them, conduct themselves flamboyantly in public. But alone with the work they are chaste and humble. They know they are not the source of the creations they bring into being. They only facilitate. They carry. They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1043:As God adds his 'Yes' to your 'Yes,' as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his 'Yes' to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new - the holy estate of matrimony. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1044:As God adds his ‘Yes’ to your ‘Yes,’ as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his ‘Yes’ to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new – the holy estate of matrimony… ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1045:The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
1046:I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
1047:What I would like to leave behind is a simple prayer that each of you may find what I have found—God’s special gift to us all: the gift of peace. When we are at peace, we find the freedom to be most fully who we are, even in the worst of times. We let go of what is nonessential and embrace what is essential. We empty ourselves so that God may more fully work within us. And we become instruments in the hands of the Lord. ~ Joseph Bernardin, #NFDB
1048:Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1049:The Second Madrigal
A night of love
exquisite as a
concert from old Venice
played on exquisite instruments.
Healthy as a
buttock of a little angel.
Wise as an
anthill.
Garish as air
blown into a trumpet.
Abundant as the reign
of a royal Negro couple
seated on two thrones
cast in gold.
A night of love with you,
a big baroque battle
and two victories.
~ Anna Swirszczynska,#NFDB
1050:The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
1051:There's a very old recording maxim that goes, 'Distance makes depth.' I've used that a hell of a lot-whether it's tracking guitars or the whole band. People are used to close-miking amps, but I'd have a mic out around the back, as well, and then balance the two. Also, you shouldn't have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound right. You should be able to get the right tones simply with the science of microphone placement. ~ Jimmy Page, #NFDB
1052:Both instruments are processors of information. Both appeared when nothing quite like them had existed before, and both began to make their effects felt immediately (a situation that isn't invariable with new technology). Both devices were less the result of a single breakthrough than of an evolving set of technologies. Like the computer, the printing press had no one certain inventor; it was a technology whose time had come. ~ Pamela McCorduck, #NFDB
1053:I grant that the caprices of democracy are perpetual; its instruments are rude; its laws imperfect. But if it were true that soon no just medium would exist between the empire of democracy and the dominion of a single arm, should we not rather incline towards the former than submit voluntarily to the latter? And if complete equality be our fate, is it not better to be levelled by free institutions than by despotic power? ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1054:But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose; we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church. It ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
1055:The Palestinians were offered two options: 1) to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1056:Not everyone’s cut out to have one,” she said. She wished for a moment that she had the words to explain it properly: how loving someone more than you loved yourself gave you strength and courage; how seeing yourself in your parabatai’s eyes meant seeing the best version of yourself; how, at its best, fighting alongside your parabatai was like playing instruments in harmony with one another, each piece of the music improving the other. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1057:The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1058:The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
1059:they pale by comparison to the trading volumes of hedge funds, to say nothing of the levels of trading in exotic securities such as interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives such as futures on commodities, stock indexes, stocks, and even bets on whether a given company will go into bankruptcy (credit default swaps). The aggregate nominal value of these instruments, as I noted in Chapter 1, now exceeds $700 trillion. ~ John C Bogle, #NFDB
1060:Fresh pitsand, however, in spite of all its excellence in concrete structures, is not equally useful in stucco, the richness of which, when the lime and straw are mixed with such sand, will cause it to crack as it dries on account of the great strength of the mixture. But river sand, though useless in "signinum" on account of its thinness, becomes perfectly solid in stucco when thoroughly worked by means of polishing instruments. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
1061:Then the musical instruments appeared. Dad’s snare drum from the house, Henry’s guitar from his car, Adam’s spare guitar from my room. Everyone was jamming together, singing songs: Dad’s songs, Adam’s songs, old Clash songs, old Wipers songs. Teddy was dancing around, the blond of his hair reflecting the golden flames. I remember watching it all and getting that tickling in my chest and thinking to myself: This is what happiness feels like. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
1062:I was in orchestra in high school, but I really started when a friend of mine who's a drummer showed me some things. I was always just really fascinated with drums, it was the instrument I was always drawn towards. My ear sort of went to rhythmic aspects of music and songs. But he really was the beginning point of starting me on drum sets; like I said, I was in the orchestra first and I was playing orchestral snare and mallet instruments first. ~ Carla Azar, #NFDB
1063:Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1064:The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1065:The third class is made up of the scientists...they attack the boundary lines of the known...Those who wage this war in the cause of science are mostly concrete thinkers who follow as far as their instruments will lead them and then must wait for instruments still more powerful. Most of these minds are atheistic or at least agnostic...The miracles of theology are incapable of chemical analysis and are consequently taken cum grano salis by the scientific world, #NFDB
1066:The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong. . . . There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1067:Without you the instruments would die.
One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.
The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.
Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,
that what died last night can be whole today.
Why live some soberer way, and feel you ebbing out?
I won't do it.
Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,
now that I know how it is
to be with you in constant conversation. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1068:As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx’s economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of an uncontrolled society in which the productive workers unconsciously create the instruments of their own oppression. It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1069:Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1070:Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1071:In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1072:My fingers, which a second before had been taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn’t dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
1073:Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
1074:Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax and spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh... and everybody's high! ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
1075:Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high! ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
1076:Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. ~ Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell (Smith, Grover (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus)., #NFDB
1077:It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
1078:Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
1079:Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about. ~ Lawrence M Krauss, #NFDB
1080:Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
1081:The Unsolicited Promise When the man volunteered, “I promise we’ll look after him,” he gave one of the most reliable signals of trouble. Promises are used to convince us of an intention, but they are not guarantees. A guarantee offers some compensation if the speaker fails to deliver, but promises offer no such collateral. They are the very hollowest instruments of speech, showing nothing more than the speaker’s desire to convince you of something. ~ Gavin de Becker, #NFDB
1082:Assisted by Samuel Collins, the tsar embarked on a series of scientific and alchemical experiments, to conduct which he imported a range of new devices – phials, metals, lenses and measuring instruments – from the German lands. These were exotica in their own right, and since they had no native Russian names, many were called by their original German ones, beginning a long tradition of importing German scientific terms into the Russian language. ~ Catherine Merridale, #NFDB
1083:We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1084:...I do like the low frequencies. It's from years and years of observing audiences when they hear a lower frequency coming from an instrument it tends to pull them in. You have to listen a little more attentively. High frequency instruments hit you so hard, after a while the ear has a tendency to want to shut down. And that's what happens. I've been able to observe very carefully how people tend to get very tired of listening to high frequencies a lot. ~ Bennie Maupin, #NFDB
1085:It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry. ~ Herman Boerhaave, #NFDB
1086:the next smallest court, the Court of Priests. This was where the animals were cut and bled and burned on the large horned altar of unhewn stones that stood before the Temple, while a chorus of priests played their instruments and sang hymns of praise to the deity. A bronze laver stood nearby for what appeared to be cleansings. The Temple façade stood sixty feet high behind the altar, with its golden roof visible from anywhere on the entire temple mount. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1087:If the world is made to furnish each individual with the means of livelihood and the instruments for his growth and progress, each man has therefore the right to find in the world what is necessary for himself. The recent Council reminded us of this: "God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people. Thus, as all men follow justice and unite in charity, created goods should abound for them on a reasonable basis." ~ Pope Paul VI, #NFDB
1088:And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below.—
I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high spirits call
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,#NFDB
1089:Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
1090:Sergeant Perez began singing, “My dog has fleas.” As far as I know, Perez doesn’t play the ukulele or guitar, but I guess he knows someone who does. Guitarists and uke players sing that song to help them tune their instruments. Perez sings it to annoy me. “My dog has fleas,” he sang again. Being off-key didn’t help his song. “Your wife has crabs,” I sang, hitting the tune just right. Maybe that’s why Perez flipped me the bird. He was jealous of my singing. ~ Alan Russell, #NFDB
1091:Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12 ~ George Gilder, #NFDB
1092:You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1093:And if a minister shall usurp the supreme and absolute govern ment of America, and set up his instructions as laws in the colonies, and their Governors shall be so weak or so wicked, as for the sake of keeping their places, to be made the instruments in putting them in execu tion, who will presume to say that the people have not a right, or that it is not their indispensible duty to God and their Country, by all rational means in their power to RESIST THEM. ~ Samuel Adams, #NFDB
1094:BELOVED fellow-servants of Christ, our work requires us to be in the best possible condition of heart. When we are at our best, we are feeble enough; we would not, therefore, fall below our highest point. As instruments, we owe all our power for usefulness to the Divine hand; but, since tools should always be kept in order, we would have our spirit free from rust, and our mind sharp of point and keen of edge to answer at once to the Master's will. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1095:He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1096:What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1097:Why can't I go to Idris with you, then? Because it's not safe for you there O and it's safe for me here? I've been nearly killed almost a dozen times in the past month. That's because Valentine has been concentrating on the two Mortal Instruments that were here. He's going to shift his focus to Idris now. We all know it-- We're hardly as certain of anything as all that. And the Clave wants to meet Clarissa. You know that, Jace. The Clave can screw itself. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1098:You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1099:I believe I love my guitar more than the others love theirs. For John and Paul, songwriting is pretty important and guitar playing is a means to an end. While they're making up new tunes I can thoroughly enjoy myself just doodling around with a guitar for a whole evening. I'm fascinated by new sounds I can get from different instruments I try out. I'm not sure that makes me particularly musical. Just call me a guitar fanatic instead, and I'll be satisfied. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB
1100:I'm always happiest trying new instruments - and honestly enjoy playing, say, the glockenspiel with Radiohead as much as I do the guitar. I think regular touring has forced me to play the guitar more than anything else, which is why I'm probably most confident playing that. And whist I'd be lost if I couldn't play it too, I dislike the totemic worship of the thing... magazines, collectors, and so on. I enjoy struggling with instruments I can't really play. ~ Jonny Greenwood, #NFDB
1101:Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo . What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1102:With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
1103:he drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which he placed against his ear. Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard. Those separated by any distance were thus enabled to converse together with perfect ease and without any wire connection. ~ L Frank Baum, #NFDB
1104:We have two main instruments: the mind and the heart. The mind finds it difficult to be happy, precisely because the mind consciously enjoys the sense of separativity. It is always judging and doubting the reality in others. This is the human mind, the ordinary physical mind, the earth-bound mind. But we also have the aspiring heart, the loving heart. This loving heart is free from insecurity, for it has already established its oneness with the rest of the world. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
1105:If you think for yourself or feel for yourself or act for yourself, you become a misappropriator, a dishonest trustee-a thief of force.
Let the Divine think through you, feel through you and act through you. Then only right and perfect use will be made of the instruments that compose your being.
Let the Divine's Thoughts shine in your mind, let the Divine's Love swell in your heart, let the Divine's Energy impel your limbs. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Towards The Light,#NFDB
1106:The world does not need super-men, but supernatural men. Men who will persistently turn the self out of their lives and let Divine Power work through them. Let inspiration take the place of aspiration. Seek to grow spiritually, rather than to acquire fame and riches. Our chief ambition should be to be used by God. The Divine Force is sufficient for all the spiritual work in the world. God only needs the instruments for Him to use. His instruments can remake the world. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1107:In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful "underwills" or under-souls — indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls — to his feelings of delight as commander. L'EFFET C'EST MOI. what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1108:Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
1109:Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm. ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
1110:As government, and strong rods for the exercise of it, are necessary to preserve public societies from dreadful and fatal calamities arising from among themselves; so no less requisite are they to defend the community from foreign enemies. As they are like the pillars of a building, so they are also like the walls and bulwarks of a city: they are under God the main strength of a people in a time of war and the chief instruments of their preservation, safety and rest. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
1111:Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically ~ Albert Speer, #NFDB
1112:However, there is a fundamental difference between the issue related to Japan's history and our negotiations with China. What is it all about? The Japanese issue resulted from World War II and is stipulated in the international instruments on the outcomes of World War II, while our discussions on border issues with our Chinese counterparts have nothing to do with World War II or any other military conflicts. This is the first, or rather, I should say, the second point. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1113:In proportion to the value of this revolution; in proportion to the importance of instruments, every word of which decides a question between power and liberty; in proportion to the solemnity of acts, proclaiming the will authenticated by the seal of the people, the only earthly source of authority, ought to be the vigilance with which they are guarded by every citizen in private life, and the circumspection with which they are executed by every citizen in public trust. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
1114:I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. ~ Edward R Murrow, #NFDB
1115:The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1116:Just in same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for... before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected... that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
1117:Of course we are called to be instruments of His peace, to live righteous lives, and to care for others. But ultimately, our calling is to bring glory to God and to let Him perfect us into the image bearers He always meant us to be. I think sometimes we can bring much more glory to God by being cheerful and delighting in the world and people He has given us than by living a “useful” life where we trot grimly around with a martyr complex that annoys everyone we encounter. ~ Sally Clarkson, #NFDB
1118:Why can't I go to Idris with you, then?
Because it's not safe for you there
O and it's safe for me here? I've been nearly killed almost a dozen times in the past month.
That's because Valentine has been concentrating on the two Mortal Instruments that were here. He's going to shift his focus to Idris now. We all know it--
We're hardly as certain of anything as all that. And the Clave wants to meet Clarissa. You know that, Jace.
The Clave can screw itself. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1119:Modern times are dominated by Satan and will be more so in the future. The conflict with hell cannot be engaged by men, even the most clever. The Immaculata alone has from God the promise of victory over Satan. However, assumed into Heaven, the Mother of God now requires our cooperation. She seeks souls who will consecrate themselves entirely to her, who will become in her hands effective instruments for the defeat of Satan and the spreading of God's kingdom upon earth. ~ Maximilian Kolbe, #NFDB
1120:But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in union. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1121:We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It's the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it's racing towards. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
1122:[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1123:Presumably there are energies, to which each human is sensitive, that we cannot yet detect by means of our instruments. Built into our brains and our bodies are very sensitive tuneable receivers for energies that we do not yet know about in our science but that each one of us can detect under the proper circumstances and the proper state of mind. We can tune our nervous systems and bodies to receive these energies. We can also tune our brains and bodies to transmit these energies. ~ John C Lilly, #NFDB
1124:[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1125:I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1126:Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
1127:legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, that takes the name of socialism. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
1128:the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like ‘force,’ ‘mass,’ ‘space,’ and ‘time,’ he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1129:Of course, an exhausting day at sail lines and nets left little energy to expend on running or laughing. Perhaps that was why her parents couldn't appreciate her music - it wouldn't appear to be hard work to them. Menolly shook her hands, letting them flap from her wrists. They ached and trembled from the constricted movements and tension of an hour of intensive playing. No, her parents would never understand that playing musical instruments could be as hard work as sailing or fishing. ~ Anne McCaffrey, #NFDB
1130:She walked as if through a forest. The pillars were furrowed like ancient trees, and into the woods the light seeped, colorful and as clear as song, through the stained-glass windows. High overhead animals and people frolicked in the stone foliage, and angels played their instruments. At an even higher, more dizzying height, the vaults of the ceiling arched upward, lifting the church toward God ... The song cut through her like a blinding light. Now she saw how deep in the dust she lay. ~ Sigrid Undset, #NFDB
1131:377. God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these things are turned on what is evil or harmful & ill-regulated within thee, then it is well; but if they attack thy very sources of life & strength, then seize & expel them or thou diest.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#NFDB
1132:Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exericised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law. ~ John Marshall, #NFDB
1133:Now, legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, that takes the name of socialism. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
1134:Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
1135:The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from the jug of “Materia”, the two lekythoi from the “Custodes” shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward—all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1136:This post-Christian confusion—MacIntyre calls it “emotivism”—now shapes American public life. In such an environment, the purpose of moral discourse, he writes, “[becomes] the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own.” Other people become instruments to be dominated and used. They’re means to achieve our ends, not ends in themselves.6 As a result, most of our moral debates about public policy never get near the truth of an issue. ~ Charles J Chaput, #NFDB
1137:Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1138:I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
1139:I think our songwriting has evolved. We can show that we have continued to branch out and do different stuff and incorporate different instruments. When it comes to writing, I think that we have pushed the envelope. We can do whatever we want to try - a longer song or a shorter song, some different instruments, some piano, an intro with just vocals, something that's scathing. Whatever. However we feel the song should go, that's what we will do. With that mindset, I think it's made us better writers. ~ John Bush, #NFDB
1140:And yet, for all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a trans-governmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments. Finally, ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
1141:Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic. Before the invention of navigational instruments, a beautiful lady was carved on the prow of the boat to help sailors cross the ocean; and architects, grappling with the intangibles of design, select a guru whose work gives them personal help in areas where there are few rules to follow. The guru, as architectural father-figure, is subject to intense hate and love; either way, the relationship is personal, and necessarily one-to-one. ~ Denise Scott Brown, #NFDB
1142:She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1143:The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1144:The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
1145:Therefore pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh. As it reduces the actors in the sexual drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest. The pornographer, in spite of himself, becomes a metaphysician when he states that the friction of penis in orifice is the supreme matter of the world, for which the world is well lost; as he says so, the world vanishes. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
1146:Time and again we try to cope with situations using collective instruments that are out of tune. Rather than stopping to tune them, we increase the pace, hire consultants who want to increase productivity by further reducing the time devoted to tuning and practicing, hire new conductors who promise to conduct even faster, and so forth. But the obvious thing to do—to stop and tune the instruments collectively—doesn’t come easily because it requires a shift of the mind to a deeper level of operating. ~ C Otto Scharmer, #NFDB
1147:Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is. ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
1148:It is so easy to lose sight of the fact that these are God’s children. They do not belong to us. They are given not to bring us glory, but him. Our teenagers are from him, they exist through him, and the glory of their lives points to him. We are but agents to accomplish his plan. We are but instruments in his hands. Our identity is rooted in him and his call to us, not in our children and their performance. The ultimate rejection that should make us weep is not that they have rejected us, but him. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
1149:Many say Russia is waging the war in Ukraine to acquire more territory. But really, the Kremlin doesn’t need new territory—that was the old tactic the Russian Empire used to preserve itself. The Kremlin now has a modified and updated version of this tactic: it uses threats of takeovers and alternative forms of war (customs, trade, information/cyber) as instruments of intimidation and blackmail. The Kremlin doesn’t actually need Donbas; it would just become another burden on the beleaguered Russian budget. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1150:Of course, I’m not one to judge people by their appearances, Rhonda, but from how this guy looked I would have said he had graduated high school with three friends tops, all of them in the computer club with him, and that he had some super-obscure hobby he was obsessed with, like collecting ancient musical instruments or making origami rocket ships that could break the sound barrier, and that, if he noticed women at all, he tried to impress them with how many decimal places of pi he had memorized. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
1151:Europeans never had the remotest intention of raising Africans to the Western level, of sharing with them the instruments of physical, political or economic power. It was precisely their intention, their necessity, to keep the people they ruled in a state of cultural anarchy, that is, simply in a barbaric state. “The famous inferiority complex one is pleased to observe as a characteristic of the colonized is no accident but something very definitely desired and deliberately inculcated by the colonizer. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1152:For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means ~ Gordon Cooper, #NFDB
1153:It is a great problem for the true international agenda of human rights that the United States, uniquely among industrialised countries, has not ratified three main instruments, has not ratified the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and we could have so much richer a debate and dialogue on international human rights standards if the superpower would sign up to the agenda. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
1154:Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1155:She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines. ~ Frances Hardinge, #NFDB
1156:Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1157:You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book... but surely the minuet-- the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the vain thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls? ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
1158:He is about to hand the earphone to Jutta when—clear and unblemished, about halfway down the coil—he hears the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin. He tries to hold the pin perfectly still. A second violin joins the first. Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
1159:this model of control has the great advantage of simultaneously creating the illusion of freedom. The compulsion to obedience exists in the individual’s mind. Individuals choose on their own to comply, out of fear that they are being watched. That eliminates the need for all the visible hallmarks of compulsion, and thus enables control over people who falsely believe themselves to be free. For this reason, every oppressive state views mass surveillance as one of its most critical instruments of control. ~ Glenn Greenwald, #NFDB
1160:In their censures of luxury the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial; and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows, white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and am impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
1161:I brought the music out to L.A., and the producer Tommy LaPuma heard it and he said - "Man, I love it. Let's do it. Let's record it." I said, "Okay, where's the band?" He said, "We don't have a band. We want it to sound exactly like your demo." I said, "Well, I played all the instruments on the demo." You do that when you're making demos. You got your guitar, you got your sax. He said, "Well, I want it to sound just like that, so get all your instruments out here." So I ended up playing all the instruments. ~ Marcus Miller, #NFDB
1162:Religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place. Insofar as human pride may win the battle, religion can and does become one of the instruments of human sin. But insofar as there the self does meet God and so can surrender to something beyond its own self-interest, religion may provide the one possibility for a much needed and very rare release from our common self-concern.23 ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1163:It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and a usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. ~ James Monroe, #NFDB
1164: “So, he’s pouting, right? That’s why he missed the ceremony,” I say over the instruments.
“He’s been away from his home for some time. He had things to do. To prepare for your night together.” Gossamer’s furred wings buzz into action, lifting her off my shoulder.
“Sure.” I smother a smile. “We both know he didn’t come because he would’ve been bored to tears. There’s too much orderliness for his liking.”
She giggles in agreement—a tinkling sound that blends with the music. ~ A G Howard,#NFDB
1165:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being? ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
1166:The question is whether the ECB will be able to fight low inflation by itself. Mr Draghi signalled that the central bank could only do so much when he called last week for governments in the eurozone to do more to boost growth by loosening fiscal policy and introducing structural reforms. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, told Bloomberg News this week that monetary policy had “come to the end” of its instruments, stating: “I don’t think that the ECB’s monetary policy has the instruments to fight deflation. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1167:I didn't blame Wes. I actually didn't blame anybody except myself. Really, what did I have in my life that was so bad it raced under my skin until I couldn't stand it anymore and I had to give it a place to come out? I didn't know. At moments like this, when my flesh cried out for relief, I didn't have to know. I just needed to make it stop. I lifted the pleated bed skirt and pulled out the wooden box. Inside, the instruments were lines up on a folded snowy white pillowcase, still sterile and gleaming from Eater night. ~ Nancy N Rue, #NFDB
1168:When you’re in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap. Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything. You forget something, you’re screwed. You break something, you’re screwed. You don’t have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.
Once you hit it big, though —
You’re packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn’t forget anything. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB
1169:For the Members of the Assembly having before their eyes so many fatal Instances of the errors and falshoods, in which the greatest part of mankind has so long wandred, because they rely'd upon the strength of humane Reason alone, have begun anew to correct all Hypotheses by sense, as Seamen do their dead Reckonings by Cœlestial Observations; and to this purpose it has been their principal indeavour to enlarge and strengthen the Senses by Medicine, and by such outward Instruments as are proper for their particular works. ~ Robert Hooke, #NFDB
1170:Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
1171:When I was a little kid and I heard a song I liked on TV, I would jump up and run to the piano to try and figure it out by ear. When I was 10 or 11, I built myself a drum kit in the garage made out of empty laundry detergent buckets, old lawn chairs, paint cans, and old trash cans. And around that time, my parents got me my first guitar. A baby acoustic. I jumped between all of these instruments constantly to satisfy the ideas I heard in my head. At this young age, I realized that music would play a huge part in my life. ~ Brendon Urie, #NFDB
1172:When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music. ~ Lenny Kravitz, #NFDB
1173:How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably
subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment —
from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies — how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being? ~ Alan W Watts,#NFDB
1174:In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
1175:Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1176:I do believe that the Barack Obama administration has reached a new low by using the instruments of the state against its political adversaries. Obama does not see people who disagree with him as well-meaning opponents but rather as enemies. That's not something that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did as President. Probably Obama's direct descendant in this line is Richard Nixon. And Obama seems to have carried Nixonian tactics to a new low. So, we've turned a corner in American politics that doesn't bode well for our future. ~ Dinesh D Souza, #NFDB
1177:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. ~ Karl Marx,#NFDB
1178:During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections.
[...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers. ~ Ted Gioia,#NFDB
1179:The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
1180:There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience: they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power -- God, history, fate, nation, or humanity. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
1181:I think my music being referred to as "cinematic" has a lot to do with people just not being used to listening to instrumental music without watching a film. I'm still pretty convinced of that. You'll play Chopin in place of something average and like, "Wow, that'd be great in a film." People say it every time, swear to God. I don't think people have a good relationship with instruments and music anymore. But it's definitely visual; I started writing with this band because of the pictures. I can't really deny it either, you know? ~ Patrick Watson, #NFDB
1182:The snores alone were quite a study, varying from the mild sniff to the stentorian snort, which startled the echoes and hoisted the performer erect to accuse his neighbor of the deed, magnanimously forgive him, and wrapping the drapery of his couch about him, lie down to vocal slumber. After listening for a week to this band of wind instruments, I indulged in the belief that I could recognize each by the snore alone, and was tempted to join the chorus by breaking out with John Brown's favorite hymn: "Blow ye the trumpet, blow! ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
1183:Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1184:In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1185:There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from anothe quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing. ~ Daniel Webster, #NFDB
1186:Arbitrary distinctions...have always been the instruments of arbitrary power, the means of lulling and ensnaring men into their own servitude. For whenever we leave principles and clear positive laws, and wander after constructions, one construction or consequence is piled upon another until we get an immense distance from fact and truth and nature, lost in the wild regions of imagination and possibility, where arbitrary power sits upon her brazen throne and governs with an iron sceptre.’ -said by John Adams, in Those Who Love, p. 166 ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
1187:Thus far our meditation on quantum reality has revealed that the world of everyday matter, when properly understood, embodies concepts of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, ordinary matter is built up from atoms that are, in a rich and precise sense, tiny musical instruments. In their interplay with light, they realize a mathematical Music of the Spheres that surpasses the visions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler. In molecules and ordered materials, those atomic instruments play together as harmonious ensembles and synchronized orchestras. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
1188:Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1189:Pessoa could not identify the instruments that he could hear so well, but we can do that for him. There are two groups of instruments in the Pessoa orchestra. First, the main sensory devices with which the world around and inside an organism interacts with the nervous system. Second, the devices that continuously respond emotively to the mental presence of any object or event. The emotive response consists of altering the course of life within the old interior of organisms. The devices are known as drives, motivations, and emotions. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1190:First, by the figurations of art there be made instruments of navigation without men to row them, as great ships to brooke the sea, only with one man to steer them, and they shall sail far more swiftly than if they were full of men; also chariots that shall move with unspeakable force without any living creature to stir them. Likewise an instrument may be made to fly withall if one sits in the midst of the instrument, and do turn an engine, by which the wings, being artificially composed, may beat the air after the manner of a flying bird. ~ Roger Bacon, #NFDB
1191:A consequence of this alienation of humans from their own nature is that they are also alienated from each other. Productive activity becomes ‘activity under the domination, coercion and yoke of another man’. This other man becomes an alien, hostile being. Instead of humans relating to each other co-operatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
1192:It is very strange, that, ever since mankind have taken it into their heads to trouble themselves so much about the education of children, they should never have thought of any other instruments to effect their purpose than those of emulation, jealousy, envy, pride, covetousness, and servile fear—all passions the most dangerous, the most apt to ferment, and the most fit to corrupt the soul, even before the body is formed. With every premature instruction we instil into the head, we implant a vice in the bottom of the heart. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, #NFDB
1193:We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1194:Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
1195:And then as the knives and forks began to clank softly above the white tablecloths, the violins would rise alone, now suddenly mature although tentative and unsure just a short while before; slim and narrow-waisted, they eloquently proceeded with their task, took up again the lost human cause, and pleaded before the indifferent tribunal of stars, now set in a sky on which the shapes of the instruments floated like water signs or fragments of keys, unfinished lyres or swans, an imitatory, thoughtless starry commentary on the margin of music. ~ Bruno Schulz, #NFDB
1196:If our hearts and minds are not properly transformed, we are like musicians playing untuned instruments, or engineers working with broken and ill-programmed computers. The attunement of the heart is essential to the outflow of grace...We must aim at building the structures of God's kingdom but recognized that we will only create these through the transformation of our experience. Concentration on reformation without revival leads to skins without wine; concentration on revival without reformation soon loses the wine for want of skins. ~ Richard Lovelace, #NFDB
1197:I thank Missio, (Pontifical Mission Societies), the primary instruments for cooperation in the universal Church's universal mission in the world. Through their action, the proclamation of the Gospel bears witness to Christ and is lived out in service of our neighbour through justice for the poorest, education in isolated villages, medical care in remote areas, freedom from poverty, the reintegration of the marginalised, support for the development of peoples, the breaking down of ethnic divisions and respect for life in all its stages. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1198:The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of a mass movement unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1199:To those who say that we need weights and measures in order to enforce accountability in education, my response is, yes, of course we do, but only under three conditions that are not being met today. We need to make sure (1) that we measure things worth measuring in the context of authentic education, where rote learning counts for little; (2) that we know how to measure what we set out to measure; and (3) that we attach no more importance to measurable things than we attach to things equally or more important that elude our instruments. ~ Parker J Palmer, #NFDB
1200:If, for example, you learn a craft or play an instrument, you will understand that this is only possible because the specific practice has a long history, which you help to maintain and develop whenever you recreate aspects of it. To practise living traditions is to be reminded of the historical depth of our lives. In this way, you learn that everything doesn't necessarily always move forwards. For example, it isn't possible to build violins today that are as good as the instruments built in Stradivarius' workshop more than 300 years ago. ~ Svend Brinkmann, #NFDB
1201:Gus, help me! Help! Oh, God, no no nooo!” So screamed the female upon at last fully perceiving the stained altar just before her, and evidently realizing its purpose, just at the moment when the two priests who were not playing instruments came to tear away her garlands and clothes and chain her down upon the stones. The berserker watched steadily to see whether Gus or God (whatever entities these might be) might come to the female’s aid, although from its experience following 17,261 similar appeals the probability seemed vanishingly small. ~ Fred Saberhagen, #NFDB
1202:My identity is mostly as a songwriter and lyricist and singer. I also have a lot of production ideas but I have my own limitations in terms of what instruments I'm actually proficient at and what I can do myself, so I really love working with people on the production end; just really going for it with orchestration and instrumentation and production. That's where I see myself going: maintaining my integrity and abilities as a songwriter, but applying it to different contexts, to where I can put on a huge feathered costume and roll around in the ocean. ~ Mirah, #NFDB
1203:Take Einstein; wasn't he looking for something stable and changeless in this enormous, constantly changing melting pot that is the universe? He sought fixed rules. Today, instead, it would be helpful to find all those rules that show how and why the universe is not fixed - how this dynamism develops and acts. Then maybe we will be able to explain many things, perhaps even art, because the old instruments of judgment, the old aesthetics, are no longer of any use to us - so much so that we no longer know what's beautiful and what isn't. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni, #NFDB
1204:Je le saluerais d'un cri de victoire, s'il [l'homme nouveau] pouvait prouver que l'existence, sur ce vaste continent, peut se passer des articles de première nécessité ci-dessus mentionnés [laboratoires, usines chimiques, aciéries, avions, munitions, tracteurs et aliments pasteurisés]. Oui, ce serait un type très suprême d'homme s'il apportait la démonstration que l'existence, tant ici qu'ailleurs, peut se passer de travail forcé, d'instruments de torture, d'outils de mort, d'argent, de dernière mode, de prophylaxie, de gouvernement et la suite. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1205:To know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other instruments-including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses, thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings-fall within the sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon. ~ Russell Sherman, #NFDB
1206:For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable. The third group, however, which I made at Uraniborg during approximately the last 21 years with the greatest care and with very accurate instruments at a more mature age, until I was fifty years of age, those I call the observations of my manhood, completely valid and absolutely certain, and this is my opinion of them. ~ Tycho Brahe, #NFDB
1207:I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in true freedom, to publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless. ~ Assata Shakur, #NFDB
1208:Never admit that you live by the power of food and not by the power of God! He who has created every form of nourishment, He who has bestowed appetite, will certainly see that His devotee is sustained! Do not imagine that rice maintains you, or that money or men support you! Could they aid if the Lord withdraws your life-breath? They are His indirect instruments merely. Is it by any skill of yours that food digests in your stomach? Use the sword of your discrimination, Mukunda! Cut through the chains of agency and perceive the Single Cause! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1209:From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams... only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues.... Until he has those means and power instruments, his tactics are very different from power tactics. Therefore, every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization, whether by means of local organizations, churches, service groups, labor Unions, corner gangs, or as individuals. ~ Saul Alinsky, #NFDB
1210:I trust microphones, speakers and recordings less and less, and no longer buy into the idea that I can recreate at home, or in my earphones, the experience of hearing live acoustic instruments. The orchestra is already a set of speakers that react differently to each player, each room and each concert - it's that high level of uncertainly and unrepeatability that I like. The music is just soaked into the walls of a room straight from the instruments - and it's a one-off deal. The alternative - left speaker, right speaker - is kind of a compromise. ~ Jonny Greenwood, #NFDB
1211:Portuguese craftsmen such as Agostinho de Goes Raposo, Francisco Gois and João Dias perfected the construction of nautical instruments. The Portuguese caravel – and its successors the great nau (1480) and the galleon (1510) – were also significantly better than other sailing ships of the time. Finally, with the Cantino Map of 1502, the Portuguese achieved a breakthrough in cartography: the first modern projection of the world’s geography, with largely accurate depictions of the world’s major continents aside from Australia and Antarctica (plate 7). ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1212:The great events of an age appear, to those living through them, as backdrops only to the vastly more compelling dramas of their own lives, and how could it be otherwise?
In this same way, many of the men and women there in the Hippodrome (and some who were not, but later claimed to have been) would cling to one private image or another of what transpired. They might be entirely different things, varying moments, for each of us has strings within the soul, and we are played upon in different ways, like instruments, and how could it be otherwise? ~ Guy Gavriel Kay,#NFDB
1213:That the happiness of man may still remain imperfect, as wants in this place are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created; every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniencies, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1214:I think the cornerstone for my impetus for doing arrangements for people is because I want to be an enabler. That is to say, I don't approach arrangements with the idea that I want to progressive the genre of arranging. I want to be more of an enabler, and if a person is making a record and they have the option of layering some real instruments down on a track and I can be of assistance whether it is brass or winds or stings or percussion then I do so. Sometimes I do take on projects because it is a pretty sweet deal to work with Pet Shop boys, you know? ~ Owen Pallett, #NFDB
1215:You know what punk is? a bunch of no-talent guys who really, really want to be in a band. Nobody reads music, nobody plays the mandolin, and you're too dumb to write songs about mythology or Middle-earth. So what's your style? Three chords, cranked out fast and loud and distorted because your instruments are crap and you can't play them worth a damn. And you scream your lungs out to cover up the fact that you can't sing. It should suck, but here's the thing - it doesn't. Rock and roll can be so full of itself, but not this. It's simple and angry and raw. ~ Gordon Korman, #NFDB
1216:A Poem About Miracles
Why don't the records go blank
the instant the singer dies?
Oh, I know there are explanations
but they don't convince me
I'm still surprised
When I hear the dead singing
As for orchestra's
I expect the Instruments
To fall silent one by one
as the musicians succumb
to cancer and heart disease
so that toward the end
I turn on a disc
labelled Gotterdammerung
and all that comes out
is the sound of one sick old man
scraping a shaky bow
across an out-of-tune fiddle.
~ Alden Nowlan,#NFDB
1217:A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument--a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself--in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1218:And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Isaiah 2:4 OH, that these happy times were come! At present the nations are heavily armed, and are inventing weapons more and more terrible, as if the chief end of man could only be answered by destroying myriads of his fellows. Yet peace will prevail one day; yes, and so prevail that the instruments of destruction shall be beaten into other shapes and used for better purposes. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1219:Beyond the apartment’s walls, in the night sky of his closed eyes, little lights charted the streets and broad avenues, the apartments and clubs of late revelers, the tall towers, where five or six guys he knew, guys only a few years ahead of him, would be toiling, even at this hour, in their big chairs, the vast windows of their offices overlooking the city, overlooking the planet with its mines and wells, its fields and great waterways, as they steered Earth’s course by the graphs and instruments of their predecessors’ devising into the hidden future. ~ Deborah Eisenberg, #NFDB
1220:The basic function of the government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and it's principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler - to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest of schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke. ~ Errico Malatesta, #NFDB
1221:Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, McDonald’s—which makes its uniforms in prison—AT&T, Starbucks, which manufactures holiday products, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Walmart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, and Target. Prisoners ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
1222:Each day, the moon’s gravitational field tugs at the earth as it rotates underneath. At CERN, this tiny stress caused the total length of the LEP tunnel to stretch and contract by about a millimeter (one-twenty-fifth of an inch) every day. Not such a big deal in a seventeen-mile-long beam pipe, but enough to cause a tiny fluctuation in the energy of the electrons and positrons—one that was easily detectable by the high-precision instruments. After some initial puzzlement at the daily energy variations, the CERN physicists quickly figured out what was going on. ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
1223:The theologians dead, knew no more than the theologians now living. More than this cannot be said. About this world little is known,—about another world, nothing.
Our fathers were intellectual serfs, and their fathers were slaves. The makers of our creeds were ignorant and brutal. Every dogma that we have, has upon it the mark of whip, the rust of chain, and the ashes of fagot.
Our fathers reasoned with instruments of torture. They believed in the logic of fire and sword. They hated reason. They despised thought. They abhorred liberty. ~ Robert G Ingersoll,#NFDB
1224:There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against property and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as instruments that execute them. The latter find that “the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; EVERY SOCIETY HAS THE CRIMINALS IT DESERVES."[4] ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1225:There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against property and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as instruments that execute them. The latter find that "the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; every society has the criminals it deserves."[4] ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1226:Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people--often in poverty--taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1227:In the old days, when women were mostly illiterate, and their only “skill” with men was limited to blushing with the head down, courtesans could read, write, sing, dance, and play instruments—real and euphemistic ones—in and out of bed in a hundred different positions. Brothels were the only place a gentleman could find a worldly, elegant, irresistible, learned, challenging, understanding, interesting, and amorous woman. Many five-star courtesans became multimillionaires and eventually married distinguished suitors who immortalized their charm and beauty with poems. ~ Jason Y Ng, #NFDB
1228:On the cracked floor beside her lay an open violin case. The ebony violin she had played for Death rested inside, along with the bow. The golden strings gleamed in the torchlight. Of all the instruments that were famous works of art, this one was the most exquisite she had ever seen. And of all the instruments in the world, there would never be a more expensive one she could acquire. She had paid for it with an endless lifetime of service.
Carefully, as she closed the lid and latched it, she thought, I was broken, and broken again, until I became someone else. ~ Thea Harrison,#NFDB
1229:Your violin has only two strings,” I say. “You’re missing the other two.”
Yes, he says. He’s well aware.
“All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I’m having is right here. This one’s gone,” he says of the missing top string, “that one’s gone, and this little guy’s almost out of commission.” His goal in life, Nathaniel tells me, is to figure out how to replace the strings. But he got used to playing imperfect instruments while taking music classes in Cleveland’s public schools, and there’s a lot you can do, he assures me, with just two strings ~ Steve L pez,#NFDB
1230:In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial;89 and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
1231:Man came silently into the world. As a matter of fact he trod so softly that, when we first catch sight of him as revealed by those indestructible stone instruments, we find him sprawling all over the old world from the Cape of Good Hope to Peking. Without doubt he already speaks and lives in groups ; he already makes fire. After all, this is surely what we ought to expect. As we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, The Birth of Thought, 186, #NFDB
1232:Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here today evidences their victory.
What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs,#NFDB
1233:So let us ask ourselves this evening, in adoring Christ who is really present in the Eucharist: do I let myself be transformed by him? Do I let the Lord who gives himself to me, guide me to going out ever more from my little enclosure, in order to give, to share, to love him and others? Brothers and sisters, following, communion, sharing. Let us pray that participation in the Eucharist may always be an incentive: to follow the Lord every day, to be instruments of communion and to share what we are with him and with our neighbour. Our life will then be truly fruitful. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1234:I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses were themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from any but herself) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1235:The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. History is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth. Some of the most significant discoveries in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their beliefs. If astronomy had not kept always in advance of the telescope, no one would ever have thought a telescope worth making. What great invention has not existed in the inventor's mind long before he gave it tangible shape? ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
1236:The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations…repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup. “But the Composer is still dead. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
1237:And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be 'a necessary evil,' and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck. ~ Voltairine de Cleyre, #NFDB
1238:His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment of two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
1239:I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia's drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing to do battle, which turn their wearers into something utterly alien -- faceless instruments of violence capable of unspeakable acts. ~ Michela Wrong, #NFDB
1240:There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) ~ Kelly Link, #NFDB
1241:Everything we know has its origin in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. Then how is it possible that no more than one in one hundred students has ever been exposed to an extended and systematic study of the art and science of question-asking? How come Alan Bloom did not mention this, or E. D. Hirsh, Jr., or so many others who have written books on how to improve our schools? Did they simply fail to notice that the principal intellectual instrument available to human beings is not examined in school? ~ Alfred A Knopf Sr, #NFDB
1242:We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism-and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world, is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and to which they export new capital-instruments of domination-arms and all kinds of articles, thus submerging us in an absolute dependence. ~ Che Guevara, #NFDB
1243:I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1244:We are living in uncertain times. In a world where peace seems to be in short supply, I feel like the world is desperate to see an example of "peace that passes understanding." When someone goes "all in" for God, committing their whole life to Him, peace is one of the gifts we are promised. Someone who is all in for God can take to heart that even though we will have trouble in this world, our lives are in the hands of the one who has overcome this world. When we've been filled with God's peace, only then can we turn around and become instruments of His peace to a hurting world. ~ Matthew West, #NFDB
1245:Freedom of Will-that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order-who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls-indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls-to his feelings of delight as commander. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1246:The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers then. Uncle Alex must have thought something like this: “God help us. Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain. Well—at least there is a Harvard man with whom he can discuss this ridiculous dream.” (It was Schiller who first said that about stupidity and the gods. This was Nietzsche’s reply: “Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.”) ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1247:There is something very wonderful about the high achievements of science and modern technology (which no doubt will be bettered in the near future), in the superb ingenuity of scientific instruments, in the amazingly delicate and yet powerful machines, in all that has flowed from the adventurous inquiries of science and its applications, in the glimpses into the fascinating workshop and processes of nature, in the fine sweep of science, through its myriad workers, in the realms of thought and practice, and, above all, in the fact that all this has come out of the mind of man. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
1248:Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1249:There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart. One sound comes from a chamber orchestra, the other from the beating of the heart's chamber. One comes from an instrument of graphite and wood, the other from an organ of flesh and blood. This loftier music I speak of tonight is more pleasing than the notes of the most gifted composers, more moving than a marching band, more harmonious than a thousand voices joined in hymn and more powerful than all the world's percussion instruments combined. That sweet sound of love. ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
1250:Freedom of Will"—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order—who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful "underwills" or under-souls—indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls—to his feelings of delight as commander. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1251:In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices. ~ Hector Berlioz, #NFDB
1252:Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.
Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost. ~ Neil Gaiman,#NFDB
1253:I was just a seventeen-year-old kid, going to Times Square to participate in this left-wing demonstration. The signs were for peace and justice and so on. But then I was attacked by police mounted on horseback and on foot. Before I knew it, I was clubbed and knocked unconscious. So it gave me a radical view of the United States, a critical view of the role of the state and of the instruments of the state - the police, the Army, and so on - as not being neutral at all in political battles, but being generally against workers and against striking people, against dissenters of all kinds. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1254:Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures. Is this reasonable? Is it conceivable that feelings could have motivated the intellectual inventions that gave humans (1) the arts, (2) philosophical inquiry, (3) religious beliefs, (4) moral rules, (5) justice, (6) political governance systems and economic institutions, (7) technology, and (8) science? I would respond yes, wholeheartedly. I can make the case that cultural practices or instruments in each of the eight areas above required feeling a situation of actual or anticipated ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1255:The dance began. Caran remained silent the entire time.
When the instruments slowed to an end, a lute picking a light tune downward until there was no more music, Kestrel broke away. Caran gave her an awkward bow and left.
“Well, that didn’t look very fun,” said a voice behind her. Kestrel turned. Gladness washed over her.
It was Ronan. “I’m ashamed of myself,” he said. “Heartily ashamed, to be so late that you had to dance with such a boring partner as Caran. How did that happen?”
“I blackmailed him.”
“Ah.” Ronan’s eyes grew worried. “So things aren’t going well. ~ Marie Rutkoski,#NFDB
1256:Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess. It's like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, "That's it! That's it!" to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it. ~ Jandy Nelson, #NFDB
1257:At conception, we start as a single cell that contains all the DNA needed to build our body. The plan for that entire body unfolds via the instructions contained in this single microscopic cell. To go from this generalized egg cell to a complete human, with trillions of specialized cells organized in just the right way, whole batteries of genes need to be turned on and off at just the right stages of development. Like a concerto composed of individual notes played by many instruments, our bodies are a composition of individual genes turning on and off inside each cell during our development. ~ Neil Shubin, #NFDB
1258:I try to think of acting in terms of thinking and doing. People think of it as, "Oh, let's get inside this guy." They think that acting is being, or feeling, or emoting. It's as much doing. One of the first things you do as an acting student is ask, "Can you say words and do a task at the same time, like sweep a floor?" You get to watch the human condition, and there's always a "doing" aspect of it. This couple, they're carrying backpacks, where are they going? Students? Or are they carrying instruments? It stimulates the imagination. So acting is doing ... and I forget how we got off on that. ~ Tobin Bell, #NFDB
1259:On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves’ drums away because they didn’t want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up—fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened. ~ Ahmir Questlove Thompson, #NFDB
1260:The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet—or more frequently around a completely different planet. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1261:No doubt, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin's scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
1262:Our mind and our language are very clumsy instruments and we have to deal with very subtle matters and subtle problems. At the same time we do not realize that by simplifying things, by imagining ourselves in a three-dimensional world, we make this world non-existent. We put ourselves in an impossible position, because if we take, for instance, the ordinary view of the past disappearing and the future not yet existent, then nothing exists. This is the only conclusion from this idea that is logically possible: either nothing exists or everything exists— there is no third alternative, so to speak. ~ P D Ouspensky, #NFDB
1263:This does not mean that science is just the art of making measurable predictions. Some philosophers of science overly circumscribe science by limiting it to its numerical predictions. They miss the point, because they confuse the instruments with the objectives. Verifiable quantitative predictions are instruments to validate hypotheses. The objective of scientific research is not just to arrive at predictions: it is to understand how the world functions; to construct and develop an image of the world, a conceptual structure to enable us to think about. Before being technical, science is visionary. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
1264:the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts. ~ Henry Adams,#NFDB
1265:I have spoken here of heavenly help, of angels dispatched to bless us in time of need. But when we speak of those who are instruments in the hand of God, we are reminded that not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them we walk with and talk with—here, now, every day. Some of them reside in our own neighborhoods. Some of them gave birth to us, and in my case, one of them consented to marry me. Indeed heaven never seems closer than when we see the love of God manifested in the kindness and devotion of people so good and so pure that angelic is the only word that comes to mind. ~ Jeffrey R Holland, #NFDB
1266:There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All the perfumes of Arabia' makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.) ~ John O Hara, #NFDB
1267:It is a battle that intensely interests humanists (the International Humanist and Ethical Union is one of the most responsible and persistent of the NGOs at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva27) because the concept of rights is so paradigmatically humanistic: when the instruments of the international Human Rights Bill were being forged, there was no claim that their terms and principles were drawn from anything other than human experience, nor that their observance would get anyone into heaven. No, the claim was then, and is now, only that their observance would make this world a vastly better place. ~ A C Grayling, #NFDB
1268:It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology. Genes were not abstractions anymore. They could be liberated from the genomes of organisms where they had been trapped for millennia, shuttled between species, amplified, purified, extended, shortened, altered, remixed, mutated, mixed, matched, cut, pasted, edited; they were infinitely malleable to human intervention. Genes were no longer just the subjects of study, but the instruments of study. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1269:In reality, thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide but not command or effectuate. The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and instruments.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
1270:The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
1271:Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. ~ Clancy Martin, #NFDB
1272:A child deserves to be born of that love, and not by any other means, for “he or she is not something owed to one, but is a gift”, which is “the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of the parents”. This is the case because, “according to the order of creation, conjugal love between a man and a woman, and the transmission of life are ordered to each other (cf. Gen 1:27-28). Thus the Creator made man and woman share in the work of his creation and, at the same time, made them instruments of his love, entrusting to them the responsibility for the future of mankind, through the transmission of human life”. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1273:So long as human beings can gain sufficient co-operation from some to enable them to dominate others, they will use the forms of law as one of their instruments. Wicked men will enact wicked rules which others will enforce. What surely is most needed in order to make men clear sighted in confronting the official abuse of power, is that they should preserve the sense that the certification of something as legally valid is not conclusive of the question of obedience, and that, however great the aura of majesty or authority which the official system may have, its demands must in the end be submitted to a moral scrutiny. ~ H L A Hart, #NFDB
1274:Compare it to its contemporary, the space program. The latter focused on a single mind-blowing goal, a moon landing, which was successfully met. And then the enterprise fizzled, becoming decreasingly relevant to the general public. The main benefits of the whole enterprise seem to have been Teflon, Tang, and a stack of very cool photographs. ARPA—by using its relatively meager bankroll (millions, not billions) to seed an entire culture devoted to transforming computers into instruments of communications and mental augmentation—bootstrapped a revolution that would change the way all of us worked, created, and thought. ~ Steven Levy, #NFDB
1275:That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have the instruments they need and that they’ll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly—preferably at the intended airport. Parents deploy them against all that can go wrong in transporting small children. Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will. ~ John Lewis Gaddis, #NFDB
1276:Whether at Rome or Naples, or, in fact, wherever his abode, he selected one room remote from the rest of the house, which was fastened by a lock scarcely larger than the seal of a ring, yet which sufficed to baffle the most cunning instruments of the locksmith: at least, one of his servants, prompted by irresistible curiosity, had made the attempt in vain; and though he had fancied it was tried in the most favourable time for secrecy, — not a soul near, in the dead of night, Zanoni himself absent from home, — yet his superstition, or his conscience, told him the reason why the next day the Major Domo quietly ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
1277:All the stories are true. Of course, what Jace means ultimately is that stories are how we make sense of the world. The Mortal Instruments is the story of Clary above everything else: the story of a girl who starts out ordinary and becomes a hero. A girl who first is blind to the magic in the world all around her, but comes not just to see it, but to be able to master and control it. Clary is an artist and a shaper of runes, the magical language of angels, and in using that language she shapes her own story and her own destiny. Clary and her friends are heroes who make their stories true—as, in the end, do we all. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1278:Die, then!” This alarming counsel split the air. “Die if you must, Mukunda! Never believe that you live by the power of food and not by the power of God! He who has created every form of nourishment, He who has bestowed appetite, will inevitably see that His devotee is maintained. Do not imagine that rice sustains you nor that money or men support you. Could they aid if the Lord withdraws your life breath? They are His instruments merely. Is it by any skill of yours that food digests in your stomach? Use the sword of your discrimination, Mukunda! Cut through the chains of agency and perceive the Single Cause! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1279:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1280:Musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law. The Papists therefore, have foolishly borrowed, this, as well as many other things, from the Jews. Men who are fond of outward pomp may delight in that noise; but the simplicity which God recommends to us by the apostles is far more pleasing to him. Paul allows us to bless God in the public assembly of the saints, only in a known tongue (1 Corinthians 14:16) What shall we then say of chanting, which fills the ears with nothing but an empty sound? ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
1281:My heartbeat accelerates. I am in the here, in the now. I am also in the future. I am holding her and wanting and knowing and hoping all at once. We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are the underneath every part of this moment. And by making this moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It's the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it's racing toward. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1282:Even today, I am in total awe of the following wondrous chain of ideas and interconnections. Guided throughout by principles of symmetry, Einstein first showed that acceleration and gravity are really two sides of the same coin. He then expanded the concept to demonstrate that gravity merely reflects the geometry of spacetime. The instruments he used to develop the theory were Riemann's non-Euclidean geometries-precisely the same geometries used by Felix Klein to show that geometry is in fact a manifestation of group theory (because every geometry is defined by its symmetries-the objects it leaves unchanged). Isn't this amazing? ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
1283:If the mind was already oscillating and is energized further, then slowly it becomes concentrated, or, as we say in yoga, “one-pointed.” That is far better than the previous state. But the highest state is when the mind becomes conscious. In terms of instruments, it is not your computer, car, or spacecraft, but the human mind that is the most miraculous—if only you could use it consciously. The reason why success comes so easily and naturally for one person, and is a struggle for someone else, is essentially this: one person has organized his or her mind to think the way he wants, and another thinks against his or her own interests ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1284:the lord of the sacrifice and the measure of our works :::
The Divine, the Eternal is the Lord of our sacrifice of works and union with him in all our being and consciousness and in its expressive instruments is the one object of the sacrifice; the steps of the sacrifice of works must therefore be measured, first, by the growth in our nature of something that brings us nearer to the Divine Nature, but secondly also by an experience of the Divine, his presence, his manifestation to us, an increasing closeness and union with that Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Sacrifice, The Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#NFDB
1285:One young man asked me a question, ‘Mr President, please tell me, since you have flown in the supersonic fighter aircraft at the age of seventy-four, were you afraid anytime during the flight?’ I told the young man, ‘All the forty minutes of the flight, I was busy on the controls and instruments and experiencing the “g” build up. I was advised by the captain to track targets and also look at the ground using the synthetic aperture radar. In addition, I was observing the performance of the instruments developed indigenously. I was continuously busy in the flight operations and I didn’t have time to allow fear to enter into me. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
1286:In 1967 Kilby and his team produced almost what Haggerty envisioned. It could do only four tasks (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) and was a bit heavy (more than two pounds) and not very cheap ($150).21 But it was a huge success. A new market had been created for a device people had not known they needed. And following the inevitable trajectory, it kept getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1287:Abbie had learned a thing or two about hospitals during her three-day stay. She’d learned that when someone said, “This will only hurt a little bit,” what he really meant was, “Nothing ever hurt this bad.” She’d learned that the steel instruments they touched you with were cold, as if they kept them in the freezer. She’d learned that when you felt well enough for a soda, they brought you too little. She’d learned that there were rules for everything, including when people could come see you, and who could come see you, and what you could wear, and what time you had to get up. She’d learned that people in hospitals could Pass Away. ~ Chet Williamson, #NFDB
1288:For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and senses are dis- pensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.03, #NFDB
1289:Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1290:The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1291:he resented Golz's orders, and the necessity for them. He resented them for what they could do to him and for what they could do to this old man. They were bad orders all right for those who would have to carry them out. And that is not the way to think, he told himself, and there is not you, and there are no people that things must not happen to. Neither you nor this old man is anything. You are instruments to do your duty. There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on anything that happens in this war. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1292:The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1293:The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1294:It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a “humble carpenter” that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip. ~ Gene Wolfe, #NFDB
1295:Man's potentialities are still more important, infinitely more important, than all his present achievements. This was so at the beginning and it still holds. His greatest problem has been how to selectively organize and consciously direct both the internal and external agents of the mind, so that they form more coherent and more intelligible wholes. Technics played a constructive part in solving this problem; but instruments of stone and wood and fiber could not be put to work on a sufficient scale until man had succeeded in inventing other impalpable tools wrought out of the very stuff of his own body, and not visible in any other form. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1296:Who can comprehend how those whom God takes so early are chosen? Does not the early death of young Christians always appear to us as if God were plundering his own best instruments in a time in which they are most needed? Yet the Lord makes no mistakes. Might God need our brothers for some hidden service on our behalf in the heavenly world? We should put an end to our human thoughts, which always wish to know more than they can, and cling to that which is certain. Whomever God calls home is someone God has loved. “For their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness” (Wisdom of Solomon 4). ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
1297:... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1298:As usual, he combined experience and experiment; in fact he used the same word, esperienza, for both. While in Florence, he devised a pair of goggles for his dives in the Arno so he could study the water as it flowed past a weir. He threw oak apples or corks into a river and counted “beats of time” to study how long it took those in the center and those nearer the banks to move two hundred feet. He made floats that could hover at different depths to see how the currents changed from the surface to the bottom, and he crafted instruments that could measure a river’s downhill course so he could determine the “rate of fall of a river per mile. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1299:I went to the theatre and what I saw hinted at my desires but mainly felt like their frustrating opposite. If in conventional theatre you had costumes, characters, acting, scripted narrative, piped-in music, and artifice, instead I wanted people dressed in their normal clothing, being themselves, walking a tightrope between structure and spontaneity, music we loved played on vinyl, CDs, or with instruments, anything and everything that might bring us just a little bit closer to authenticity or reality. There was a kind of theatre that already existed and a kind of theatre that didn’t yet exist, might never exist, and I knew which side I was on. ~ Jacob Wren, #NFDB
1300:But here it is, Wanda Landowska is giving a concert at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday. And a delightful programme, delightful, Bach and Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. A muddle but delightful. And all that harpsichord music is so interesting historically. Oh, Mary, and you too, Rose, you must hear her. After you have heard her play the pieces you have only heard on the piano, you will realise that quite a number of composers have been prophets, they have frequently written compositions which could not be properly performed, could not be fully realised, on the only instruments then existing, they were never truly heard till the piano was invented. ~ Rebecca West, #NFDB
1301:The hour passed in jewels and alleys and winds from the Egyptian desert. The sun was golden and the Nile was muddy where it lapped down to the deltas, and there was someone very young and very quick at the top of the pyramid, laughing, calling to him to
come on up the shadowy side into the sun, and he was climbing, she putting her hand down to help him up the last step, and then they were laughing on camel back, loping
toward the great stretched bulk of the Sphinx, and late at night, in the native quarter, there was the tinkle of small hammers on bronze and silver, and music from some stringed instruments fading away and away and away . . . ~ Ray Bradbury,#NFDB
1302:But derivatives did create new dangers. If you were making a loan, and you were confident you could hedge some of the credit risk of that loan, you might be tempted to make a larger and riskier loan. And the instruments themselves often had leverage embedded in them, so investors could be exposed to greater losses than they realized. Firms weren’t required by law to post any collateral (or “margin”) to make derivatives trades, and the market wasn’t requiring them to post much, either. This meant fewer shock absorbers for the system if those trades went bad. That’s why Warren Buffett had called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction. ~ Timothy F Geithner, #NFDB
1303:Patients, they wrote, underwent “unnamed tortures when having their hands and feet strapped to the operating table, their heads shaved to the vertex [top of the skull], and the outside world masked from view by the towels and drapes.” Next came the “rattling of the instruments, the noise of the suction apparatus, and the menacing spark of the electro-cautery.” Some patients told them they wanted to die right then and there. Others called for help. These terrifying moments were useful, the doctors assured their colleagues, as the patients’ distress was often so great that the “additional trouble caused by the operation passes almost unnoticed. ~ Kate Clifford Larson, #NFDB
1304:He smiled affably at the burglar, a burly fellow whom he continued to hold with one hand, as easily as if he had been a child. The entire household had been aroused, and a good number of them had joined in, shouting questions and brandishing various deadly instruments. The burglar glared wildly at Emerson, bare to the waist and bulging with muscle - at Gargery and his cudgel - at Selim, fingering a knife even longer than Nefret's - at assorted footmen armed with pokers, spits, and cleavers - and at the giant form of Daoud advancing purposefully toward him. 'It's a bleedin' army!' he gurgled. 'The lyin' barstard said you was some kind of professor! ~ Elizabeth Peters, #NFDB
1305:Appearance isn’t what matters most. More importantly, our physical bodies are the instruments through which we accomplish our purpose in this world. Whether you or I desire to be a good parent, a spiritual mentor, a world traveler, a successful businessperson, or anything else, our bodies’ condition is either an asset or a liability. This implies that we need to make an important change in our thinking. We do not care for our bodies simply for vanity’s sake or to fill an emotional void within us. We care for our bodies so we can more effectively accomplish what we most want to do with our lives. This line of thinking drives us to make healthy choices: ~ Joshua Becker, #NFDB
1306:present, there exists no overarching regulatory framework governing OTC derivatives markets in any major jurisdiction. Provided that certain qualifications are met, 29 OTC derivatives transactions generally reside outside the scope of securities, insurance and other regulatory regimes in the jurisdictions in which they notionally take place.Accordingly, while certain market participants (most notably banks and publicly traded firms) may be subject to, for example, prudential banking requirements30 . and mark-to-market accounting rules31 . which tangentially impact upon their ability to utilise these instruments, OTC derivatives themselves have historically ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1307:Technology builds from harnessing phenomena largely uncovered by science. And equally science builds from technology-or, better to say, forms from its technologies-from the use of the instruments and methods and experiments it develops. Science and technology co-evolve in a symbiotic relationship. Each takes part in the continued creation of the other, and as it does, takes in, digests, and uses the other; and in so doing becomes thoroughly intermingled with the other. The two cannot be separated, they rely completely on one another. Science is necessary to uncover and understand deeply buried phenomena, and technology is necessary to advance science. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
1308:She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In this wilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means: they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind's internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accomplished scold. ~ Thomas Love Peacock, #NFDB
1309:Finally, in 1926, Heisenberg came up with a celebrated compromise, producing a new discipline that came to be known as quantum mechanics. At the heart of it was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.*22 Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn't a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1310:If you were not very close to Dumbledore, how do you account for the fact that he remembered you in his will? He made exceptionally few personal bequests. The vast majority of his possessions--his private library, his magical instruments, and other personal effects--were left to Hogwarts. Why do you think you were singled out?”
“I…dunno,” said Ron. “I…when I say we weren’t close…I mean, I think he liked me…”
“You’re being modest, Ron,” said Hermione. “Dumbledore was very fond of you.”
This was stretching the truth to breaking point; as far as Harry knew, Ron and Dumbledore had never been alone together, and direct contact between them had been negligible. ~ J K Rowling,#NFDB
1311:So that no one may be deceived into supposing that there is any time, any place when anger will be of benefit, its unbridled and deranged madness must be revealed, and it must have restored to it the equipment that is its very own—the horse of torture, the cord, the gaol, the cross, the fires that encircle live bodies buried in the ground, the hook that drags along corpses as well, the different kinds of chains and of punishments, the tearing of limbs, branding of the forehead, the pits where monstrous beasts prowl: let anger be set in the midst of these implements, uttering a terrible and horrible shriek, more loathsome than all these instruments that let it vent its fury. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1312:The countess's dispassionate gaze fell on Cassandra first, and she motioned for the girl to approach. "The posture is merely adequate," she observed, "but that can be corrected. What are your accomplishments, child?"
Having been prepared for the question in advance, Cassandra replied hesitantly. "My lady, I am able to sew, draw, and watercolor. I play no instruments, but I am well-read."
"Have you studied languages?"
"A little French."
"Have you any hobbies?"
"No, ma'am."
"Excellent. Men are afraid of girls with hobbies." Glancing at Kathleen, Lady Berwick remarked in an aside, "She's a beauty. With a bit more polish, she'll be the belle of the season. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1313:Scherzo
When, as a boy, I went
To study in the Muses' school,
One of them came to me, and took
Me by the hand, and all that day,
She through the work-shop led me graciously,
The mysteries of the craft to see.
She guided me
Through every part,
And showed me all
The instruments of art,
And did their uses all rehearse,
In works alike of prose and verse.
I looked, and paused awhile,
Then asked: 'O Muse, where is the file?'
'The file is out of order, friend, and we
Now do without it,' answered she.
'But, to repair it, then, have you no care?'
'We _should_, indeed, but have no time to spare.'
~ Count Giacomo Leopardi,#NFDB
1314:The correlation between elms and the botanist's elm thoughts was hard earned; think of all the dreary years he must have spent in graduate school learning to be a reliable elm-detector. Whereas I can now correlate my thoughts with elms practically instantaneously: My mind-world correlation co-opts his [insofar as I use his expertise to identify elms], much as, in the other case, the correlation between my acid thoughts and acids co-opts the correlation between acidity and the color of litmus. What philosophers call 'linguistic deference' is actually the use of experts as instruments; not Marxist division of labor in semantics but capitalist exploitation in epistemology. ~ Jerry A Fodor, #NFDB
1315:I suppose none of what I'm saying matters. In a few years a search like this won't even be necessary. We have instruments now that can be mounted on the underside of an airplane. To find a man all you have to do is fly over the spot where you think he is, and the machine will register his body heat. Right now there aren't enough of those machines to go around. Most of them are in the war. But when we come home from there, well, a man on the run won't have hope. And a man like me, he won't be needed. This is the last of something. It's too bad. As much as I hate war, I fear the day when machines take the place of men. At least now a man can still get along on his talents. ~ David Morrell, #NFDB
1316:This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a “control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft.” The instruments detected the spectral signature of the chlorophyll from green plants, and signs of an obviously life-altered atmosphere. As Sagan and colleagues wrote in their paper “A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft” published in Nature, they found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
1317:As we practice these disciplines, it’s of paramount importance that we keep two truths in mind. First, the disciplines themselves are not the source of spiritual power. Only the Holy Spirit is. The disciplines are his instruments to transmit his power. Second, the practice of the disciplines doesn’t earn us favor with God or secure his blessings. Christ has already done that through his sinless life and sin-bearing death for us. That’s why the grace we need to live the Christian life is “in Christ Jesus.” It bears repeating: we must be on our guard to avoid seeing the practice of the disciplines as either the source of power we need or the meritorious cause of receiving the power. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1318:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form-all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #NFDB
1319:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #NFDB
1320:It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions—objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1321:that I played a part in building. We needed a safe way for the Submissives and the Dominants to learn. This club isn’t a free-for-all. Although each Dominant has their own way of doing things, their own preferences and kinks, and we encourage the variety. Dressed in leathers, the trainers are lined up and waiting for the women to choose instruments from the extensive collection. Their sole purpose is to provide a means for the women to explore their limits. One woman, I believe her name is Lisa, is concerned about her positioning. Although she’s dressed in a simple cream chiffon romper, she’s on the waxed floor of the stage, practicing with a trainer offering advice. She’s not very ~ Lauren Landish, #NFDB
1322:about runaway trolleys!” This is an example of what Kant would call heteronomous determination —doing something for the sake of something else, for the sake of something else, and so on. When we act heteronomously, we act for the sake of ends given outside us. We are instruments, not authors, of the purposes we pursue. Kant’s notion of autonomy stands in stark contrast to this. When we act autonomously , according to a law we give ourselves, we do something for its own sake, as an end in itself. We cease to be instruments of purposes given outside us. This capacity to act autonomously is what gives human life its special dignity. It marks out the difference between persons and things. ~ Michael J Sandel, #NFDB
1323:in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman’s company, or as the cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1324:But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. ~ Deborah Eisenberg, #NFDB
1325:Lex malla, lex nulla,” said Julian with a regretful wave of his hand. It was the Blackthorn family motto: A bad law is no law.
“I wonder what other family mottoes are,” Emma mused. “Do you know any?”
“The Lightwood family motto is ‘We mean well.’ ”
“Very funny.”
Julian looked over at her. “No, really, it actually is.”
“Seriously? So what’s the Herondale family motto? ‘Chiseled but angsty’?”
He shrugged. ‘If you don’t know what your last name is, it’s probably Herondale’?”
Emma burst out laughing. “What about Carstairs?” she asked, tapping Cortana. “ ‘We have a sword’? ‘Blunt instruments are for losers’?”
“Morgenstern,” offered Julian. “ ‘When in doubt, start a war’? ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1326:The music of cri-cri and cigales droned on in a hypnotic rhythm, punctuated by the occasional croon of the nightingale. I thought of lullabies and how as a child they would placate my disappointment that another day had ended. I was used to sleeping in strange places, and would always focus on sound to relax. In the pawnshop, it was the ticking of grandfather clocks or the tuning of antique instruments. In the thieves’ den, it was striking of a match, the bubbling of a water pipe and the gentle murmur floating in off the streets. On the Wastrel, it was the wind or the creaking wood. It was important to me to find lullabies where I could. If death came with a lullaby, perhaps fewer men would fear it. ~ Meg Merriet, #NFDB
1327:The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men. In order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1328:All philosophers - and others - have always paid a great deal of attention to ideas seen as the result of thought and observation; but in modern times all too little attention has been paid to the study of the ideas which form the very instruments by which thought and observation proceed. On the basis of experience and conscious thought small ideas may easily be dislodged, but when it comes to bigger. more universal, or more subtle ideas it may not be so easy to change them. Indeed, it is often difficult to become aware of them, as they are the instruments and not the results of our thinking - just as you can see what is outside you, but cannot easily see that with which you see, the eye itself. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
1329:That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
1330:The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes - will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1331:We’ve relegated death, birth, and even making music to the professionals…all things that, until a few generations ago, used to be done by regular people like us in the home. What used to be natural — giving birth, playing instruments and singing, and dying among loved ones who will lovingly lay our bodies out in the parlor to be honored by those who loved us — is now a commercial enterprise. Not that I’m ungrateful for a lower infant mortality rate or the safety that women in high-risk pregnancies now enjoy, and not that I don’t love hearing professionally recorded music. But I do wonder if we lost more than we realized when we started hiring professionals to do for us what we used to do for ourselves. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
1332:When I speak elsewhere in the book of the multifaceted joys of the resurrected life in the new universe, some readers may think, But our eyes should be on the giver, not the gift; we must focus on God, not on Heaven. This approach sounds spiritual, but it erroneously divorces our experience of God from life, relationships, and the world—all of which God graciously gives us. It sees the material realm and other people as God’s competitors rather than as instruments that communicate his love and character. It fails to recognize that because God is the ultimate source of joy, and all secondary joys emanate from him, to love secondary joys on Earth can be—and in Heaven always will be—to love God, their source. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
1333:Out of all the sciences... the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those who were to be educated. These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher. For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind's complete knowledge of philosophic truth. Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by certain ways (viae), a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom. ~ Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, #NFDB
1334:Xxxii
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love !--more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,-And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,#NFDB
1335:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use." ~ Hal Abelson (1986) Introduction of video of lectures on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (source)., #NFDB
1336:His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1337:Klan violence was unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history and Grant dealt with it aggressively, using all the instruments at his disposal. To strengthen the federal arsenal, he urged Congress to widen his executive powers and insisted the new Forty-Second Congress meet on March 4, 1871, instead of waiting until that December, to do so. So strongly did Grant feel about Klan atrocities that he beseeched House Speaker James G. Blaine to focus exclusively on legislation to uproot these domestic terrorists: “If the attention of Congress can be confined to the single subject of providing means for the protection of life and property . . . I feel that we should have such legislation. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1338:There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. .. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are "opium" for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1339:There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on, you’d hear a tone at 440 hertz—the tone used to tune instruments—and you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sights through riflescopes. There was what looked like a bull’s-eye in the middle of the screen, with numbers like coordinates. The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s-eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set the sights on the target. This was just a test. ~ Tommy Orange, #NFDB
1340:It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father, it is to identify you,
It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided,
Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you,
You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.
The threads that were spun are gather'd, the weft crosses the warp, the pattern is systematic.
The preparations have every one been justified,
The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton has given the signal.
The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed,
He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those that to look upon and be with is enough. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
1341:We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so that we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society, tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1342:All along the way, family members have been experiencing feelings of ambivalence, helplessness, and crisis. They fear what they are seeing, as well as what they have yet to see. No matter how often they are reminded, many people persist in believing they are permitting conscious suffering. And yet, it is always so hard to let go. Such legal instruments as living wills and durable power of attorney may function as so-called advance directives, but all too often they do not exist; a grieving wife or husband, or children already struggling with family problems of their own, are adrift in a sea of conflicting emotions. The difficulty of deciding is compounded by the difficulty of living with what has been decided. ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
1343:Sonnet Xxxii
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love !--more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,-And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,#NFDB
1344:When Cloud Yabuki-Varma takes off her heart-shaped glasses all manner of items disappear, and when she puts them on they come back, and when she holds them out in front of her nose she can see stuff in the lenses but not around the edges. Spooky. The dinosaurs in Reptile Republic, the instruments in Music Corner, the entirety of Cupcake Garden, the floating mathematical models that can be manipulated to score points: now you see it, now you don’t; now you see it, now you don’t. People do look silly in mesh when you are real world. Her classmates interact with invisible beasts, gesticulate at empty space, laugh in unison when nothing funny has happened. Some big trick. Every child is wearing i-specs in various designs ~ Katie Ward, #NFDB
1345:...let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. ~ Francis S Collins, #NFDB
1346:Create a Chocolate Factory There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls—a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That’s what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts ~ John Medina, #NFDB
1347:Yahweh Elohim retreated with his divine council to deliberate the verdict. When he returned, he announced to the lawyers at the bar, “I declare the defense righteous in standing. The Accuser has failed to provide proof of his charges against Yahweh’s right to eminent domain, and his use of Israel as his instruments of justice.” “Your honor,” spouted the Accuser, “I demand a court order for a stay of execution. This is a capital trial and I think we need to reexamine the evidence in light of the extreme sentence.” “Motion denied,” said Yahweh Elohim. “The iniquity of the Amorites is complete. Canaan has filled up the measure of its guilt. Israel shall commence its possession of the land immediately. Court is dismissed. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1348:By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly...This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1349:Sonnet Xxxii: The First Time
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love!--more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,-And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,#NFDB
1350:separate cultures that couldn’t be criticized or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning or suicide bombing. Each separate cultural group was playing its own ‘language game’, to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism. ~ Nick Cohen, #NFDB
1351:There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1352:He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1353:Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1354:As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine. ~ Alija Izetbegovi, #NFDB
1355:The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional, and lifetronic. The nineteen components are intelligence; ego; feeling; mind (sense-consciousness); five instruments of knowledge, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch; five instruments of action, the mental correspondence for the executive abilities to procreate, excrete, talk, walk, and exercise manual skill; and five instruments of life force, those empowered to perform the crystallizing, assimilating, eliminating, metabolizing, and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives the death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross metallic and nonmetallic elements. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1356:... All the works of mind and intllect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 149, #NFDB
1357:Psalm 67 For the choir director: A song. A psalm, to be accompanied by stringed instruments. 1 May God be merciful and bless us. May his face smile with favor on us. Interlude 2 May your ways be known throughout the earth, your saving power among people everywhere. 3 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. 4 Let the whole world sing for joy, because you govern the nations with justice and guide the people of the whole world. Interlude 5 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. 6 Then the earth will yield its harvests, and God, our God, will richly bless us. 7 Yes, God will bless us, and people all over the world will fear him. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1358:Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1359:For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the sun's being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets - and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity's resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1360:There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord's hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we. We offer him our service only to the extent that we can, and for as long as he grants us the strength. To do all we can with what strength we have, however, is the task which keeps the good servant of Jesus Christ always at work: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14). ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1361:The Emperor, you see, protects... He protects mankind, through the Legions, through the Martial corps, through the war machines of the Mechanicum. He understands the dangers. The inconsistencies. He uses you, and all the instruments like you, to protect us from harm. To protect our physical bodies from murder and damage, to protect our minds from madness, to protect our souls... There are insane dangers in the cosmos, dangers that mankind is fundamentally unable to comprehend, let alone survive. So he protects us. There are truths out there that would drive us mad by one fleeting glimpse of them. So he chooses not to share them with us. That's why he made you... Remember, Garviel. The Emperor is our truth and out light. If we trust in him, he will protect. ~ Dan Abnett, #NFDB
1362:One time I told her that she reminded me of that charming tale, the one with the red shoes."
Helen had always hated that story, in which a little girl who had dared to wear red shoes to her confirmation had been doomed to dance in them until she died. "You're referring to the one by Hans Christian Andersen? It's a morality tale about the wages of sin, is it not?"
His smile faded, and his gaze returned to hers, now appraising rather than dismissive. "I confess, I don't recall the moral of the story."
"No doubt it's been a long time since you've read it." Helen made her face into the inscrutable mask that had always annoyed the twins and provoked them to call her a sphinx. "The red shoes become instruments of death, after a girl yields to temptation. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1363:But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves “professionals,” housing had become a business. ~ Matthew Desmond, #NFDB
1364:faithfulness c put an end to them. 6 With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you; I will give thanks to your name, O LORD, d for it is good. 7 For he has delivered me from every trouble, and my eye has e looked in triumph on my enemies. Cast Your Burden on the LORD To the choirmaster: with f stringed instruments. A Maskil [1] of David. PSALM 55 g Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy! 2 Attend to me, and answer me; I am restless h in my complaint and I i moan, 3 because of the noise of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked. For they j drop trouble upon me, and in anger they bear a grudge against me. 4 My heart is in anguish within me; ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1365:In contrast to almost every major army in history, the Mongols traveled lightly, without a supply train. By waiting until the coldest months to make the desert crossing, men and horses required less water. Dew also formed during this season, thereby stimulating the growth of some grass that provided grazing for horses and attracted game that the men eagerly hunted for their own sustenance. Instead of transporting slow-moving siege engines and heavy equipment with them, the Mongols carried a faster-moving engineer corps that could build whatever was needed on the spot from available materials. When the Mongols came to the first trees after crossing the vast desert, they cut them down and made them into ladders, siege engines, and other instruments for their attack. ~ Jack Weatherford, #NFDB
1366:...it would be a contradiction in terms to think of formulating techniques for making fundamental new discoveries in science or original and creative works of art, for the very essence of such action is a certain freedom from dependence on others, who would be needed as guides. How can this freedom be transmitted in an activity in which conforming to someone else's knowledge is the main source of energy?
....Actually, there are no direct and positive things that man can do to get in touch with the immeasurable, for this must be immensely beyond anything that man can grasp with his mind or accomplish with his hands or his instruments. What man can do is give his full attention and creative energies to bring clarity and order into the totality of the field of measure. ~ David Bohm,#NFDB
1367:The process of anarchist transformation in Africa might prove comparatively easy, given that Africa lacks a strong capitalist foundation, well-developed class formations and relations of production, and a stable, entrenched state system. What is required for now is a long-term program of class consciousness building, relevant education, and increased individual participation in social struggles. Meanwhile, the crises and mutations in capitalism, marxist socialism, and the state system, individually and collectively, cannot but accelerate. For Africa in particular, long-term development is possible only if there is a radical break with both capitalism and the state system — the principal instruments of our arrested development and stagnation. Anarchism is Africa’s way out. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1368:What is the library? If one believes Mallarmé’s antithesis, then the library would first of all be the place of instrumental spirituality. As a consequence, it would be a place of “production,” because the instrument exercises (instruire) a material, which it trans-forms. It would be the place of the life of spirit, of its genesis—but of its material genesis. In short, the library is a place of writing. It is at once the place of the conservation and elaboration of forms of knowledge—of their memory. But this memory is dead: supported by inorganic, yet organized objects, those which Husserl names “spirit-invested objects.” On the other hand, the library is trans-formed as a network, which is to say that it is digitized—and so it requires “new spiritual instruments. ~ Bernard Stiegler, #NFDB
1369:Perhaps an illustration here will help. Imagine you’re in an orchestra and you begin to play, but the sound is horrific because the instruments are out of tune. The problem can’t be fixed by simply tuning them to each other. It won’t help for each person to get in tune to the person next to her because each person will be tuning to something different. No, they will all need to be tuned properly to one source of pitch. Often we go about trying to tune ourselves to the sound of everything else in our lives. We often hear this described as “getting balance.” But the questions that need to be asked are these: “Balanced to what?” “Tuned to what?” The gospel does not begin by tuning us in relation to our particular problems and surroundings; it first re-tunes us to God.19 ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1370:All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1371:It is the worker who is attached to results that grumbles about the nature of the duty which has fallen to his lot; to the unattached worker all duties are equally good, and form efficient instruments with which selfishness and sensuality may be killed, and the freedom of the soul secured. We are all apt to think too highly of ourselves. Our duties are determined by our deserts to a much larger extent than we are willing to grant. Competition rouses envy, and it kills the kindliness of the heart. To the grumbler all duties are distasteful; nothing will ever satisfy him, and his whole life is doomed to prove a failure. Let us work on, doing as we go whatever happens to be our duty, and being ever ready to put our shoulders to the wheel. Then surely shall we see the Light! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1372:Keeping out the mirror, water, and the towel, he put the other things away in the box and replaced it on the shelf. Another box held articles of a more technical nature. He pulled them all out and set them up neatly on the desk like a surgeon lining up his instruments before commencing an operation. He covered his shoulders and front with the towel and then sketched out what he wanted to do on a piece of paper. He applied spirit gum to his nose and tapped it with his finger to make it sticky. He then quickly added a bit of a cotton ball to the surface before the adhesive dried out. He used a Popsicle stick to remove from a jar a small quantity of nose putty mixed with Derma Wax. He rubbed the putty into a ball, warming it with his body heat, making it easier to manipulate. He ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
1373:Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch’d with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev’ry place they ran it, ev’ry House pass’d by, Road cross’d, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev’ry-where, and the Dragon nearly visible. “So,— so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate ’Morphosis,— and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?” “Not the worst I’ve handed in. And had they wish’d to pay for Coloring? Why, tha’d scarcely knaah the Place . . . ?” “This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying, all the time.” Dixon, his face darken’d by the Years of Weather, may be allowing himself to blush in safety. “Could have us’d a spot of Orpiment, all the same. Some Lapis . . . ? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1374:In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant little room, with three windows—north, west, and south—and bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents. Dr. Kemp's solar lamp was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them pulled down. Dr. Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, so highly did he think of it. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
1375:The guitar. Rubbing the gentle polish
On Every smooth contour.
On the lap. Knowing every curve
As the light shines from it.
On stage a planned metamorphosis
Takes places as the hours go by and the
Space is transformed to a concert hall.
The energetic nemesis has struck.
The risers are transformed into a stage
And black boxes turned into powerful
Pieces of sound equipment.
The spring is taut.
Backstage while pandemonium
Sweeps the hall and people
Crowd the arena as ants flow to a cake.
The stage is set, the
Instruments tuned and placed.
The musicians work out last minute
Kinks as the lights dim.
An intense force hits the spectators.
Energy is released in every form.
A power rage beyond comprehension. ~ David Morrell,#NFDB
1376:It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. Unluckier ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1377:The sword that has been forged against us is already blunted; the instruments of war which the enemy is preparing have already lost their point. God has taken away in the person of Christ all the power that anything can have to hurt us. Well then, the army may safely march on, and you may go joyously along your journey, for all your enemies are conquered beforehand. What shall you do but march on to take the prey? They are beaten, they are vanquished; all you have to do is to divide the spoil. You shall, it is true, often engage in combat; but your fight shall be with a vanquished foe. His head is broken; he may attempt to injure you, but his strength shall not be sufficient for his malicious design. Your victory shall be easy, and your treasure shall be beyond all count. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1378:We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
1379:But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1380:The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. If these natural rights are further affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition: they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of that solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance. . . . The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1381:But Jace", Clary said. "Valentine taught him more than just fighting. He taught him languages, and how to play the piano"
"That was Jocelyn's influence." Sebastian said her name unwillingly, as if he hated the sound of it. "She thought Valentine ought to be able to talk about books, art, music...not just killing things. He passed that on to Jace."
A wrought iron blue gate rose to their left. Sebastian ducked under it and beckoned Clary to follow him. She didn't have to duck but went after him, her hands stuffed into her pockets. "What about you?" she asked.
He held up his hands. They were unmistakably her mother's hands - dexterous, long-fingered, meant for holding a brush or a pen. "I learned to play the instruments of war, " he said, "and paint in blood. I am not like Jace. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1382:The way Karma Ura sees it, a government is like a pilot guiding an airplane. In bad weather, it must rely on its instruments to navigate. But what if the instruments are faulty? The plane will certainly veer off course, even though the pilot is manipulating the controls properly. That, he says, is the state of the world today, with its dependence on gross national product as the only real measure of a nation’s progress. “Take education,” he says. “We are hooked on measuring enrollment, but we don’t look at the content. Or consider a nation like Japan. People live a long time, but what is the quality of their life past age sixty?” He has a point. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what really matters to most people’s lives—a disparity that Gross National Happiness seeks to correct. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
1383:We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
~ R Buckminster Fuller,#NFDB
1384:A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1385:Argument
Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more obstinate,
argue argue argue with me
endlessly
neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.
Distance: Remember all that land
beneath the plane;
that coastline
of dim beaches deep in sand
stretching indistinguishably
all the way,
all the way to where my reasons end?
Days: And think
of all those cluttered instruments,
one to a fact,
canceling each other's experience;
how they were
like some hideous calendar
"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."
The intimidating sound
of these voices
we must separately find
can and shall be vanquished:
Days and Distance disarrayed again
and gone...
~ Elizabeth Bishop,#NFDB
1386:Sonnet 32 - The First Time That The Sun Rose On
Thine Oath
XXXII
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love!—more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,—
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,#NFDB
1387:You hold in your hands a very special book. It contains one hundred carnival rides of terror. You must remember: horror can come from any direction. It can be as subtle as a spider web's caress, or as vicious as the drop of an axe blade. It can be grim as the reaper, or as sardonic as, well, Sardonicous. It can wear the garments of science or superstition; can be dressed in the trappings of fantasy or the fancy-free. But always it will terrify. And one of the bluntest of its instruments is the short-short story, one of the most difficult of literary devices to master. Not only must each word be perfect-but each comma and period. Nothing can be wasted. In the hands of master executioners, like the authors who fill this book-it can be deadly. So... Die-and die again- one hundred times... ~ Martin H Greenberg, #NFDB
1388:Which Brian had done. They had taken off and that was the last of the conversation. There had been the initial excitement, of course. He had never flown in a single-engine plane before and to be sitting in the copilot’s seat with all the controls right there in front of him, all the instruments in his face as the plane clawed for altitude, jerking and sliding on the wind currents as the pilot took off, had been interesting and exciting. But in five minutes they had leveled off at six thousand feet and headed northwest and from then on the pilot had been silent, staring out the front, and the drone of the engine had been all that was left. The drone and the sea of green trees that lay before the plane’s nose and flowed to the horizon, spread with lakes, swamps, and wandering streams and rivers. ~ Gary Paulsen, #NFDB
1389:When Homer Wells saw the stationmaster’s brain stem exposed, he felt that Dr. Larch was busy enough – with both hands – for it to be safe to say what Homer wanted to say.
‘I love you,’ said Homer Wells. He knew he had to leave the room, then – while he could still see the door – and so he started to leave.
‘I love you too, Homer,’ said Wilbur Larch, who for another minute or more could not have seen a blood clot in the brain stem if there had been one to see. He heard Homer say ‘Right’ before he heard the door close.
In a while, he could make out the brain stem clearly, there was no clot.
‘Arrhythmia,’ Wilbur Larch repeated to himself. Then he added, ‘Right,’ as if he were now speaking for Homer Wells. Dr. Larch put his instruments aside; he gripped the operating table for a long time. ~ John Irving,#NFDB
1390:[the four aids ::: YOGA-SIDDHI, the perfection that comes from the practice of Yoga, can be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments. There is, first, the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern the realisation - sastra. Next comes a patient and persistent action on the lines laid down by this knowledge, the force of our personal effort - utsaha. There intervenes, third, uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher - guru. Last comes the instrumentality of Time - kala; for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of the divine movement.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Four Aids, 53 [T0],#NFDB
1391:Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
1392:Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example of a greenfield DevOps project is the Hosted LabVIEW product in 2009 at National Instruments, a thirty-year-old organization with five thousand employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. To bring this product to market quickly, a new team was created and allowed to operate outside of the existing IT processes and explore the use of public clouds. The initial team included an applications architect, a systems architect, two developers, a system automation developer, an operations lead, and two offshore operations staff. By using DevOps practices, they were able to deliver Hosted LabVIEW to market in half the time of their normal product introductions. ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
1393:Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It’s almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on. Through the most ordinary things, books, for instance, or a postcard, or eyes or hands, life is transformed. Hands that for decades reached out to hurt us, to drag us down, to control us, or to wave us away in dismissal now reach for us differently. They become instruments of tenderness, buoyancy, exploration, hope. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
1394:It was too much. Harry turned around, shaking with rage. “I don’t want to talk about how I feel, all right?” “Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human —” “THEN — I — DON’T — WANT — TO — BE — HUMAN!” Harry roared, and he seized one of the delicate silver instruments from the spindle-legged table beside him and flung it across the room. It shattered into a hundred tiny pieces against the wall. Several of the pictures let out yells of anger and fright, and the portrait of Armando Dippet said, “Really!” “I DON’T CARE!” Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE —” He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that too. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1395:The Listening Exercise
Relax. Close your eyes. Try for several minutes to concentrate on all of the sounds you hear in your surroundings, as if you were hearing an orchestra playing its instruments. Little by little, try to separate each sound from
the others. Concentrate on each one, as if it were the only instrument playing. Try to eliminate the other sounds from your awareness.
When you do this exercise every day, you will begin to hear voices. First, you will think that they are imaginary. Later, you will discover that they are
voices of people from your past, present, and future, all of them participating with you in the remembrance of time.
This exercise should be performed only when you already know the voice of your messenger.
Do this exercise for ten minutes at a time. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
1396:I'd been told that Catholic masses were stable and cold with dull organ music so I was surprised when the choir broke into song. They sang in Shona, with African drums and rattles, ngoma ne bosho. The women;s voices merged with men's bass producing an effect that was confusing but beautiful. At Forward with Faith Ministries we only used guitars, western drums and a keyboard, because Pastor Mavumba preached against using African Traditional instruments. He said that before the missionaries came, our people engaged in devil worship, so the instruments they used were the devil's instruments. We sang in English and he preached in English too, when he was not speaking in tongues. I was a bit confused; maybe the Catholic Church was the devil's church after all, but I couldn't stop my foot from tapping along to the music. [88] ~ Tendai Huchu, #NFDB
1397:Well, what do you think? Avanti?"
"Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.
How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight. ~ Vikram Seth,#NFDB
1398:Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today--especially in the southern half of the nation--armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, main or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1399:On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it—or its representative, the state—deems this desirable. Fascism, said one of its leading spokesmen, Alfredo Rocco, stresses the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society. . . . For Liberalism [i.e., individualism], the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.5 ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
1400:Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
1401:My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see - Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire. ~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
1402:The Bridges
Skies the gray of crystal.
A strange design of bridges,
some straight, some arched,
others descending at oblique angles to the first;
and these figures recurring
in other lighted circuits of the canal,
but all so long and light that the banks,
laden with domes, sink and shrink.
A few of these bridges
are still covered with hovels,
others support polls,
signals, frail parapets.
Minor chords cross
each other and disappear;
ropes rise from the shore.
One can make out a red coat,
possibly other costumes
and musical instruments.
Are these popular tunes,
snatches of seigniorial concerts,
remnants of public hymns?
The water is gray and blue,
wide as an arm of the sea.
A white ray falling from high
in the sky destroys this comedy.
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1403:What does it take to break a person?
Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions.
But there is considerable variation in people's ability to withstand torture. Sometimes one can achieve the desired result simply by showing the instruments and explaining what is to be done with them. Sometimes it takes weeks; one may be forced to restart a heart which has given out from the pain, and even then one may not manage to break the subject down.
However, it is presumably possible to discern some kind of average. This many needles, this many blows to the soles of the feet, before most people are sufficiently destroyed to give up what they once held most dear.
But in everyday life? ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist,#NFDB
1404:The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. ~ Jacques Derrida, #NFDB
1405:The problem with sanctions is that they are just too convenient. They are what you do when you cannot or will not do anything else. They offer a good feeling that a crisis is being handled, but in reality they are blunt instruments with a questionable track record.26 When they work, they hurt the economy and state institutions of the country they target—along with its civilian populace—but do they reshape the bad policy behaviors that cause them to be applied in the first place? Sanctions impoverished Iraq and cost the lives of vulnerable Iraqis (including tens of thousands of children), but Saddam Hussein stayed in power and remained a hazard. Indeed, it could be argued that sanctions boomeranged on the United States because the Iraq that U.S. forces conquered and were then responsible for putting back on its feet had been left such a basket case. ~ Vali Nasr, #NFDB
1406:The same blight affects most o Africa. Time and again, its potential for economic development has been disrupted by the predatory politics of ruling elites seeking personal gain, often precipitating violence for their own ends. ‘The problem is not so much that development has failed’, observed the Nigerian academic, Claude Ake, in his essay Democracy and Development in Africa, ‘as that was never really on the agenda on the first place.’ After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival. ~ Martin Meredith, #NFDB
1407:To a chorus of resonant barking, the instruments proceeded to adjust themselves into tune. A billy-goat, alarmed, aroused his harem, and distantly a muffled lowing broke out.
Philippa said, ‘Oh dear. It must have cost a fortune. Did Gideon ever do this to you?’
Kate thought. ‘No, but I did it to him. He hadn’t called to see me for a week, so I sent eight bell ringers to serenade him at cock-crow and his mother’s parrot dropped dead, quoting Luther.’
‘What did it say?’ Philippa said. Sitting on the sill, with her long brown hair falling over her night robe, she looked, in the darkness, like the daughter who had come back from Turkey: calm and smiling and soignée.
‘Music is a fair and lovely gift of God, and deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart,’ said Kate, surprised. ~ Dorothy Dunnett,#NFDB
1408:Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,’ and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi") ~ W B Yeats, #NFDB
1409:Because he is bereft of any coherent ideology and largely immune to any of the norms of good character, Donald Trump is, in many respects, a perfect example of how capitalism, absent the extra-rational dogmas of morality, creates creatures of pure appetite, guided only by the most rudimentary software of human nature. He cares about sex and power, dominating others, and having his status affirmed. He puts family above all other considerations, but defines the family’s interests in terms of wealth and dynastic glory. He views others as instruments of his will whose value is measured in their loyalty to him, a loyalty that is rarely reciprocated. When asked what sacrifices he made comparable to those of parents who lost a child in war, he couldn’t even name any sacrifice at all.42 He is a knight, in the Nietzschean sense, and he makes his own morality. ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
1410:Meteorology . . . is quite as “scientific” as geology and far more so than archaeology—it actually makes more use of scientific instruments, computers, and higher mathematics. . . . Yet we laugh at the weatherman every other day; we are not overawed by his impressive paraphernalia, because we can check up on him any time we feel like it: he makes his learned pronouncements—and then it rains or it doesn’t rain.
No scientific conclusion is to be trusted without testing—to the extent to which exact sciences are exact they are also experimental sciences; it is in the laboratory that the oracle must be consulted. But the archaeologist is denied access to the oracle. For him there is no neat and definitive demonstration; he is doomed to plod along, everlastingly protesting and fumbling through a laborious, often rancorous running debate that never ends. ~ Hugh Nibley,#NFDB
1411:The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power; and now the process has turned against it. Believing itself a liberator, it discovers its role as persecutor. Children curse their fathers and become their judges. Contemporary scholars discover traces of magic in all the classical forms of rationalism and science. Instead of breaking through the circle of violence and the sacred as they imagined they were doing, our predecessors re-created weakened variations of myths and rituals. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
1412:what is meant by the psychic :::
What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#NFDB
1413:The Kiss
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see - Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.
~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
1414:Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although the world is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at MIT can significantly give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileges access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum, #NFDB
1415:The two [Greco-Roman and Latin] worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today’s Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1416:I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house.
I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped. ~ Gayle Forman,#NFDB
1417:the school the Seer had set up trained select men in the calling of prophet. If a man felt he had the calling upon him, he would be interviewed by the Seer for sincerity and integrity. If accepted into the school, he was then educated in the Torah and Wisdom literature of Israel and surrounding nations. Prophecy was not merely foretelling of the future by revelation from Yahweh. It was mostly forth-telling of truth, be it directly from Yahweh’s revelation or from the learned precepts of their sacred texts. Prophets would spend long hours in the spiritual exercises of religious devotion and scribal disciplines of learned education to become messengers of Yahweh. Hearing from their god involved both supernatural and natural pursuits to be both holy and wise. Part of that education included the playing of musical instruments that would accompany ecstatic trances and dances. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1418:As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.'
[In this quote from 1973 Watts, remarkably, essentially anticipates the discovery (in the late 1990's) of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.] ~ Alan W Watts,#NFDB
1419:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1420:His argument is that the system’s much lauded economic, political, and social freedoms, formerly a source of social progress, lose their progressive function and become subtle instruments of domination which serve to keep individuals in bondage to the system that they strengthen and perpetuate. For example, economic freedom to sell one’s labor power in order to compete on the labor market submits the individual to the slavery of an irrational economic system; political freedom to vote for generally indistinguishable representatives of the same system is but a delusive ratification of a nondemocratic political system; intellectual freedom of expression is ineffectual when the media either co-opt and defuse, or distort and suppress, oppositional ideas, and when the image-makers shape public opinion so that it is hostile or immune to oppositional thought and action. Marcuse ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
1421:The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death. ~ James H Cone, #NFDB
1422:Mrs. Varden was a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper - a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable. Thus it generally happened, that when other people were merry, Mrs. Varden was dull; and that when other people were dull, Mrs. Varden was disposed to be amazingly cheerful. Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1423:But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible
things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he
who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our
discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with
passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in
earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material
image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every
thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is
the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper
creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has
already made. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
1424:Now as God revealed his Word and spoke, or preached, by the mouth of the fathers and Prophets, and at last by his own Son, then by the Apostles and evangelists, whose tongues were but as the pens of scribes writing rapidly, God thus employing men to speak to men; so to propose, apply, and declare this his Word, he employs his visible spouse as his mouthpiece and the interpreter of his intentions. It is God then who rules over Christian belief, but with two instruments, in a double way: (1) by his Word as by a formal rule and (2) by his Church as by the hand of the measurer and rule-user. Let us put it thus: God is the painter, our faith the picture, the colors are the Word of God, the brush is the Church. Here then are two ordinary and infallible rules of our belief: the Word of God, which is the fundamental and formal rule; the Church of God, which is the rule of application and explanation. ~ Francis de Sales, #NFDB
1425:I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“ Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1426:Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the ‘scientific’ theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience — the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man’s experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun ‘rises’ for me today as it ‘rose’ for the man of ten thousand years ago. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton, #NFDB
1427:Now as God revealed his Word and spoke, or preached, by the mouth of the fathers and Prophets, and at last by his own Son, then by the Apostles and evangelists, whose tongues were but as the pens of scribes writing rapidly, God thus employing men to speak to men; so to propose, apply, and declare this his Word, he employs his visible spouse as his mouthpiece and the interpreter of his intentions. It is God then who rules over Christian belief, but with two instruments, in a double way: (1) by his Word as by a formal rule and (2) by his Church as by the hand of the measurer and rule-user. Let us put it thus: God is the painter, our faith the picture, the colors are the Word of God, the brush is the Church. Here then are two ordinary and infallible rules of our belief: the Word of God, which is the fundamental and formal rule; the Church of God, which is the rule of application and explanation. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #NFDB
1428:Listen," he whispered.
As the thrumming of her own heart quieted, Beatrix heard music. Not instruments, but human voices joined in harmony. Bemused, she went to the window and looked out. A smile lit her face.
A small group of officers from Christopher's regiment, still in uniform, were standing in a row and singing a slow, haunting ballad.
Were I laid on Greenland's coast,
And in my arms embrac'd my lass;
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half year's night would pass.
And I would love you all the day.
Ev'ry night would kiss and play,
If with me you'd fondly stray.
Over the hills and far away...
"Our song," Beatrix whispered, as the sweet strains floated up to them.
"Yes."
Beatrix lowered to the floor and braced her folded arms on the windowsill... the same place where she had lit so many candles for a soldier fighting in a faraway land. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1429:The god abandons Antony
When at the hour of midnight
an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing
with exquisite music, with voices ―
Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides,
your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have proved illusions.
But like a man prepared, like a brave man,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing.
Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream,
that your ear was mistaken.
Do not condescend to such empty hopes.
Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,
like the man who was worthy of such a city,
go to the window firmly,
and listen with emotion
but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward
(Ah! supreme rapture!)
listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing. ~ Constantinos P Cavafy,#NFDB
1430:Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1431:And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1432:But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1433:In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant Apprehension of War has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body.” This was why republics must always hate war: Whatever happened on the battlefield, they always lost their liberty, in part if not in whole, and if the state of tension was permanent, so, too, was the loss of liberty. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans, it was a standing maxim to excite a war as a ruse to keep the people enslaved. Should the states separate entirely from one another, these would be the consequences,” and anyone who had been accessory to such historic consequences “could never be forgiven by their Country, nor by themselves. ~ Charles L Mee Jr, #NFDB
1434:His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
1435:It is the question that is also asked by modern political theory: Can politics accept truth as a structural category? Or must truth, as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its place taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power? By relying on truth, does not politics, in view of the impossibility of attaining consensus on truth, make itself a tool of particular traditions that in reality are merely forms of holding on to power?
And yet, on the other hand, what happens when truth counts for nothing? What kind of justice is then possible? Must there not be common criteria that guarantee real justice for all—criteria that are independent of the arbitrariness of changing opinions and powerful lobbies? Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom? ~ Benedict XVI,#NFDB
1436:Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1437:All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word "spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe. ~ Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 62, #NFDB
1438:There is a tendency to romanticize the abilities of the ancient Egyptians because they produced structures that were miraculous for their time and certainly would pose a serious challenge to ours. They were somehow immensely more talented with sticks and stones than modern researchers have been able to demonstrate using the same implements. When pondering the theories proffered by Egyptologists, one gets the impression that an ancient Egyptian quarry worker was like a maestro playing a complete symphony on a violin made of a cigar box and a stick and producing the quality of a Stradivarius.
The argument is pleasing and poetic, but the trouble is that, metaphorically speaking, when modern scholars make a violin from a cigar box and a stick, its results are precisely what you would expect from a cigar box and a stick. So the question persists: From what instruments did the symphonic architecture of Egypt materialize? ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1439:This is your captain speaking, so stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello, wherever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today, and I didn’t become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you’re very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first. “Secondly, we are about to jump into hyperspace for the journey to Barnard’s Star. On arrival we will stay in dock for a seventy-two-hour refit, and no one’s to leave the ship during that time. I repeat, all planet leave is canceled. I’ve just had an unhappy love affair, so I don’t see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1440:Shaving
In the mirror, the hand hacks at my skin
It belongs to the child who used his father's
blades for sharpening pencils, playing murder.
Full of cuts, I have the blood-effacing
instruments: water, water, and survival
tricks : I'm as clean
as glass, my brown face glistens
with oil, turns a fine olive green.
There's no return
to the sanctuary
of ripped paper-boat-journeys
This is morning, I must
scrub myself. A college lecturer, I smell of talcum
Old Spice and unwritten poems.
The mirror smiles back like a forgotten student:
The hairs die like ants in the basin.
My reflection gathers the night's dust,
I wipe it with the morning towels.
The girls drape their muslin shawls,
their necks turn on Isadora's wheels:
In the classroom I shuffle like unrhymed poetry
The blade, wet with Essenin's wrist,
waits with the unwritten poem.
~ Agha Shahid Ali,#NFDB
1441:At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.
At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.
The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. ~ Ken Liu,#NFDB
1442:At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon the violin part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1443:I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night
The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief
I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
Without an upward path
Because there is no path
There is only a blunt rock
With a river to fall into
And Time with its medieval chambers
Time with its jagged edges
And blunt instruments
I did not know the work of mourning
Is a labor in the dark
We carry inside ourselves
Though sometimes when I sleep
I'm with him again
And then I wake
Poor Sisyphus grief
I'm not ready for your heaviness
Cemented to my body
Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders
That's why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day ~ Edward Hirsch,#NFDB
1444:Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
1445:If we are going to avoid similar financial crises in the future, we need to restrict severely freedom of action in the financial market. Financial instruments need to be banned unless we fully understand their workings and their effects on the rest of the financial sector and, moreover, the rest of the economy. This will mean banning many of the complex financial derivatives whose workings and impacts have been shown to be beyond the comprehension of even the supposed experts. You may think I am too extreme. However, this is what we do all the time with other products – drugs, cars, electrical products, and many others. When a company invents a new drug, for example, it cannot be sold immediately. The effects of a drug, and the human body’s reaction to it, are complex. So the drug needs to be tested rigorously before we can be sure that it has enough beneficial effects that clearly overwhelm the side-effects and allow it to be sold. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
1446:There is a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music comes. But if brain and belly are burning clean with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire. The fog clears and new energy makes you run up the steps in front of you. Be emptier, and cry like reed instruments cry. Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen. When you are full of food and drink, an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help. Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it to some illusion and lose your power, but even if you have, if you have lost all will and control, they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground, pennants flying above them. A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table. Expect to see it when you fast, this table spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1447:clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction.” Last-minute design changes were required, however, necessitating more money. Tesla had already obtained a second loan from Morgan, and when those funds ran out, he again approached the financier for additional capital. In an attempt to convince the powerful Morgan to invest another large sum, Tesla explained that the tower could be used for more than transmitting radio signals—it could be used to saturate the entire globe with electricity harmless to living things so that everyone could obtain usable power by simply sticking wires in the soil. ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
1448:There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1449:There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1450:Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
1451:They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve. THE ARTIST'S LIFE
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don't do it. It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got. WITH GRATITUDE ~ Steven Pressfield,#NFDB
1452:I've come to the conclusion that we are all looking for fulfillment in an unfulfilling world. For example, you get good grades, play sports/instruments, and so on, because other people tell you this is a good thing, not because this is what you really want to do. If it was then you probably wouldn't be so bored of it. Going to a new school or getting involved in a relationship might bring on temporary ease, but you will get tired of it soon and it will not bring you the satisfaction you desire. In order to reach a state of contentment, don't blindly take other people's advice, instead search yourself for your true identity. Be more open to life. Try new things, and venture out a little more. Go out of your comfort zone. Don't let your 'friends' in the right now hold you back from things possible in the future. You can ask others for their opinion, ask them what they think is best, but ultimately, this is your life and you have to make the decisions. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1453:We do not know whether [Hipparchus] drew maps--perhaps he did--but the truth is that in his day he could not possibly have applied his projections to the globe because the necessary data, in the form of correct findings of latitudes and longitudes of a very large number of places over the known areas of the earth, were not available. This was the weakness of all Greek cartographic science. In Greek times mathematics was in advance of mechanical instrumentation: There was no instrument for easily and correctly determining the longitude of places. However, the Piri Re'is and the other maps we went on to study, seemed to suggest that such an instrument or instruments had once existed, and had been used by people who knew very closely the correct size of the earth. Moreover, it looks as if this people had visited most of the earth. They seem to have been quite well acquainted with the Americas, and to have mapped the coasts of Antarctica. ~ Charles H Hapgood, #NFDB
1454:The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
1455:Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating.
We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity. ~ Ernst Cassirer,#NFDB
1456:Quigley found the explanation of disintegration in the gradual transformation of social “instruments” into “institutions,” that is, the transformation of social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs. In an ideologically Platonistic society, social arrangements are molded to express a rigidly idealized version of reality. Such institutionalization would not have the flexibility to accommodate to the pressures of changing reality for which the ideology has no categories of thought that will allow perception, analysis, and handling. But the extraordinary distinction of Western civilization is that its ontology allows an open-ended epistemology. It is engaged in a constant effort to understand reality which is perceived as in constant change. Therefore, our categories of knowledge are themselves always subject to change. As a consequence reform is always possible. ~ Carroll Quigley, #NFDB
1457:Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils; the prototype of similar 'civilized' atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1458:I had often had trouble with [my mother-in-law] Florence and gotten angry at her; that she and I had wildly different views about child-rearing... The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life. It's not one of my strengths. I keep a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations. Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed... She believed that childhood should be full of spontaneity, freedom, discovery, and experience... I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl -- she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments... In fact, it was through butting heads with Florence that I first became aware of some of the deep differences between Chinese and (at least one variant of) Western parenting. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
1459:Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
1460:There's hidden sweeteness in the stomach's emptiness.
We are lutes, no more no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music.
If the brain and the belly are burning clean
with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and new energy makes you
run up the steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.
When you're full of food and drink, an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast,
good habits gather like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon's ring. Don't give it to some illusion and lose your power,
but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control, they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground, pennants flying above them.
A table descends to your tents, Jesus' table.
Expect to see it, when you fast, this table spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1461:Supposing that what is at any rate believed to be the 'truth' really is true, and the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey 'man' to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture; which is not to say that the bearers of these instincts themselves represent culture. Rather is the reverse not merely probable—no! today it is palpable! These bearers of the oppressive instincts that thirst for reprisal, the descendants of every kind of European and non-European slavery, and especially of the entire pre-Aryan populace—they represent the regression of mankind! These 'instruments of culture' are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against 'culture' in general! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1462:Here is a man to whom all others are not-self: at bottom his own personality alone is real to him, the others in truth only phantasms: he recognises an existence in them, but it is relative, they can serve him as instruments of his designs or can come in his way and that is all: in short between his own personality and all of them there is a deep gulf, an immense distance. Look upon this man confronted by death: it seems to him as if with him all reality, the whole world were disappearing. Then look upon this other who recognises in all that are his like, more, in all that lives, himself, his own essence : he casts his existence into the existence of all living beings and by death he loses only a feeble portion of that existence, for he subsists in all the others in whom he has always recognised, has always loved his own being, his own essence, and it is only the illusion that is now about to fall away from him, the illusion which separated his consciousness from all others. ~ Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1463:For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....
To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way. ~ Terri Windling,#NFDB
1464:If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1465:Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn’t get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer’s breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
1466:Not one but two great nations were to look back to Abraham as their father - two great nations, that is, two guided powers, two instruments to work the Will of Heaven, for God does not promise as a blessing that which is profane, nor is there any greatness before God except greatness in the Spirit. Abraham was thus the fountain-head of two spiritual streams which must not flow together, but each in its own course; and he entrusted Hagar and Ishmael to the blessing of God and the care of His Angels in the certainty that all would be well with them.
Two spiritual streams, two religions, two worlds for God; two circles, therefore two centres. A place is never holy through the choice of man, but because it has been chosen in Heaven. There were two holy centres within the orbit of Abraham: one of these was at hand, the other perhaps he did not get know; and it was to the other that Hagar and Ishmael were guided, in a barren valley of Arabia, some forty camel days south of Canaan. ~ Martin Lings,#NFDB
1467:What I have said makes it appear that this process of improvement by internal replacement applies to the technology as a whole. But by our recursion principle, it applies to all constituent parts of the technology as well: a technology improves as better subparts and sub-subparts are swapped into its assemblies and subassemblies. This means we need to think of a technology as an object-more an organism, really-that develops through its constituent parts and subparts improving simultaneously at all levels in its hierarchy.
And there is something else. A technology developls not just by the direct efforts applied to it. Many of a technology's parts are shared by other technologies, so a great deal of development happens automatically as components improve in other uses "outside" that technology. For decades, aircraft instruments and control mechanism benefited from outside progress in electronic components. A technology piggybacks on the external development of its components. ~ W Brian Arthur,#NFDB
1468:Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.
And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.
~ Jorge Luis Borges, History Of The Night
,#NFDB
1469:Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. “The weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nation’s growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they determine what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution, they by the same token determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation; our conscience in matters of law and our opportunity in matters of politics are in their hands.”10 Moreover, the only legitimate opinions the federal courts can render are those that endorse and promote the expansion of federal power. “[T]hat if they had interpreted the Constitution in its strict letter, as some proposed, and not in its spirit, like the charter of a business corporation and not like the charter of a living government, the vehicle of a nation ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
1470:Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
1471:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #NFDB
1472:AN ARTIST’S PRAYER
O Great Creator,
We are gathered together in your name
That we may be of greater service to you
And to our fellows.
We offer ourselves to you as instruments.
We open ourselves to your creativity in our lives.
We surrender to you our old ideas.
We welcome your new and more expansive ideas.
We trust that you will lead us.
We trust that it is safe to follow you.
We know you created us and that creativity
Is your nature and our own.
We ask you to unfold our lives
According to your plan, not our low self-worth.
Help us to believe that it is not too late
And that we are not too small or too flawed
To be healed—
By you and through each other—and made whole.
Help us to love one another,
To nurture each other’s unfolding,
To encourage each other’s growth,
And understand each other’s fears.
Help us to know that we are not alone,
That we are loved and lovable.
Help us to create as an act of worship to you. ~ Julia Cameron,#NFDB
1473:the disparity between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore, bewilderment, and untimely death. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1474:Yes, and this amazement should fill us when we approach every Sacrament. For Jesus himself is attentively hearing our sins, encouraging us, and pouring out his merciful forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance. Jesus himself is washing us in the water flowing from his pierced side in Baptism. Jesus himself is joining husband and wife together as one flesh in the Sacrament of Marriage. Jesus himself is stretching out his loving hand to touch the infirm with his strength, healing, and consolation in the Anointing of the Sick. Jesus himself is breathing out the Holy Spirit in the Sacrament of Confirmation. Jesus himself is receiving the humanity of broken men and using them as his instruments of salvation in the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Wonder of wonders! Jesus remains truly with us, not just in our minds through his Word, not just in our souls through faith and grace, but also bodily present with us in his Sacraments, where he continues to bless, forgive, cleanse, unite, heal, strengthen, and make all things new. ~ Michael Gaitley, #NFDB
1475:In his letter, he explains why the loss of those traditional sources of meaning is so tragic. “Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star,” Durant writes; “geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species; historians have told us that ‘progress’ is delusion, whose glory ends in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment, and that the once incorruptible soul is but a transient incandescence of the brain.” Philosophers, meanwhile, with their emphasis on reasoning their way to the truth, have reasoned their way to the truth that life is meaningless: “Life has become, in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured.” In ~ Emily Esfahani Smith, #NFDB
1476:Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human —”
“THEN — I — DON’T — WANT — TO — BE — HUMAN!” Harry roared, and he seized one of the delicate silver instruments from the spindle-legged table beside him and flung it across the room. It shattered into a hundred tiny pieces against the wall. Several of the pictures let out yells of anger and fright, and the portrait of Armando Dippet said, “Really!”
“I DON’T CARE!” Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE —”
He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that too. It broke apart on the floor and the legs rolled in different directions.
“You do care,” said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it. ~ J K Rowling,#NFDB
1477:12. If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment— If you can embrace this without fear or expectation—can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)—then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that. 13. Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth. 14. Stop drifting. You’re not going to re-read your Brief Comments, your Deeds of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the commonplace books you saved for your old age. Sprint for the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1478:Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1479:Each practical moral virtue has two opposed vices, a “too much” and a “too little” (e.g., cowardice and foolhardiness, or insensitivity and self-indulgence). Theoretical truth also usually contrasts with two opposite errors, e.g., angelism vs. animalism regarding human nature, or deism vs. pantheism in theology, or the denial of free will vs. the denial of predestination. And so too here, with the sacraments. On the one hand, superstition ascribes supernatural powers to the natural things themselves, not as instruments; and on the other hand, in the typically Muslim Ash’arite theology, God does everything Himself and acts not by using natural things as active instruments but only as accidental occasions. Thus the technical term “occasionalism”. In Catholic theology, grace is, on the one hand, absolutely sovereign and also, on the other hand, it uses, perfects, and respects nature. Thus divine grace comes to us through the sacraments in a way which perfects their natural matter in giving it the power to actually cause the increase of grace in souls. It ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
1480:War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1481:The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology to see that the European “give” is always highly selective. We never give any native people under our control – and we never shall, for it would be sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitik – the following elements of culture:
1. The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes an effective defence or aggression possible
2. We do not give out instruments of political mastery [i.e. sovereignty or voting rights]
3. We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages…. Even when under indirect economic exploitation… we allow the native a share of the profits, the full control of the economic organization remains in the hands of Western enterprise.
4. We do not admit them as equals to Church, Assembly, school, or drawing room… Full political, social and even religious equality is nowhere granted. ~ Bronis aw Malinowski,#NFDB
1482: A former fighter pilot, teaching at an aeronautics university, discovered how this works in the classroom. One of his students had been a star in ground school but was having trouble in the air. During a training flight, she misinterpreted an instrument reading, and he yelled at her, thinking it would force her to concentrate. Instead, she started crying, and though she tried to continue reading the instruments, she couldn’t focus. He landed the plane, lesson over. What was wrong? From the brain’s perspective, nothing was wrong. The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger. This is weapons focus, merely replacing “Saturday Night Special” with “ex-fighter pilot.”
The same is true if you are a parenting a child rather than teaching a student. The brain will never outgrow its preoccupation with survival. ~ John Medina,#NFDB
1483:But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result. And afterwards you will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, 12, #NFDB
1484:God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1485:In view of the cataclysmic changes that followed, it is significant that the initiative in bringing about the release of nuclear energy, the central event in the recrudescence of the megamachine in modern form, was taken, not by the central government, but by a small group of physicists. Not less significant is the fact that these advocates of nuclear power were themselves unusually humane and morally sensitive people, notably, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Harold Urey. These were the last scientists one would accuse of seeking to establish a new priesthood capable of assuming autocratic authority and wielding satanic power. Those unpleasant characteristics, which have become all too evident in later collaborators and successors, were derived from the new instruments commanded by the megamachine and the dehumanized concepts that were rapidly incorporated in its whole working program. As for the initiators of the atom bomb, it was their innocence that concealed from them, at least in the initial stages, the dreadful ultimate consequences of their effort. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1486:Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.
Doubt.
The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent. ~ Salman Rushdie,#NFDB
1487:Therefore, perception, which I count as the most wonderful of instruments, has just as little reality as that of my poor senses. However I might conceive of matter, it is always something different from what I understood it to be. But it is not only that I can never completely perceive the essence of matter, but also it's that it has no being. Spray water on a hot oven and it is instantaneously vaporized, if I throw a lump of sugar into a cup of tea it melts. If I break the cup I'm drinking out of, I'll have nothing but shards - but no longer a cup. If, however, being can be turned into not-being with the flip of the wrist, then it is not worth talking about it as being. Not-being, death, is the real essence of all matter, life is only a negation of this essence for an infinitely short span of time. But the thought of the drop of water, or the lump of sugar remains immutable, it can never be broken, vaporated, or melted. So isn't this thought to be spoken of with much greater right as reality, than fluctuating material is?
"From The Diary Of An Orange Tree ~ Hanns Heinz Ewers,#NFDB
1488:There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. The danger and the attraction of these false mystiques of Nation and of Class is precisely that they seduce and pretend to satisfy those who are no longer aware of any deep or genuine spiritual need. The false mysticism of the Mass Society captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are “opium” for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1489:Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth's. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1490:While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical motu proprio. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world. ~ Daniel J Boorstin, #NFDB
1491:It is the impulse of science to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology. Genes were not abstractions anymore. They could be liberated from the genomes of organisms where they had been trapped for millennia, shuttled between species, amplified, purified, extended, shortened, altered, remixed, mutated, mixed, matched, cut, pasted, edited; they were infinitely malleable to human intervention. Genes were no longer just the subjects of study, but the instruments of study. There is an illuminated moment in the development of a child when she grasps the recursiveness of language: just as thoughts can be used to generate words, she realizes, words can be used to generate thoughts. Recombinant DNA had made the language of genetics recursive. Biologists had spent decades trying to interrogate the nature of the gene-but now it was the gene that could be used to interrogate biology. We had graduated, in short, from thinking about genes, to thinking in genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1492:He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. PSALM 25:9 JUNE 22 After a speaking engagement in Florida, my hosts assigned a Navy captain to fly me home. En route, the captain told me that there was a very heavy overcast in New York. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’ll have to go in on instruments.” We went down, down, down. And finally, I saw the lights of the runway and we came right up to the ramp. It was a beautiful landing. The captain said, “The primary ingredient for a good landing is faith. I have to have faith in these instruments. If I didn’t, I might think, ‘Well, maybe this instrument isn’t exactly right, so I’ll make this adjustment.’ And that could have tragic consequences.” Your religious education is your instrument panel for safe navigation through the long flight of the years. When clouds gather, storms develop, and trouble looms, if you lose faith in your instruments, you can be lost. But if you have faith in the teachings of the Bible, in prayer, in the church, in goodness, love, and hope, your instruments will bring you through. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
1493:The only mode which is employed to repress this violence, and to maintain the order and peace of society, is punishment. Whips, axes and gibbets, dungeons, chains and racks are the most approved and established methods of persuading men to obedience, and impressing upon their minds the lessons of reason. There are few subjects upon which human ingenuity has been more fully displayed than in inventing instruments of torture. The lash of the whip a thousand times repeated and flagrant on the back of the defenceless victim, the bastinado on the soles of the feet, the dislocation of limbs, the fracture of bones, the faggot and the stake, the cross, impaling, and the mode of drifting pirates on the Volga, make but a small part of the catalogue. When Damiens, the maniac, was arraigned for his abortive attempt on the life of Louis XV of France, a council of anatomists was summoned to deliberate how a human being might be destroyed with the longest protracted and most diversified agony. Hundreds of victims are annually sacrificed at the shrine of positive law and political institution. ~ William Godwin, #NFDB
1494:There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. [...]
This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet [...] and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.
So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.
For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America’s and Europe’s forests by acid rain, say, might really be.
And here was the sort of advice a full belly gave and still gives [...]: “Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
1495:As we have seen so often in this book, religion may begin with mystical experiences but it always leads to politics. It starts with the voice heard by the prophets who are its chosen instruments. And what they hear always leads to actions that affect the way people live: with politics. Sometimes the politics are bad. People are persecuted for following the wrong faith or for listening to the wrong voice. Or they are forced to embrace the message announced by the latest hot prophet. So the history of religion becomes a study in different forms of oppression. But sometimes the politics are good. They are about liberation, not oppression. We saw good politics in the stand the Pennsylvanian Quakers made against slavery in 1688. And in the African American Church today the politics of Christianity are still about liberation. The tactics of Moses and the promises of Jesus are used to make the world a better place. Religion is no longer used as an opiate to dull the pain of injustice and inequality but as a stimulant to overcome it. That’s what keeps many people in the religion game. ~ Richard Holloway, #NFDB
1496:Those who abdicate the empire of reason and permit their wills to wander in pursuit of reflections in the Astral Light, are subject to alternations of mania and melancholy which have originated all the marvels of demoniacal possession, though it is true, at the same time, that by means of these reflections impure spirits can act upon such souls, make use of them as docile instruments and even habitually torment their organism, wherein they enter and reside by obsession, or embryonically. These kabalistic terms are explained in the Hebrew book of the Revolution of Souls, of which our thirteenth chapter will contain a succinct analysis. It is therefore extremely dangerous to make sport of the Mysteries of Magic; it is above all excessively rash to practice its rites from curiosity, by way of experiment and as if to exploit higher forces. The inquisitive who, without being adepts, busy themselves with evocations or occult magnetism, are like children playing with fire in the neighborhood of a cask of gunpowder; sooner or later they will fall victims to some terrible explosion. ~ liphas L vi, #NFDB
1497:Je dois dire un mot sur la peur. C'est le seul adversaire réel de la vie. Il n'y a que la peur qui puisse vaincre la vie. C'est une ennemie habile et perfide, et je le sais bien. Elle n'a aucune décence, ne respecte ni lois ni conventions, ne manifeste aucune clémence. Elle attaque votre point le plus faible, qu'elle trouve avec une facilité déconcertante. Elle naît d'abord et invariablement dans votre esprit. Un moment vous vous sentez calme, en plein contrôle, heureux. Puis la peur, déguisée en léger doute, s'immisce dans votre pensée comme un espion. Ce léger doute rencontre l'incrédulité et celle-ci tente de le repousser. Mais l'incrédulité est un simple fantassin. Le doute s'en débarrasse sans se donner de mal. Vous devenez inquiet. La raison vient à votre rescousse. Vous êtes rassuré. La raison dispose de tous les instruments de pointe de la technologie moderne. Mais, à votre surprise et malgré des tactiques supérieures et un nombre impressionnant de victoires, la raison est mise K.- O. Vous sentez que vous vous affaiblissez, que vous hésitez. Votre inquiétude devient frayeur. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
1498:The engineering context of precision where precision is not necessary indicates the existence of sophisticated tools. These have not been found in the archaeological record, but the existence of them must be taken into account when we consider the mountain of circumstantial evidence to support their use.
In the case of the Serapeum, the list of tools and instruments that are necessary to create the granite boxes has grown. We can say with certainty that exact measuring instruments existed, for this work and the work at Luxor and Karnak could not have been accomplished without them. They are the most important and necessary tools for such work. The wooden squares, plumb bobs, and alignment instruments on display in the Luxor and Cairo Museums are incapable of giving even the most talented craftsman the information he needs to know that his work has achieved this kind of accuracy. Even if these boxes and monuments were crafted today with modern tools, such instruments are limited in what they can measure--and they most certainly cannot explain the precision and geometry [on display]. ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1499:While the Eternal Feminine in Faust II still appears in personalized form as the Madonna, she works her effects in The Magic Flute as an invisible spiritual power, as music. But this music is the expression of divine love itself, which unites law and freedom, above and below, in the wisdom of the heart and of love. As harmony, it grants humankind divine peace and rules the world as the highest divinity.
From the earliest times, magic and music have stood under the rule of the Archetypal Feminine, which in myth and fairy tale is also the mistress of transformation, intoxication, and enchanting sound. Thus it is quite understandable that it is precisely this feminine principle that bestows the magical instruments. The Orpheus motif of the magical taming of the animal energies through music belongs to her, for as mistress of the animals the Great Goddess rules the world of wild as well as tame creatures. She can transform things and people into animal form, tame the animal, and enchant it because, like music, she is able to make the tame wild and the wild tame with the power of her magic. ~ Erich Neumann,#NFDB
1500:Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.
The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero ~ Primo Levi,#NFDB
268 Integral Yoga
37 Poetry
29 Occultism
26 Yoga
24 Philosophy
23 Fiction
23 Christianity
6 Hinduism
4 Sufism
4 Psychology
4 Mythology
3 Science
3 Integral Theory
2 Theosophy
2 Education
2 Baha i Faith
1 Cybernetics
1 Buddhism
1 Alchemy
316 Sri Aurobindo
92 The Mother
54 Satprem
54 Nolini Kanta Gupta
18 Sri Ramakrishna
17 Aleister Crowley
16 H P Lovecraft
12 A B Purani
7 Percy Bysshe Shelley
7 James George Frazer
7 Aldous Huxley
6 Plotinus
6 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
5 Walt Whitman
5 Swami Krishnananda
5 Saint Augustine of Hippo
5 Rudolf Steiner
5 Plato
5 Friedrich Nietzsche
4 Vyasa
4 Nirodbaran
4 George Van Vrekhem
4 Carl Jung
4 Al-Ghazali
3 William Wordsworth
3 Swami Vivekananda
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Ovid
3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3 Anonymous
2 Robert Browning
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 John Keats
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Baha u llah
87 The Synthesis Of Yoga
40 Record of Yoga
31 The Life Divine
20 Savitri
18 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
16 Lovecraft - Poems
15 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
14 The Human Cycle
13 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
12 Liber ABA
12 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
11 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
10 Essays Divine And Human
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
9 Questions And Answers 1956
9 Letters On Yoga II
9 Essays On The Gita
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Letters On Yoga IV
8 Letters On Yoga I
7 The Perennial Philosophy
7 The Golden Bough
7 Shelley - Poems
7 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
7 Letters On Yoga III
6 The Bible
6 Talks
6 Prayers And Meditations
6 On the Way to Supermanhood
6 Magick Without Tears
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
6 Agenda Vol 05
5 Whitman - Poems
5 The Study and Practice of Yoga
5 Questions And Answers 1953
5 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
5 City of God
5 Agenda Vol 13
5 Agenda Vol 09
4 Vishnu Purana
4 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
4 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
4 The Alchemy of Happiness
4 Some Answers From The Mother
4 Questions And Answers 1955
4 Questions And Answers 1954
4 Preparing for the Miraculous
4 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
4 Agenda Vol 12
3 Wordsworth - Poems
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Secret Doctrine
3 The Phenomenon of Man
3 The Future of Man
3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
3 Metamorphoses
3 Faust
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
3 Agenda Vol 10
3 Agenda Vol 08
3 Agenda Vol 07
3 Agenda Vol 03
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Walden
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2 The Secret Of The Veda
2 The Practice of Psycho therapy
2 Raja-Yoga
2 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 On Education
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Keats - Poems
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Collected Poems
2 Browning - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 04
2 Agenda Vol 01
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
materials, brains, instruments, and tools of production.
000.110 Mutually assumed survival-only-of-the-fittest is the reason why the
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and atomics. These invisible micro- and macro-exploring cosmic instruments
provided for rearrangements of atomic interpositioning whose metallic alloying and
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
few conscious instruments at their disposal. It is true that in
this matter quality compensates by far for quantity. As for the
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karan.a), as opposed to the two others which are instruments (karan.a), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
Consciousness. The evolution which we observe and of which
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita3 Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth,
Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.
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Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal operations. In the ancient tradition of Hathayoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called pran.ayama, the control of the breath or vital power; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Pranayama, for the Hathayogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity are attained.
On the other hand, Pranayama awakens the coiled-up serpent of the Pranic dynamism in the vital sheath and opens to the Yogin fields of consciousness, ranges of experience, abnormal faculties denied to the ordinary human life while it puissantly intensifies such normal powers and faculties as he already possesses.
--
Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all and do all through the human instruments which are open to
His influence.
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere school of thought, that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.
***
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were draison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrumentnothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.
--
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A stillness falls upon the instruments:
Fixed, motionless like a marble monument,
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Increased and heightened were the instruments.
Illusion lost her aggrandising lens;
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Against this tyranny of the group, this absolute rule of the collective will, the human mind rose in revolt and the result was Individualism. For whatever may be the truth and necessity of the Collective, the Individual is no less true and necessary. The individual has his own law and urge of being and his own secret godhead. The collective godhead derides the individual godhead at its peril. The first movement of the reaction, however, was a run to the other extremity; a stern collectivism gave birth to an intransigent individualism. The individual is sacred and inviolable, cost what it may. It does not matter what sort of individuality one seeks, it is enough if the thing is there. So the doctrine of individualism has come to set a premium on egoism and on forces that are disruptive of all social bonds. Each and every individual has the inherent right, which is also a duty, to follow his own impetus and impulse. Society is nothing but the battle ground for competing individualities the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall. Association and co-operation are instruments that the individual may use and utilise for his own growth and development but in the main they act as deterrents rather than as aids to the expression and expansion of his characteristic being. In reality, however, if we probe sufficiently deep into the matter we find that there is no such thing as corporate life and activity; what appears as such is only a camouflage for rigorous competition; at the best, there maybe only an offensive and defensive alliancehumanity fights against nature, and within humanity itself group fights against group and in the last analysis, within the group, the individual fights against the individual. This is the ultimate Law-the Dharma of creation.
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-operation. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the demand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. The scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
with the instruments She has at her disposal. Finally he
told me that he had no opinion on the subject. "My
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified and enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the thing the one thing needfulTamevaikam jnatha; 'religions' are its names and forms, appliances and decorations. Let us have by all means the religious spirit, the fundamental experience that is the inmost truth of all religions, that is the matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let there be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the numberless facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to the human consciousness. Ekam sat viprh bahudh vadanti. It is an ancient truth that man discovered even in his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an adequate expression and application in life.
II
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitivealmost aboriginalelement in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful the classic grace and aristocracyform one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.
All elemental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on earth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently simple and commonplace.
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Divine become especially powerful and effective instruments.
The endeavour is difficult and demands an absolute and
0 1959-01-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
My body would also like to have a mantra to repeat. Those it has are not enough for it anymore. It would like to have one to hasten its transformation. It is ready to repeat it as many times as needed, provided that it does not have to be out loud, for it is very rarely alone and does not want to speak of this to anyone. Truly, the Ashram atmosphere is not very favorable for this kind of thing. You will have to take precautions so as not to be disturbed or interrupted in an inopportune way. Domestic servants, curious people, so-called friends can all serve as instruments of the hostile forces to put a spoke in the wheels. I will do my best to protect you, but you will have a lot to do yourself and will have to be as firm as an iron rod.
I am not writing you all this to discourage you from coming. But I want you to succeed; for me that is more important than anything else, no matter what the price. So, know for certain that I am with you all the time and more so especially when you repeat your mantra
0 1960-08-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Myself, I cant afford to do that, I have other things to do. And Im not keen on going blind either. I need my eyes, they are my work instruments.
On top of that, there are all the people who want to see me. Now everyone wants to see me! And since they are happy after coming once, they ask to come again! If I were very disagreeable and told them (Mother laughs) but that cant be done.
0 1961-03-21, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The moment I saw this person I knew he was only an instrument, but a well-paid instrumentsomeone paid a great deal to have him do that! I would recognize him again among hundreds I can still see him I see him more clearly than with physical eyes. He is an unintelligent man with no personal animosity, merely a very well-paid instrumentsomeone is hiding behind him, using him as a screen.
Before that experience, as part of the attack, I also got a sore throat. I didnt believe it would manifest, but around 9:30 this morning when I came downstairs for meditation with X,2 it did. Its nothing at all, though. The whole time I was with X (and even before, when I was waiting for him), it was halted completelyeverything in that room came to a halt. It started up again only after he left and I came here. But its nothing.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Once again, Mother's experience coincides with modern science, which is beginning to discover that time and space are not fixed and INDEPENDENT quantitiesas, from the Greeks right up to Newton, we had been accustomed to believe but a four-dimensional system, with three coordinates of space and one of time, DEPENDENT UPON THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA DEVELOPING THEREIN. Such is 'Riemann's Space,' used by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. Thus, a trajectoryi.e., in principle, a fixed distance, a quantity of space to be traversed-is a function of the time taken to traverse it: there is no straight line between two points, or rather the I straight' line is a function of the rate of speed. There is no 'fixed' quantity of space, but rather rates of speed which determine their own space (or their own measure of space). Space-time is thus no longer a fixed quantity, but, according to science, the PRODUCT ... of what? Of a certain rate of unfolding? But what is unfolding? A rocket, a train, muscles?... Or a certain brain which has generated increasingly perfected instruments adapted to its own mode of being, like a flying fish flying farther and farther (and faster and faster) but finally failing back into its own oceanic fishbowl. Yet what would this space-time be for another kind of fishbowl, another kind of consciousness: a supramental consciousness, for example, which can be instantaneously at any point in 'space'there is no more space! And no more time. There is no more 'trajectory': the trajectory is within itself. The fishbowl is shattered, and the whole evolutionary succession of little fishbowls as well. Thus, as Mother tells it, space and time are a 'PRODUCT Of the movement of consciousness.' A variable space-time, which not only changes according to our mechanical equipment, but according to the consciousness utilizing the equipment, and which ultimately utilizes only itself; consciousness, at the end of the evolutionary curve, has become its own equipment and the sole mechanism of the universe.
***
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, we are the first possible instruments for making the world progress. For example (this is one way of putting it), the transformation of the Inconscient into the Subconscient is probably far more rapid and complete now than it was before man appeared upon earth; man is one of the first transformative elements. Animals are obviously more conscious than plants, but WILLED (and thus more rapid) progress belongs to humanity. Likewise, what one hopes (more than hopes!), what one expects is that when the new supramental race comes upon earth, the work will go much more swiftly; and man will necessarily benefit from this. And since things will be done in true order instead of in mental disorder, animals and everything else will probably benefit from it also. In other words, the whole earth, taken as one entity, will progress more and more rapidly. The Inconscient (oh, all this comes to me in English, thats the difficulty!) is meant to go and necessarily the Subconscient will go too.
Broadly speaking, does this mean that physical Matter will become conscious?
--
I knew how it was with her because I remember the days when Sri Aurobindo was here and I used to go downstairs to give meditations to the people assembled in the hall. Theres a ledge above the pillars there, where all the gods used to sitShiva, Krishna, Lakshmi, the Trimurti, all of them the little ones, the big ones, they all used to come regularly, every day, to attend these meditations. It was a lovely sight. But they didnt have this kind of adoration for the Supreme. They had no use for that concepteach one, in his own mode of being, was fully aware of his own eternal divinity; and each one knew as well that he could represent all the others (such was the basis of popular worship,7 and they knew it). They felt they were a kind of community, but they had none of those qualities that the psychic life gives: no deep love, no deep sympathy, no sense of union. They had only the sense of their OWN divinity. They had certain very particular movements, but not this adoration for the Supreme nor the feeling of being instruments: they felt they were representing the Supreme, and so each one was perfectly satisfied with his particular representation.
Except for Krishna. In 1926, I had begun a sort of overmental creation, that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). I asked all these gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body (some of them absolutely refused). Well, with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on November 24th, and it was the beginning of Mother.8
0 1962-05-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Striking though the parallel may be, there is still a fundamental difference between these mathematical concepts and Mothers experience. In the first case, we are dealing with conceptual instruments used by the human mind to better explain and master the world: no one has actually seen electromagnetic wavesnot to speak of gravitational ones! They are images, convenient models, invisible and nonexistent in themselves. They exist only through their effects: a beam of sunlight, which is an electromagnetic wave, strikes our retina and enables us to distinguish a flower; by means of gravitational waves, Newtons apple falls from the tree but no one has lived the reality of those waves. The way Mother grasps reality, on the contrary, is first and foremost through lived experience. She is the movement, she is the wave: I walk around the room, and that is what is walking. Here we touch upon a stupendous mystery and a formidable question: How is it possible for a material and cellular body to be the wave that at once constitutes and carries the worlds along in its infinite undulating movement and governs the existence of atoms and galaxies? How is it possible to be an infinite and ubiquitous electromagnetic wave while remaining within the narrow confines of a human body?
In being THAT, it might be said, Mother thus resolves the famous question of the unified-field theory, the theory to which Einstein devoted the last years of his life in vain, that would describe the movements of both planets and atoms in a single mathematical equation. Mothers body-consciousness is one with the movement of the universe, Mother lives the unified-field theory in her body. In so doing she opens up to us not merely one more physical theory, but the very path to a new species on earth, a species that will physically and materially live on the scale of the universe. The posthuman species might not simply be one with a few organs more or less, but rather one capable of being at every point in the universe. A sort of material ubiquity. It may not be so much a new as an ubiquitous species, a species that embraces everything, from the blade of grass under our feet to the far galaxies. A multifarious, undulating existence. A resume or epitome of evolution, really, which at the end of its course again becomes each point and each species and each movement of its own evolution.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You say that what is needed is maddening enthusiasm, to fill the country with emotional excitement. In the time of the Swadeshi [fight for independence, boycott of English goods] we did all that in the field of politics, but what we did is all now in the dust. Will there be a more favorable result in the spiritual field? I do not say there has been no result. There has been. Any movement will produce some result, but for the most part in terms of an increase of possibility. This is not the right method, however, to steadily actualize the thing. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement or any intoxication of the mind the base. I wish to make a large and strong equanimity the foundation of the yoga. I want established on that equality a full, firm and undisturbed Shakti in the system and in all its movements. I want the wide display of the light of Knowledge in the ocean of Shakti. And I want in that luminous vastness the tranquil ecstasy of infinite Love, Delight and Oneness. I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God. I have no faith in the customary trade of the guru. I do not wish to be a guru. If anybody wakes and manifests from within his slumbering godhead and gets the divine lifebe it at my touch or at anothersthis is what I want. It is such men that will raise the country.
You must not think from all this lecture that I despair of the future of Bengal. I too hope, as they say, that this time a great light will manifest itself in Bengal. Still I have tried to show the other side of the shield, where the fault is, the error, the deficiency. If these remain, the light will not be a great light and it will not be permanent.
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I am sure thats how the work is done, slowly, imperceptibly, like a chick being formed in the egg: you see the shell, you see only the shell, you dont know whats inside, whether its just an egg or a chick (normally, I meanof course, you could see through with special instruments) and then the beak goes peck-peck! And then cheep! Out comes the chick, just like that. Its the same thing exactly for the contact with the psychic being. For months on end, sometimes years, you may be sitting before a closed door, push, push, pushing, and feeling, feeling the pressure (it hurts!), and theres nothing, no results. Then all at once, you dont know why or how, you sit down and poof! Everything bursts wide open, everything is ready, everything is doneits over, you emerge into a full psychic consciousness and become intimate with your psychic being. Then everything changeseverything changesyour life completely changes, its a total reversal of your whole existence.
In the end, its best not to worry, not to get agitated or depressed (thats the worst of all), not to get worked up or impatient or disgustedjust be calm and say, It will come when it comes, but with an unyielding stubbornness. Do what you feel has to be done, and keep on with it, keep on even if it seems utterly futile.
0 1963-06-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.
(XXII.340)
0 1963-11-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He was one of the instruments for the establishment of peaceits a setback for the entire political history of the earth.
But probably, it means basically that things werent ready: some parts would have been overlooked.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame of life; for by this inwardness we shall best be able both to see the truth of the high things which we now only speak with our lips and form into outward intellectual constructions, and to apply their truth sincerely to all our outward living. If we are to found the kingdom of God in humanity, we must first know God and see and live the diviner truth of our being in ourselves; otherwise how shall a new manipulation of the constructions of the reason and scientific systems of efficiency which have failed us in the past, avail to establish it? It is because there are plenty of signs that the old error continues and only a minority, leaders perhaps in light, but not yet in action, are striving to see more clearly, inwardly and truly, that we must expect as yet rather the last twilight which divides the dying from the unborn age than the real dawning. For a time, since the mind of man is not yet ready, the old spirit and method may yet be strong and seem for a short while to prosper; but the future lies with the men and nations who first see beyond both the glare and the dusk the gods of the morning and prepare themselves to be fit instruments of the Power that is pressing towards the light of a greater ideal.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1964-10-17, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now they say that they have instruments capable of measuring the fact that the continents are still moving. They even said, a few years ago, that many parts of Siberia, which used to be so cold that nothing could be done there, were beginning to be cultivated, and that, necessarily, the tropics arent so warm anymore.
But these things must be coming about very gradually, so its always possible to adapt, people can move to other places.
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You cannot understand it, because you are using instruments that cannot understand. But it cannot be understood: it has to BE.
When you are that, then you will be it, thats all, there wont be any more problem.
0 1964-11-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, he may have violent passions and reactions, and ambitions too, but he isnt one of those beings who know they are instruments of the great Asurahes not that. He is less dangerous than that. Not like Hitlerwho knew, of course.
Hitler asserted that Falsehood should govern the world and that it was governing it. And he was very conscious of being the instrument of the Asura who had himself called the Lord of Nations, who is precisely the present, current representation of the Asura of Falsehood (the one who was born the Lord of Trutha lovely story).
0 1964-12-02, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive had some very precise memorieslived memoriesof a human life on earth, quite primitive (I mean outside any mental civilization), a human life on earth that wasnt an evolutionary life, but the manifestation of beings from another world. I lived in that way for a timea lived memory. I still see it, I still have the image of it in my memory. It had nothing to do with civilization and mental development: it was a blossoming of force, of beauty, in a NATURAL, spontaneous life, like animal life, but with a perfection of consciousness and power that far surpasses the one we have now; and indeed with a power over all surrounding Nature, animal nature and vegetable nature and mineral nature, a DIRECT handling of Matter, which men do not havethey need intermediaries, material instruments, whereas this was direct. And there were no thoughts or reasoning: it was spontaneous (gesture indicating the direct radiating action of will on Matter). I have the lived memory of this. It must have existed on earth because it wasnt premonitory: it wasnt a vision of the future, it was a past memory. So there must have been a moment It was limited to two beings: I dont have the feeling there were many. And there was no childbirth or anything animal, absolutely not; it was a life, yes, a truly higher life in a natural setting, but with an extraordinary beauty and harmony! And I dont have the feeling it was (how can I explain?) something known; the relationships with vegetable life and animal life were spontaneous ones, absolutely harmonious, and with the sensation of an undisputed power (you didnt even feel it was possible for it not to be), undisputed, but without any idea that there were other beings on earth and that it was necessary to look after them or make a demonstrationnothing of the sort, absolutely nothing of mental life, nothing. A life just like that, like a beautiful plant or a beautiful animal, but with an inner knowledge of things, perfectly spontaneous and effortlessan effortless life, perfectly spontaneous. I dont even have the feeling that there was any question of food, not that I remember; but there was the joy of Life, the joy of Beauty: there were flowers, there was water, there were trees, there were animals, and all that was friendly, but spontaneously so. And there were no problems! No problems to be solved, nothing at allone just lived!
An uncomplicated life, definitely.
0 1964-12-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe nothing at all will come! I cant say. This morning This morning, I dont know, did you think of your visit here? Yes? I heard magnificent musicmagnificent! But it was music it took at least four hands to play it, or several instruments. If that came
Wait. The message (it isnt a message!) There is a photo of me in which I have my hands folded and I look happy (!), so I wrote underneath, Salut Toi, Vrit. Then I was asked to put it into English I said, Salute to the advent of the Truth.
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The only point (I dont know if science has solved it) is the unpredictability of the future. But maybe they say thats because they havent yet reached the perfection of their instruments and methods! For instance, maybe they think that just when man appeared on the earth, if there had been the instruments they now have, they would have been able to foresee the transformation from animal to man, or the appearance of man as a result of something in the animal I am not aware (Mother smiles) of their most modern pretensions. In that case, they should be able to measure or perceive the difference in the atmosphere now, with the intrusion of something that wasnt therebecause that still belongs to the material field.3 But I dont think thats what Sri Aurobindo meant; I think he meant that the world of the soul and the inner realities are so much more wonderful than the physical realities that all the physical wonders make you smileits rather that.
But the key you speak of, that key they dont have, is it not precisely the soul? A power of the soul over Matter, a power to change Matterto work physical wonders, too. Does the soul have that power?
0 1966-03-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But when nobody is there or I am alone, or when I dont speak or I am not busy with other people, its the inner lesson: the whole change in the vibration and how the world is organized. This morning, it was really extraordinarily amusing to see the mass of things that lie behind this appearance, an appearance that seems complicated enough as it is, but its nothing! Its thin, flimsy, without complexity in comparison with the MASS of things behind, which (drilling gesture) which bore their way through to reach the surface. Its amusing. But certainly ninety-nine people in a hundred would be seized with panic if they knew, if they saw. I had always been told (I read it, Sri Aurobindo often said it to me, Thon too often said it to me, so did Madame Thon) that its the Grace that keeps people from knowing. Because if they knew, they would be terrified! All, but all the things that are constantly there, moving behindbehind the appearancesall the complexities that are the true causes of or the instruments for all those small events, which to us are absolutely unimportant, but because of which one day you feel everything is harmonious, and another day you feel it takes a labor to do anything at all. And thats how it is. And naturally, when you know, you have the key. But if you know before you have the key, its a little frightening. I think that when people take leave of their senses, its because they are put in contact with the vibrations before having the knowledge, the sufficient knowledge, the sufficient state of consciousness.
There, weve wasted all our time!
0 1966-07-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But that great current of Power needs instruments in order to express itself, doesnt it?
A brain.
0 1966-11-19, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us recall that Mother's written notations often act as occult instruments: she keeps them near her and "recharges" them from time to time.
Of "unexpected" rainfalls or "unexpected" endings of rain.
0 1967-08-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The contact with the great Asuras, the first Asuras, is like that: the full consciousness of their formidable power, their marvellous capacities they forget one thing, its that they deserve no credit for it, its not their exclusive property! So they cut the connection and become instruments of disorder and confusion.
This one, the Lord of Falsehood.
0 1967-11-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth.
Its almost a proclamation.
0 1967-11-Prayers of the Consciousness of the Cells, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth.
***
0 1968-04-10, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, thats right! But I am referring to the system all the way down, socialistic or communistic, which represents material needs. Basically, it corresponds to a sort of absence of government, because they dont have the power to govern others: they are forced to transfer their power to someone who exercises it, like a Lenin, for instance, because he was a brain. But all that all that has been tried out and has given proof of its incompetence. The only thing that could be competent is the Truth-Consciousness choosing instruments and expressing itself through a certain number of instruments, if one cant be found (just one isnt enough, either, that one would necessarily need to choose a whole collectivity). Those possessing this consciousness may belong to any class of society: its not a privilege arising from birth, but the result of personal effort and development. In fact, that would be an external sign, an evident sign of change on the political level: no question anymore of classes or categories or birth (all that is outdated), but those individualities that have reached a higher consciousness would have the right to govern, whatever class they belong toand no others.
That would be the true vision.
0 1968-05-22, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know. De Gaulle5 is open to something more than the purely material force. Is he capable? I dont know. At any rate, he is among the best instruments.
Its clearly (not in the detail of it, but in the direction of the movement), clearly a will to have done with the past and to open the door to the future.
0 1968-06-29, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At any rate, the inner (or higher) organization of circumstances, feelings, sensations, reactions in the totality of what thinks it is individuals, is certainly growing more precise towards a definite aim in its orientation, an aim we might define as the progress of the content of consciousness, that is to say, the broadening and enlightening of consciousnesses. But I am putting it the wrong way round (that is, I am putting it the way its understood); the truth is this: its the Consciousness doing a special work (gesture of kneading) on the instruments of its manifestation, so as to make them clearer, more precise, transparent and complete. When the Consciousness expresses itself, it does so in instruments who darken, muddle, mix up and diminish its power of expression to a tremendous degree; well, thats the work: making them more limpidmore transparent and limpidmore direct, less muddled, and broader, ever broader and at the same time more and more transparent: removing the obstructing fogtransparent, limpid, and also very vast.
Its a movement of acceleration: its the great work of the whole creation to consciously return (return is another silly wordturn to would be better), to become again, to identify again, not by abolishing the whole work of development and ascent, but Its like a multiplication of the facets of Consciousness, and that multiplication is growing increasingly coherent, organized and conscious of itself.
0 1968-08-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For millennia, we have been developing outer means, outer instruments, outer techniques of living and finally those means and techniques are crushing us. The sign of the new humanity is a reversal in the standpoint, and the understanding that inner knowledge and inner technique can change the world and master it without crushing it.
Auroville is the place where this new way of living is being worked out, it is a center of accelerated evolution where man must begin to change his world through the power of the inner spirit.
0 1968-08-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I know, its like that: the mind and vital have been instruments to knead Matterknead and knead and knead in every possible way: the vital through sensations, the mind through thoughtsknead and knead. But they strike me as transitory instruments which will be replaced by other states of consciousness.
You understand, they are a phase in the universal development, and they will be they will fall off as instruments that have outlived their usefulness.
So then, I had the concrete experience of what this matter kneaded by the vital and the mind is, but WITHOUT vital and WITHOUT mind Its something else.
0 1969-03-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats because it has come to materializeit hasnt come to (gesture up in the clouds): its looking for instruments.
I have great hope in little children.
0 1969-05-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So then, for instance, these two I mentioned [P. and his sister, the two captains], from a human standpoint, you would say theyre really insensitiveits because theyre insensitive and too egocentric that the accident took place. In other words, a reproach. In this light, Oh, these are good instruments, one can lean on them5 (solid gesture), they wont sag, theyre strong enough for one to lean on them. And all that is shown to the body, which is really beginning (laughing) to know things no body had ever learned beforeever. And to see life quite differently It feels (laughing) you know, it feels stupid, that is, consciously its in one way, and then out of atavism, out of construction, its tied down in the other way. So it feels very silly, very silly. But the Consciousness held it (with yesterdays event), it HELD it in its Consciousness like that, present, until it had really understood everything in detail, and once it had really understood, poff! the thing was gone, finished. So it understands that when something is held like that, it means theres something to understand, it has a lesson to learn, and when the lesson has been learned, when it has understood, seen clearlyonce it has seen clearly and its all simple and very clear thats it, poff! its gone, finished (gesture showing the Consciousness letting go of the body), as though the thing were quite taken away That was taking place at night, while I am not disturbed (the night hours are the only ones when I am not disturbed every minute; I can carry on with my work untroubled), and then I saw. And that night was so peaceful, but with such peace! Its ten rungs above the ordinary material peace, completely You know, the peace of a psychic will so powerful (Mother stretches her arms in a sovereign gesture), so tranquil that all our emotions, our reactions, all that absolutely looks like childishness. But the body understands very well (since this Consciousness came it has begun to understand lots of things), it understands that all that [emotions, reactions] was a necessary path to prepare receptive instruments.
Its really interesting.
0 1969-08-27, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The small human individualities act as instruments, thats nothing.
But by yielding (because in a way he yielded), did he win a greater victory over that Asura?
0 1971-03-17, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, thats it. We dont know. If we could become transparent instrumentswe have so many dark spots! Thats whats terrible, those dark spots. If we could be like a something like a searchlight of the Divine shining constantly, which nothing could dim thats the only way. To be like a searchlight casting the Divine onto the world. He is there, but the world as you say, doesnt see Him, doesnt care about Him. Such a blinding searchlight should be made of Him that one is forced, compelled to acknowledge Him.
But is there a point THERE that can understand reason?
0 1971-06-23, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Ashram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what is ones own but what already belongs to the Divine. There is no question of payment or return, no bargain, no room for demand and desire. The Mother is in sole charge and arranges things as best they can be arranged within the means at her disposal and the capacities of her instruments. She is under no obligation to act according to the mental standards or vital desires and claims of the Sadhaks; she is not obliged to use a democratic equality in her dealings with them. She is free to deal with each according to what she sees to be his true need or what is best for him in his spiritual progress. No one can be her judge or impose on her his own rule and standard; she alone can make rules, and she can depart from them too if she thinks fit, but no one can demand that she shall do so. Personal demands and desires cannot be imposed on her. If anyone has what he finds to be a real need or a suggestion to make which is within the province assigned to him, he can do so; but if she gives no sanction, he must remain satisfied and drop the matter. This is the spiritual discipline of which the one who represents or embodies the Divine Truth is the centre. Either she is that and all this is the plain common sense of the matter; or she is not and then no one need stay here. Each can go his own way and there is no Ashram and no Yoga.
April 11, 1930
0 1971-10-20, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have become confirmed in a perception which I had always, less clearly and dynamically then, but which has now become more and more evident to me, that the true basis of work and life is the spiritual,that is to say, a new consciousness to be developed only by Yoga. I see more and more manifestly that man can never get out of the futile circle the race is always treading until he has raised himself on to the new foundation. I believe also that it is the mission of India to make this great victory for the world. But what precisely was the nature of the dynamic power of this greater consciousness? What was the condition of its effective truth? How could it be brought down, mobilised, organised, turned upon life? How could our present instruments, intellect, mind, life, body be made true and perfect channels for this great transformation? This was the problem I have been trying to work out in my own experience and I have now a sure basis, a wide knowledge and some mastery of the secret. Not yet its fulness and complete imperative presence therefore I have still to remain in retirement. For I am determined not to work in the external field till I have the sure and complete possession of this new power of action,not to build except on a perfect foundation.
But still I have gone far enough to be able to undertake one work on a larger scale than before the training of others to receive this Sadhana and prepare themselves as I have done, for without that my future work cannot even be begun. There are many who desire to come here and whom I can admit for the purpose, there are a greater number who can be trained at a distance; but I am unable to carry on unless I have sufficient funds to be able to maintain a centre here and one or two at least outside. I need therefore much larger resources than I at present command. I have thought that by your recommendation and influence you may help Barin to gather them for me.
0 1971-12-18, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Perhaps Mother is referring to this text of Sri Aurobindo: "And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in the material Nature."
XXII.340
0 1972-04-04, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We must strive for Order, Harmony, Beauty and collective aspirationall the things which for the moment are not there. We must you see, being the organizers, our task is to set the example of what we want others to do. We must rise above personal reactions, be exclusively attuned to the divine Will and be the docile instruments of the divine Willwe must be impersonal, without any personal reaction.
We must be in all sincerity. What the Divine wantslet it be. Thats all. If we can be that, then we are as we ought to be, and THAT is what we must become. For the rest for all the rest, we do the best we can.
0 1972-04-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For me, you see, there was constantly: May Your Will be done, Lord, may Your Will be done, Lord. As if he were chosen as an instrument, as one of the instruments. May Your Will be done, Lord with a great force of concentration.
(Mother plunges in)
0 1972-07-22, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem to Mother:) Yes, but you do need human instruments to do things, dont you?
Yes, yes.
And there are instruments like Andr who are trustworthy and can do certain things for you.
But, you see, he himself says he isnt combative!
0 1973-02-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Basically, we must become conscious instruments conscious conscious of the Divine.
Normally it takes an entire lifetime, or even several lives in some cases. But here, in the present conditions, you can do it in a few months. Those who have an ardent aspiration can do it in a few MONTHS.
0 1973-04-14, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Did the Lord decide? Well, of course, it is He who decides in any case. But He also uses human instrumentso therwise this world would have never existed and these human instruments have a freedom of choice, they are not mere puppets in the hands of God Or rather, to be more precise, they have a choice between being the Divines puppet or the devilsand maybe BOTH ways conspire to lead us to an unforeseeable goal.
Hence, humans decided They said no to the trance, no to the experience, no to the fairy tale; they could not stand it anymoreit had to stop.
02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When man was a dweller of the forest,a jungle man,akin to his forbear the ape, his character was wild and savage, his motives and impulsions crude, violent, egoistic, almost wholly imbedded in, what we call, the lower vital level; the light of the higher intellect and intelligence had not entered into them. Today there is an uprush of similar forces to possess and throw man back to a similar condition. This new order asks only one thing of man, namely, to be strong and powerful, that is to say, fierce, ruthless, cruel and regimented. Regimentation can be said to be the very characteristic of the order, the regimentation of a pack of wild dogs or wolves. A particular country, nation or raceit is Germany in Europe and, in her wake, Japan in Asiais to be the sovereign nation or master race (Herrenvolk); the rest of mankindo ther countries and peoplesshould be pushed back to the status of servants and slaves, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. What the helots were in ancient times, what the serfs were in the mediaeval ages, and what the subject peoples were under the worst forms of modern imperialism, even so will be the entire mankind under the new overlordship, or something still worse. For whatever might have been the external conditions in those ages and systems, the upward aspirations of man were never doubted or questioned they were fully respected and honoured. The New Order has pulled all that down and cast them to the winds. Furthermore in the new regime, it is not merely the slaves that suffer in a degraded condition, the masters also, as individuals, fare no better. The individual here has no respect, no freedom or personal value. This society or community of the masters even will be like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; the individuals are merely functional units, they are but screws and bolts and nuts and wheels in a huge relentless machinery. The higher and inner realities, the spontaneous inspirations and self-creations of a free soulart, poetry, literaturesweetness and light the good and the beautifulare to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life.
Those that have stood against this Dark Force and its over-shadowing menaceeven though perhaps not wholly by choice or free-will, but mostly compelled by circumstancesyet, because of the stand they have taken, now bear the fate of the world on their shoulders, carry the whole future of humanity in their march. It is of course agreed that to have stood against the Asura does not mean that one has become sura, divine or godlike; but to be able to remain human, human instruments of the Divine, however frail, is sufficient for the purpose, that ensures safety from the great calamity. The rule of life of the Asura implies the end of progress, the arrest of all evolution; it means even a reversal for man. The Asura is a fixed type of being. He does not change, his is a hardened mould, a settled immutable form of a particular consciousness, a definite pattern of qualities and activitiesgunakarma. Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and impulsion. The domain of enjoyment, on the other hand, is where we reap the fruits of our past Karma; it is the result of an accumulated drive of all that we have done, of all the movements we have initiated and carried out. It is a status of being where there is only enjoyment, not of becoming where there can be development and new creation. It is a condition of gestation, as it were; there is no new Karma, no initiative or change in the stuff of the consciousness. The Asuras are bhogamaya purusha, beings of enjoyment; their domain is a cumulus of enjoyings. They cannot strike out a fresh line of activity, put forth a new mode of energy that can work out a growth or transformation of nature. Their consciousness is an immutable entity. The Asuras do not mend, they can only end. Man can certainly acquire or imbibe Asuric force or Asura-like qualities and impulsions; externally he can often act very much like the Asura; and yet there is a difference. Along with the dross that soils and obscures human nature, there is something more, a clarity that opens to a higher light, an inner core of noble metal which does not submit to any inferior influence. There is this something More in man which always inspires and enables him to break away from the Asuric nature. Moreover, though there may be an outer resemblance between the Asuric qualities of man and the Asuric qualities of the Asura, there is an intrinsic different, a difference in tone and temper, in rhythm and vibration, proceeding as they do, from different sources. However cruel, hard, selfish, egocentric man may be, he knows, he admitsat times, if hot always, at heart, if not openly, subconsciously, if not wholly consciously that such is not the ideal way, that these qualities are not qualifications, they are unworthy elements and have to be discarded. But the Asura is ruthless, because he regards ruthlessness as the right thing, as the perfect thing, it is an integral part of his swabhava and swadharma, his law of being and his highest good. Violence is the ornament of his character.
The outrages committed by Spain in America, the oppression of the Christians by Imperial Rome, the brutal treatment of Christians by Christians themselves (the inquisition, that is to say) or the misdeeds of Imperialists generally were wrong and, in many cases, even inhuman and unpardonable. But when we compare with what Nazi Germany has done in Poland or wants to do throughout the world, we find that there is a difference between the two not only in degree, but in kind.One is an instance of the weakness of man, of his flesh being frail; the other illustrates the might of the Asura, his very spirit is unwilling. One is undivine; the other antidivine, positively hostile. They who cannot discern this difference are colour-blind: there are eyes to which all deeper shades of colour are black and all lighter shades white.
--
We believe that the war of today is a war between the Asura and men, human instruments of the gods. Man certainly is a weaker vessel in comparison with the Asuraon this material plane of ours; but in man dwells the Divine and against the divine force and might, no asuric power can ultimately prevail. The human being who has stood against the Asura has by that very act sided with the gods and received the support and benediction of the Divine. The more we become conscious about the nature of this war and consciously take the side of the progressive force, of the divine force supporting it, the more will the Asura be driven to retire, his power diminished, his hold relaxed. But if through ignorance and blind passion, through narrow vision and obscurant prejudice we fail to distinguish the right from the wrong side, the dexter from the sinister, surely we shall invite upon mankind utter misery and desolation. It will be nothing less than a betrayal of the Divine Cause.
The fate of India too is being decided in this world-crisison the plains of Flanders, on the steppes of Ukraine, on the farthest expanses of the Pacific. The freedom of India will become inevitable and even imminent in proportion as she becomes cognizant of the underlying character and significance of the present struggle, deliberately takes the side of the evolutionary force, works for the gods, in proportion as she grows to be an instrument of the Divine Power. The instrument that the Divine chooses is often, to all appearances, faulty and defective, but since it has this higher and mightier support, it will surely outgrow all its drawbacks and lapses, it will surmount all dangers and obstacles and become unconquerable. Thisis what the spiritual seeker means by saying that the Divine Grace can make the lame leap across the mountain. India's destiny today hangs in the balance; it lies in the choice of her path.
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
These characters, it is true, are not clear and pronounced, do not lie in front, at the beginning of the human personality. The normal human person has his psyche very much behind; but it is still there as antarymin, as the secret Inner Controller. And whatever the vagaries of the outer instruments or their slavery to the mode of Ignorance, in and through all that, it is this Inner Guide that holds the reins and drives upward in the end.
Thus naturally there appear gradations of the human personality; as the consciousness in the human being rises higher and higher, the psychic centre organises a higher and higher a richer, wider, deeper personality. The first great conversion, the first turning of the human personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a conscious harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner nucleus of consciousness-force is formed, first, by the flaming aspiration, the upward drive within the developing and increasing psychic being itself, and secondly, by the descent, to a greater and greater degree, of the original Being from which it emanated. The final coalescence of the fully and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation returns to the point from which it started but with an added significance, a new fulfilment.
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
With only frail blunt instruments for use,
She has accepted as her nature's need
02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But needed not these instruments' toil to know;
Knowledge was Nature's pastime like the rest.
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
His erring sense and his instruments' artifice.
44.13
--
Our instruments have not that greater light,
Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And are the instruments of her cosmic might.
Or their own self they make their universe.
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The self of life yields up its instruments
To Titan and demoniac agencies
--
Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.
Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This powerful bondslave of his instruments
Thinks his low station Nature's highest top,
--
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
Invented by the life-force and the flesh.
--
Constructed for her by her instruments.
68.65
02.13 - In the Self of Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Distrust was thrown upon Mind's instruments;
All that it takes for reality's shining coin,
03.01 - The Pursuit of the Unknowable, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The godlike fullness of the instruments
Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.
03.02 - Aspects of Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The contemporary urge is not towards rationalisation, but rather towards irrationalisation. Orthodox science itself is taking greater and greater cognisance today of the irrational movements of nature, even of physical nature. Intuition and instinct are now welcomed as surer and truer instruments of knowledge and action than reason.
Another special feature of the modern consciousness is its "multiple sightedness". The world, as it is presented to us, is no more than an assemblage of view-points; and each point of observation forms its own world-system. There is no one single ultimate truth; if there is any, there is no possibility of its being known or perceived by the mind or the senses. Things exist in relation to one another and for us they have no intrinsic existence apart from the relations. The instrument itself that perceives is the resultant of a system of relations. A truth is only a view-point; and as the view-point shifts, the truth also varies accordingly. The cult of Relativity is a significant expression of the modern consciousness.
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Consciousness has two primary movements. In one it penetrates, enters straight into the heart of things; in the other it spreads out, goes about and round the object. The combination of the two powers is a rarity; ordinarily man follows the one to the exclusion of the other. The modern age in its wide curiosity has neglected the penetrative and intensive movement and is therefore marred by superficiality. It is eager to go over the entire panorama of creation at one glance, if that is possible, to have a telescopic view of things; but it has been able to take in only the surface, the skin, the crust. Even the entrance into the world of atoms and cellsof protons and electrons, of chromosomes and genesis not really a penetrative or intensive movement. It is only another form of the movement of pervasion or extension: it is still a going abroad, only on another line, in a different direction, but always fundamentally on the same horizontal plane. The microscope is only an inverted telescope. Our instruments are the external mind and senses and these move laterally and have not the power to leap on to a different level of vision. The earlier ages of mankind, narrow and circumscribed in many respects, possessed nevertheless that intensive and in-gathering movement, which is a kind of movement in the fourth dimension; it was a sixth sense leading into the Behind or Beyond of things.
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03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The instruments of an impulse not our own
Moved to achieve with our heart's blood for price
03.06 - Here or Otherwhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The question naturally turns upon the nature and the kind of workwhe ther there is a choice and selection in it. Gita speaks indeed of all works, ktsna-karmakt, but does that really mean any and every work that an ignorant man, an ordinary man steeped in the three Gunas does or can do? It cannot be so. For, although all activity, all energy has its source and impetus in the higher consciousness of the Divine, it assumes on the lower ranges indirect, diverted or even perverted formulations and expressions, not because of the inherent falsity of these so-called inferior strata, the instruments, but because of their temporary impurity and obscurity. There are evidently activities and impulsions born exclusively of desire, of attachment and egoism. There are habits of the body, urges of the vital, notions of the mind, there are individual and social functions that have no place in the spiritual scheme, they have to be rigorously eschewed and eliminated. Has not the Gita said, this is desire, this is passion born of the quality of Rajas? . . . There is not much meaning in trying to do these works unattached or to turn them towards the Divine. When you are unattached, when you turn to the Divine, these 'Simply drop away of themselves. Yes, there are social duties and activities and relations that inevitably dissolve and disappear as you move into the life divine. Some are perhaps tolerated for a period, some are occasions for the consciousness to battle and surmount, grow strong and pass beyond. You have to learn to go beyond and new-create your environment.
It was Danton who said, one carries not his country with him at the sole of his shoe. Even so you cannot hope to shift bodily your present social ensemble, place it wholesale in the divine life on the plea that it will be purified and transformed in the process. Purification is there indeed, but one must remember purification literally means burning and not a little of the past and present has to be burnt down to ashes.
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Another personLaertesplaced in an analogous situation but not worried by the promptings of idealism and the sense of discrepancy between the ideal and the real, takes the world as it is, considers it all right and moves straight to his purpose; he is not a divided being, but in full and integral possession of himself and of his instruments of actioneven though this solid pragmatism does not avail him much in the end.
The crisis in Hamlet reminds us of another somewhat similar one, that is the basis and starting-point of the great episode in the Mahabharata the Gita. Arjuna, the ideal hero and man of action, in absolute self-confidence and certitude, with no doubt or hesitation about anything in the world, advances into the very thick of the bloody strife and lo! all is changed as with a magic wand! What was to him a moment before a clear duty, an evident act of righteousness, the noblest of deeds, now appears nothing less than an inglorious slaughter. The bow of victory slips from the hand of the mighty warrior and, all nerve and tremor, he sinks down in gloom and dejection and complete confusion.
03.11 - Modernist Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What the modernist usually expresses is his brain or a part of it, his small vital desires and velleities, his sensational reactions or some sections of these. He can do that certainly, but he can do that well only when he has reached and touched the soul that is behind them: for once this is found, those become vehicles and instruments, echoes and sparks, symbols and signatures of that one thing needful.
Old style orthodox Pandit.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And instruments were sovereignly designed
To express divinity in terrestrial signs.
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That needs no instruments and erects no form;
In unison it grows with all that is.
04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But this is God's sharela part de Dieu; for man too as man has to do his part. Because the Divine descending and accomplishing the work does not mean either of two things: first, it does not mean that it is a sudden miracle, deus ex machine, a fiat from the heaven which upsets and bears down everything before it and practically has no relation, logical or causal with what precedes and what follows. It is, on the contrary, as we have said, the culmination of a long process, the seal of fulfilment set upon a steady preparation and travailing growth. The Divine descends when the time is ripe, that is to say, when forces and instruments have been developed, refined, sharpened and tempered, so that they can harness and wield the Power from above. But for the preparation, the necessary conditions being there, the Grace would not have descended, although it is also true that but for the Grace, the culmination and the utter fulfilment would not have come aboutthere would have been only a vicious circle or an unending seesaw. Next, the Descent does not mean 'either that following upon it the whole business is done and completed automatically and immediately or nothing is left to be done any more. Not so. It means that what has been so long practically beyond reach, towards which one had to move with uncertainty and vague effort and in a roundabout way, as though through a trackless virgin forest or across an uncharted sea, has now been brought nearer and closer to human grasp, is now made part and parcel of earth's familiar atmosphere, so that any human being who genuinely aspires and looks for it can find it about him: there is just a thin veil which has to be put aside a little, into which a little opening is to be made and one comes in contact with or even enters into what one seeks. This means that the Grace has leaned down to man, but man too has at least to stretch his arms to touch and embrace it. Furthermore, to make that Grace permanently active and real in the normal consciousness, one has to labour, work out in fact what is given potentially: the seed is planted for him, it will grow and bloom and come to fruition provided necessary care and attention are given to the soil that bears it.
Thus then the embodied human person who has the embodied Divine Person before his eyes must know how to instal and incorporate the Divine Person in him, in his body and physical existence. That was perhaps the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in representare or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living bodyorganic elements eliminated and replaced by the inorganic in the very atomic structure and constitutioneven so, the living human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure.
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Turning to India we find a fuller and completerif not a globalpicture of the whole movement. India, we may say, is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress in a clearer and more significant manner. Indian history, not its political but its cultural and spiritual history, divides itself naturally into great movements with corresponding epochs each dwelling upon and dealing with one domain in the hierarchy of man's consciousness. The stages and epochs are well known: they are(l) Vedic, (2) Upanishadic, (3) Darshanasroughly from Buddha to Shankara, (4) Puranic, (5) Bhagavataor the Age of Bhakti, and finally (6) the Tantric. The last does not mean that it is the latest revelation, the nearest to us in time, but that it represents a kind of complementary movement, it was there all along, for long at least, and in which the others find their fruition and consummation. We shall explain presently. The force of consciousness that came and moved and moulded the first and the earliest epoch was Revelation. It was a power of direct vision and occult will and cosmic perception. Its physical seat is somewhere behind and or just beyond the crown of the head: the peak of man's manifest being that received the first touch of Surya Savitri (the supreme Creative Consciousness) to whom it bowed down uttering the invocation mantra of Gayatri. The Ray then entered the head at the crown and illumined it: the force of consciousness that ruled there is Intuition, the immediate perception of truth and reality, the cosmic consciousness gathered and concentrated at that peak. That is Upanishadic knowledge. If the source and foundation of the Vedic initiation was occult vision, the Upanishad meant a pure and direct Ideation. The next stage in the coming down or propagation of the Light was when it reached further down into the brain and the philosophical outlook grew with rational understanding and discursive argumentation as the channel for expression, the power to be cultivated and the limb to be developed. The Age of the Darshanas or Systems of Philosophy started with the Buddha and continued till it reached its peak in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual light, the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play of the Light, the beginning of their reclamation. This was rendered more concrete and more vibrant and intense in the next stage of the movement. The whole emotional being was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was the task of the Tantras. Viewed in that light one can easily understand why especial stress was laid in that system upon the esoteric discipline of the five m's (pancha makra),all preoccupied with the handling and harnessing of the grossest physical instincts and the most material instruments. The Tantric discipline bases itself upon Nature Power coiled up in Matter: the release of that all-conquering force through a purification and opening into the consciousness of the Divine Mother, the transcendent creatrix of the universe. The dynamic materialising aspect of consciousness was what inspired the Tantras: the others forming the Vedantic line, on the whole, were based on the primacy of the static being, the Purusha, aloof and withdrawing.
The Indian consciousness, we say, presented the movement as an intensive and inner, a spiritual process: it dealt with the substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more characteristic feature of its history is the unfoldment and metamorphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers, as it were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An animal does not separate itself from Nature, exteriorise it and then seek to fashion it as he wants, try to make it yield things he requires. Man is precisely man because he has just this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more and more aware of its freedom and individual identity and agency.
The question is now asked how far this self-consciousness given to man by his progress from stone to steelhas advanced and what is its future. The crucial problem is whether man has progressed in historical times. Granted that man with an iron tool is a more advanced type of humanity than man with a chipped stone tool, it may still be enquired whether he has made any real advance since the day he learnt to manipulate metal. If by advance or progress we mean efficiency and multiplication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that Germany of today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of yesterday and America of today) is the most advanced type of humanityindeed they do make the claim in that country.
So it is argued that man may have built up more and more efficient organisation in his outer life, he may have learnt to wield a greater variety and wealth of tools and instruments in an increasing degree of refinement and power; but this does not mean that his character, his nature or even the broad mould of his intelligence has changed or progressed. The records and remains of Pre-dynastic Egypt or of Proto-Aryan Indus valley go to show that those were creations of civilised men, as civilised as any modern people. The mind that produced the Rig Veda or the Book of the Dead or conceived the first pyramid is, in essential power of intelligence, no whit inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down.
One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present cycle, the civilised or cultural life of humanity has not changed much, this does not mean that it cannot, will not change. The paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of thirty to forty thousand years; the neolithic age also must have lasted some fifteen thousand years. The metal age is now not more than ten thousand years. So it does not seem to be too late; perhaps it is just time for another radical and crucial change to come as the chronological scheme would seem to demand.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A live wirethrough which an electric current, say of several thousand volts, is passinglooks quite innocent, motionless, inactive, almost inert. The appearance, needless to say, is deceptive. Even so the still life of a Yogin. Action does not consist merely in mechanical motion visible to the eye: intra-atomic movements that are subtle, invisible, hard to detect even by the most sensitive instruments, possess a tremendous potency, even to unimaginable degrees. Likewise in man, the extent of muscular flexions does not give the measure or potential of his activity. One cannot say that the first-line infantryman who rushes and charges, shoots, bayonets, kills and is killed is more active and dynamic than the general who sits quiet behind in a cabin and merely sends out orders. Vivekananda wandered about the whole of India, crossed the seas, traversed continents, undertook whirlwind campaignstalking, debating, lecturing: it was a life superbly rich in muscular movements. By his side, Ramakrishna would appear quite tameinactive, introvert: fewer physical displacements or muscular exercises marked his life. And yet, ask anyone who is in touch with the inner life of these great souls, he will tell you, Vivekananda is only a spark from the mighty and concentrated Energy that Ramakrishna was.
What is this spiritual or Yogic Energy? Ordinary people, people with a modern mind, would concede at the most that there are two kinds of activity: (1) real activityphysical action, work, labour with muscle and nerve, and (2) passive activityactivity of mind and thought. According to the pragmatic standard especial, if not entire, importance is given the first category; the other category, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, is held at a discount. The thoughtful people are philosophers at the most, they are ineffectual angels in this workaday world of ours. We need upon earth people of sterner stuff, dynamic people who are not thought-bound, but know how to apply and execute their ideas, whatever they may be. Lenin was great, not because he had revolutionary ideas, but because he gave a muscular frame to them. Such people alone are the pragmatic, dynamic, useful category of humanity. The others are, according to the more radical leftist view, merely parasitic, and according to a more generous liberal view, chiefly decorative elements in human society. Mind-energy can draw dream pictures, beautiful perhaps, but inane; it is only muscular energy that gives a living and material bodya local habitation and a nameto what otherwise would be airy nothing.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,
Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.
04.06 - To Be or Not to Be, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Brahmin is he who represents in his nature and character the principle and movement of knowledge, of comprehension and inclusion, of peace and harmonyall the qualities that are termed sttwic. A Brahmin does not fight, the very build of his consciousness prevents him from wounding and hurting; he has no enemy; even if he is attacked or killed, he does not raise his arm to protect himself (although Ramakrishna would prescribe even for him a modified or mollified mode of resisting the evil, hissing at least if not biting). The Biblical injunction, we know, is to present the other cheek too to the smiter. This is for those who follow the Brahminical discipline. But a Kshatriya, who in his nature and consciousness is a warrior, has another dharma; he is the armed guard of knowledge and truth, he is strength and force. He has to resist the evil in the name of the Lord, he has to raise his arm to strike. He is the instrument of Rudra and Mahakali. Does not the mighty goddess declare I draw the bow for Rudra, I hurl the arrow to slay the hater of the truth?4 If the Kshatriya does not follow his own dharma, but seeks to imitate the Brahmin, he brings about a confusion liable to disintegrate the society, he is then un-Aryan, inglorious, unworthy of heaven, deserving all the epithets which Sri Krishna heaped upon the dejected, depressed and confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, I shall not fight, but God and the cosmic deities may refuse my refusal and compel me to do what in my ignorance and wrong headedness I would not like to do.
Rig Veda, IX. 126
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It may be asked if even then there are not some types of activity and impulsion that are intrinsically evil, undivine they can under no circumstances be godly or God's instruments, they have to be rejected, cast aside in the very beginning, also in the middle and naturally in the end. But it must be remembered that the human mind cannot be the judge of what is divine or undivine, there are things the Divine may sanction which the mental being fights shy of. It must leave into the Divine to choose His instrument and His mode of activityit is sufficient if the mental being knows by whom it is impelled and where it falls as an arrow shot to its mark: keneitam patati preitam.6
Yes, there is one thing intrinsically evil and undivine and that has to be rejected and cast aside ruthlessly that is nothing else than the egoistic consciousness. It is this that has passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, formations of its own, other deities installed in place of the Divine Truth and Reality. The ego goes, indeed, and with it also those rhythms and stresses, lines and shades germane to it that bar the free flow of the Supreme Breath. But the instrument remains and the arms and the weapons they are cleansed and sanctified: instead of the Asura wielding them, it is now the gods, the Divine Himself who possess and use them.
04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a dire debate, a fierce question, a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration to be and the will of inertia not to be the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusionare symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the immortal godhead in man.
II
05.02 - Of the Divine and its Help, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let the Divine think through you, feel through you and act through you. Then only right and perfect use will be made of the instruments that compose your being.
Let the Divine's Thoughts shine in your mind, Divine's Love swell in your heart, let the Divine's impel your limbs.
05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
And Powers are there that labour to debase.
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The soul in its inner consciousness knows all its evolutionary formations, remembers those of the past and foresees those of the future, when needed, and even determines them essentially. The mind ruling one incarnation cannot recall other incarnations, for it is a product of that incarnation and is meant to guide and control it; physical memory is a function of the brain in the particular body that the soul inhabits for the time. The soul carries a deeper reminiscence which is part and parcel of the self-consciousness inherent in its nature. The physical memory too can partake of this inner reminiscence if it is purified, illumined and organised around the soul as its instrument of expression. Indeed, although the journey of the soul essentially and originally is the flight of the spirit to the Spirit, yet the final consummation is towards an increasing integration of all the external instruments from the highest to the lowest, from the subtlest to the grossest into a harmonised organised whole, reflecting and embodying the Spirit in its purity and totality. The mind, the life and the body too attain a perfectly unified individuality that is the expression of the soul's truth-consciousness and escaping disruption and dissolution partake ultimately of the inherent immortality of the spiritual being.
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05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the particle of divinity in each, the developing consciousness the spark of Fire, the ray of Light the immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of earthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.
So the individualisation and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the surface, only when they obey and subserve the culture of the soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment of the true personality.
There is, of course, a spiritual path that turns the soul away from its instruments and demands that it should concentrate exclusively upon itself, upon its essential essence, upon its transcendent existence; but that is not our path and, according to us, that is only a temporary phase, an intermediate necessity for some persons and at certain stages.
The individualisation of the mind, its organisation as a special formation, as a vehicle of the true light, the light of the Psychic consciousness is comparatively easy for a man. Mind is the first member of the lower sphere that is taken up and dealt with by the soul; for it is the highest and the most characteristic element in man and less dense and less subject to the darkness inherent in human nature. The mental individual persists the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives and may survive very long the disruption of the vital being. This vital being is next in the rung to be taken up, organised and individualised by and around the psychic being. The organisation of the vital being in view of a particular object or aim in ordinary life is common enough: the purpose is limited, the scope restricted. Great men of action have done it and one has to do it more or less to be successful in life. This, however, may be called organisation; it is not individualisation in the true sense, much less personalisation. A limb is individualised, personalised only when it is an instrument and formation of the soul consciousness, the psychic being. And the vital is not easily amenable to such a role. For, it is the dynamic element, the effective power of life and it has acquired a strong nature and a definite function in its earthly relations. Naturally, there is a secret drive and an occult inspiration behind over-riding or guiding all immediate and apparent forces and happenings: in and through these the shape of things to come is being built up. In the meanwhile, however, actually the vital is an executive agent of the lower consciousness: it is an anonymous force of universal nature canalised into a temporary figure that is the normal individual man. The individualisation of the vital being would mean an immortal formulation of an immortal soul as energy consciousness with a specific role for the Divine to play. It maintains its identity, its personality independent of the vicissitudes of the physical body: it continues to function as a divine being, a godhead, to work for mankind and the world. The popular legend has imaged this phenomenon in the mystic figure of an immortal Aswatthama and Vibhishana still wandering in earth's atmosphere.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Science also declared that it is not the observation of one person, however qualified, that determines the truth or otherwise of a fact, but the observation of many persons and the possibility of observations of all persons converging, coinciding, corroborating. It is only when observation has thus been tested and checked that one can be sure that the personal element has been eliminated. Indeed the ideal condition would be if the observer, the scientist himself, could act as part of the machine for observation: at the most he should be a mere assembler of the parts of the machine that would record itself, impersonally, automatically. The rocket instruments that are sent high up in the sky to record the temperature, pressure or other weather condition in the stratosphere or the deep-sea recording machines are ingenious inventions in that line. The wizard Jagadish Chandra Bose showed his genius precisely in the way he made the plant itself declare its life-story: it is not what the scientist thinks or feels about the plant, but what the plant has to say of its own accord, as it wereits own tale of growth and decay, of suffering, spasm, swoon, suffocation or death under given conditions. This is the second step that Science took in the direction of impersonal and objective inquiry.
It was thought for long a very easy matterat least not extraordinarily difficultto eliminate the observer and keep only to the observed. It was always known how the view of the observer that is to say, his observation changed in respect of the observed fact with his change of position. The sun rises and sets to the observer on earth: to an observer on Mars, for example, the sun would rise and set, no doubt, but earth too along with, in the same way as Mars and sun appear to us now, while to an observer on the sun, the sun would seem fixed while the planets would be seen moving round. Again, we all know the observer in a moving train sees things outside the train moving past and himself at stand-still; the same observer would see another train moving alongside in the same direction and with the same speed as stuck to it and at stand-still, but as moving with double the speed if going in a contrary direction: and so on.
05.30 - Theres a Divinity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is what man can do at his best, and even at his worst, rough-hew. Ignorant as he is, crude as his instruments are, he can do no better (and happily, no worse either). The ideals he has do not go very far, not much beyond his nosethey are limited by his senses, by his notions, by his immediate reactions to the circumstances of the moment. Even when the ends are commendable, the purposes decent, even when he is happily inspired, the materials and means at his disposal are crude and he uses them in a rough and ready manner. What he can achieve in this direction is not even a near but a very far approximate. And when he is otherwise inspired, when suggestions and impulsions come to him from the Hostiles, well, he hews his way, as Hitler didand some others are doing nowto wrong ends; even there he does not succeed wholly, realises his design very partially, grosso modo. The stone club in the hand of the palaeolithic man and the atom bomb in the hand of the modern are equally rough instruments, and the ends which they serve, whether for good or for evil, are also gross, neither far-visioned nor deep inspired, but superficial, strait and narrow, blindly immediate. In either case, however, the Divine remains unaffected, firmly seated behind and in and through both, in and through their ignorant and perverse wills, it is His Will that works itself out and finds fulfilment in the end. Whether one is for or against the Divine, whether one is a God or an Asura, each in his own way contri butes to the progressive realisation of the Cosmic Purpose. From a certain point of view even it may seem as though nothing helps or hinders, all are like a straw in a rushing current.
In our human reckoning, we seem to help the evolutionary course sometimes and sometimes hamper it with our efforts in so far as they are well directed or ill directed. In the practice of spiritual life too, one may be tempted to find a measurable proportion between the personal endeavour and the attainment. However that may be, at the end of all human efforts, the finishing touch always comes from the Divine Grace. Whether we succeed or fail, whatever be the human judgment of the situation, the Grace is sure to intervene in the final stage: to success it will bring more success giving it the peak of fulfilment, and failure too it will transmute into a glorious triumph.
05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that it is consciousness-energy. And it is this consciousness-energy that is at the source of all cosmic activities. Man's action too springs from this original source, although apparently it seems to be caused by other secondary and derivative energies. As a matter of fact what these energies that seem to be actually in play do is not the origination but rather the deviation and diversion, a diminution and adulteration of the supreme energy, a lowering of the quality, the tone and temper of the dynamism. In other words, as we have already said, a thought force, a vital force, a nervous or physical force, all these are only lower, even minima values, more or less distant and deformed echoes of a true and absolute Power behind and above them all. These forces become powerful in proportion as they are instruments and functions of that one mother energy. The truth is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Brahma a and the gods in the Kena Upanishad. The gods conquered and were proud of their conquest; each thought that it was due to his own personal prowess that he conquered. But they were utterly discomfited and shamed when the Divine Power appeared and proved to them that but for this Power they would not be able even to tackle a blade of grassFire would not burn it, Water would not drench it, Wind would not move it.
The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He has made heaven and earth his instruments,
But the limits fall from him of earth and heaven;
06.09 - How to Wait, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And then there is a time, a propitious time for everything. A thing cannot be done at any time, it has its own appointed hour; you cannot succeed even if you attempt a hundred times before that hour strikes. But when the time is ripe, how easily a thing seems to get done! In what does this ripeness of time consist, what are the marks of the propitious hour? It is when you are in complete possession of the right instruments and when the disposition of circumstances is such that they concur to help and execute and not mar and obstruct. But how to find out or recognise when such conditions are available? Not by your mind or external reasoning. You must have the intuition, and instinctive perception of the situation. Always the indication is there in the very poise of your consciousness. That is to say, when it is filled with a great calm, trust and confidence, a luminous concentration.
***
06.12 - The Expanding Body-Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All this means that the physical body is not man's sole means of action in the physical world. The physical extends and expands into more and more subtle modes of activity and all the more, not less, effective for that very reason. Behind the physical lies the subtle physical, behind which again is the vital physical and then the various grades of the vital. Indeed the vital or life energy as a whole is the real dynamism of all our physical activities and if it usually acts through its bodily instruments, it can act independently of them too; normally, too, it often acts in this way, only we are not conscious or observant enough to notice. A conscious concentration of the vital energy directed upon a material object can handle it with the effectivity of material energy. When it needs physical conditions it creates them, as the protective vital energy of the young man created the physical disposition of objects that formed a covert for the girl.
In the present case, the phenomenon happened automatically without any premeditation on the part of the persons concerned; because the sympathy between the two was so strong, other considerations did not weigh in the balance against it. Needless to say, if one wishes to obtain conscious mastery of this occult power, one will have to go through a long and arduous discipline. But, if difficult, the thing is not impossible. In the matter of physical feats, for example, a particular development may seem for the moment beyond your reach; but with practice and perseverance, stubborn will and wise guidance, you can not only arrive at your immediate end but do much more. The story of many who have broken Olympic records is revealing in this respect. In the same way, one can master the subtle forces, if one goes about the thing earnestly and in the right way. It is more difficultmuch more perhaps but the way is there provided the will is there.
07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Were tamed into instruments of a great calm sway
To do a work of God on earthly soil.
07.06 - Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
Nothing is all our own that we create:
07.07 - The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And using still the body's instruments
Slipped through the conscious void she had become;
07.36 - The Body and the Psychic, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That depends. There is a kind of progress sometimes. There are, for example, writers, musicians, artists, people who lived on a high mental level, who feel that they have yet something to do upon earth, they did not finish their work, fulfil their mission, reach the goal they set before themselves. So they wish to remain in the earth's atmosphere as much as possible, retain as much cohesion of their being as needed and seek to manifest themselves and progress through other living human forms. I have seen many such cases: I shall tell you the very interesting case of a musician, a pianist, a pianist of a very high order; he had hands that had become something marvellous, full of skill, accuracy, precision, force, swiftness; it was truly remarkable. The man died comparatively young and with the feeling that had he lived he would have gone on advancing in his musical self-expression. Such was the intensity of his aspiration that his subtle hands retained their form without getting dissolved and wherever there was someone passive and receptive and at the same time a good musician the hands of the dead man would enter into the living hands that played. In the case that I saw the man used to play well enough normally but quite in the ordinary way; he became, however, as he continued to play all on a sudden not only a virtuoso, but a marvellous artist; it was the hands of the other person who made use of him. The same thing may happen with regard to a painter; in his case too, the hands are the instrument. For certain writers also a like thing may happen; but here it is the brain of the dead man that retains its formation and it is this that enters the brain of the living writer which must be receptive enough to allow the formation in all its precision. I have seen a writer who was nothing extraordinary in his normal capacity, but used to write things much more beautiful in those moments than he was capable of doing or was doing usually. I know the case of a musical composer, not executor like the one I referred to before, which was particularly remarkable. In the case of the composer, like the writer, it is the brain that serves him; for the executor the hands are the chief instrument. Beethoven, Bach, Cesar Franck were great composers, although the last one was an executor also. The composition of music is a cerebral activity. Now the brain of a great musician used to enter in contact with that of the composer and made him compose marvellous pieces. The man was writing a musical opera. You must remember what a complicated thing an opera music is. It is a complex whole in which roles are distributed to a very large number of performers each playing differently on different instruments and they must all of them together and severally express the idea and the theme the composer has in his mind. Now, this man I am speaking of, when he sat down with the blank paper in front, used to receive the musical formation in his brain and wrote down continuously as if he was recording something ready-made placed before him. I saw him filling up a whole page from top to bottom with all the details of orchestration. He had no need to hear any instrument, he did it all on paper; and the distribution was perfect. He himself was not very unconscious, he used to feel that something entered into him and helped him to bring out the music.
You must note here that when I speak of a formation entering into a living person, the formation does not mean the man himself who is dead, that is to say, his soul or psychic being. I say that it is only a special faculty which continues to remain in the earth atmosphere, even after the death of the man to whom the faculty belonged: it was so well developed, well formed that it continues to retain its independent identity. The soul, the true being of the man is no longer there; I have told you often that after death it goes away as soon as possible to the psychic world, its own world, for rest, assimilation and preparation. Not that it cannot happen otherwise. A soul incarnating as a great musician may incarnate again in or as a great musician, although I said in another connection that a soul usually prefers to vary, even to contrast and contradict its incarnations with each other. Take for example, the great violinist, Isai; he was a Belgian and the most marvellous violinist of his century. I knew him and I am sure he was an incarnation, at least, an emanation, of the soul that was the great Beethoven. It may not have been the whole psychic being that so reincarnated, but the soul in its musical capacity. He had the same appearance, the same head. When I saw him first appearing on the stage I was greatly surprised, I said to myself, he looks so like Beethoven, the very portrait of that great genius. And then he stood, the bow poised, one stroke and there were in it three or four notes only, but three or four supreme notes, full of power, greatness and grandeur; the entire hall was charged with an atmosphere marvellous and unique. I could recognise very well the musical genius of Beethoven behind. It may be possible here too the soul of Beethoven in its entirety the whole psychic beingwas not present; the central psychic might have been elsewhere gathering more modest, commonplace experiences, as a shoemaker, for example. But what was left and what manifested itself was something very characteristic of the great musician. He had disciplined his mental and vital being and even his physical being in view of his musical capacity and this formation remained firm and sought to reincarnate. The musical being was originally organised and fashioned around the psychic consciousness and therefore it acquired its peculiar power and its force of persistence, almost an immortality. Such formations, though not themselves the psychic being, have a psychic quality, are independent beings, possess their own life and seek their fulfilment by manifesting and incarnating themselves whenever the occasion presents itself.
08.27 - Value of Religious Exercises, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From this standpoint it is good that for a time humanity should come out of the religious atmosphere, full of fear and blind superstitious submission by which the adverse forces have profited so monstrously. The age of negation, of atheism and positivism is from this view quite indispensable for man's liberation from sheer ignorance. It is only when you have come out of this, this abject submission to the evil forces of the Vital that you can rise to truly spiritual heights and then become there collaborators and right instruments of the forces of the Truth and Consciousness and Power. The superstitions of the lower levels you must leave far behind to rise high.
***
09.01 - Towards the Black Void, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And ill-shaped instruments were crudely moved.
Transcended now was the poor human rule;
09.08 - The Modern Taste, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I believe there are certain things that have become great instruments of perversion and among them I name the Cinema. The Cinema could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an instrument of education and culture. But for the moment it is largely an instrument of perversion, a truly hideous perversion: perversion of taste, perversion of consciousness, a moral and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is something which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic culture and growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the beautiful and the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and accessible to all than was possible by the older methods. But what could have been better, is not better but has become worse.
As I said, we are in a period of excesses; we move from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal towards perfection, we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we live in the midst of such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we automatically share in the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over ourselves and bring down into our being the light of our highest consciousness; at every step we run the risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual also.
1.001 - The Aim of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
In short, I may conclude by saying that happiness, joy, success, or the discovery of the significance of things, including the significance of one's own life and the life of everyone, would not be possible of achievement if the basic structural fundamentals are missed in life and we emphasise only the outer aspects which are only the rim of the body of life whose vital soul we are unable to perceive, because we do not have the instrument to perceive the soul of life. We have the instruments, called the senses, to perceive the body of life, but the soul of life we cannot perceive, because while the senses can perceive the bodies and the things outside, the soul of things can be perceived only by the soul. It is the soul that sees the soul of things.
When my soul can visualise your soul, then we become really friends; otherwise, we are not friends. Any amount of roundtable conferences of individuals with no soulful connection will not lead to success. Ultimately, success is the union of souls; and yoga aims, finally, at the discovery of the Universal Soul, about which I shall speak in some detail later on.
10.05 - Mind and the Mental World, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The mental world, the world of thoughts, is a world in itself It is autonomous. It moves in its own way with its own laws. We human beings, we believe that it is we who think, that is, produce or create our thoughts. We are the makers of our notions and ideas. But in reality it is not so. Thoughts, ideas, notions, all movements of the mind are self-existent realities. They go about or flow on like the waves of a vast sea. Human beings are mere instruments, receptacles that capture or seize some undulations of this vast ocean. Man is man, that is to say, a mental being, because in him the brain has developed to such an extent and in such a manner that it serves as antennae or as an aerial to receive vibrations from the mental world. Indeed the ordinary human mind is a sort of crossroads where all kinds of thoughts from all places meet, cross one another and make an ideal market place. In fact, an individual does not possess any thought-movement which can be called his own. He only catches a contagion. And like a contagion thought-movements pass from one person to another although one may think or feel that the movement is one's own.
In order to have one's own thought, in order to think by oneself, a long process of education and training is necessary. A growing personal individual consciousness is the first requisite and for that one must do what the Vedic Rishi I spoke of sought to do, gather the thoughts that one has, collect them, sift them and try to have a control over them. One must develop the habit of admitting certain thoughts and rejecting others. Thoughts that are useful, that carry light and peacefulness and happiness, are naturally those that are worth accepting. Those that are of a contrary nature should be pushed out. This is an exercise that develops the individual consciousness and the individual will.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and
a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
b. His function is the building of forms to be His instruments of experience.
c. His mode of action is cyclic and spiral, the revolution of the wheel of existence in ordered cycles for a specific purpose, and the progression of these spheres of matter around a fixed centre, within the solar periphery.
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
We have commanded you to pray and fast from the beginning of maturity; this is ordained by God, your Lord and the Lord of your forefa thers. He hath exempted from this those who are weak from illness or age, as a bounty from His Presence, and He is the Forgiving, the Generous. God hath granted you leave to prostrate yourselves on any surface that is clean, for We have removed in this regard the limitation that had been laid down in the Book; God, indeed, hath knowledge of that whereof ye know naught. Let him that findeth no water for ablution repeat five times the words "In the Name of God, the Most Pure, the Most Pure", and then proceed to his devotions. Such is the comm and of the Lord of all worlds. In regions where the days and nights grow long, let times of prayer be gauged by clocks and other instruments that mark the passage of the hours. He, verily, is the Expounder, the Wise.
11
1.010 - Self-Control - The Alpha and Omega of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All perceptions are, therefore, engagements of consciousness, which prevents it from knowing its own background and conditions of action, so that when we are busily engaged in the perceptions and cognitions through the mind and the senses, we cannot know our own background, and we look helpless. The necessity for self-control arises merely because of the fact that the object of our quest is inherently present in the very act of our individual experience, and it cannot be observed by the ordinary means of an academic character or a scientific nature. Here we need no instruments, no types of apparatus either for observation or knowledge, because the object here is the background of our own self. There are causes behind causes, extending one behind the other, and lying one behind the other in larger and larger expansiveness one implying the other, and one inclusive of the other. The causes that are precedent are inclusive of the causes that are succeeding, so that when we go higher up we do not lose anything that is lower, but get everything that is lower in a refined form by transcendence.
Transcendence is different from giving up. When we transcend a condition, we do not reject that condition as something necessary or unnecessary, but absorb that condition into a higher nature, include it in our higher condition and make it a part of our experience, so that nothing is lost but everything is found in a more real form. So in the practice of yoga, nothing is lost. Nehbhikramanso'sti pratyavyo na vidyate (B.G. II.40), says the Bhagavadgita. There is no loss in the practice of yoga; always there is a gain. And no question of sin arises here. If we do it well, so much the better for us. If we cannot do it well, there is no sin in it; the only thing is, we have not got what we wanted. Such is the impartiality and the genuine character of this wonderful practice called yoga.
1.01 - MASTER AND DISCIPLE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "You see, Narendra excels in singing, playing on instruments, study, and everything. The other day he had a discussion with Kedar and tore his arguments to shreds. (All laugh.)
(To M.) "Is there any book in English on reasoning?"
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
motors or solenoids or heating coils or other instruments of very
diverse sorts. Between the receptor or sense organ and the effec-
1.01 - NIGHT, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
And instruments together hurled,
Ancestral lumber, stuffed and packed
1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Those also, who say that the spirit is but an accident, are in error, for the spirit exists by itself in the body, and an accident is that which subsists with something else. And those who say that the spirit is matter are in error, for matter is that which can be divided, and spirit is not susceptible of division. There is spirit, beloved, which is called animal spirit, which is susceptible of division. It is found in animals. But that spirit, which has the property of knowing God, and which is called the heart, is not found in beasts, nor is it matter or an accident. The heart, on the contrary, has been created with angelic qualities. It is a substance of which it is difficult to apprehend the essence. The law does not permit it to be explained, but there is no occasion for the student being acquainted with it at the outset of his journey. That which is necessary to the student is pious ardor and zeal, and this must be called into exercise in perfection. It is God who graciously teaches the student what spirit is, as we find in the Holy Book: "We will direct in our way, all those who shall strive to propagate our worship."1 And if a man does not strive earnestly for the faith, there is no use of explaining to him the essence of spirit. It is, however, lawful to explain to him the instruments by which it operates.
Know, O seeker after the divine mysteries! that the body is the kingdom of the heart, and that in the body there are many forces in contrariety with the heart, as God speaks [18] in his Holy Word: "And what shall teach thee the forces of thy Lord ?" The heart was destined to acquire a knowledge of God, in which its happiness consists. But we cannot grow in the knowledge of God, unless we understand the works of God.
The works of God are apprehended by the senses, which are five, hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch. For such an arrangement of the senses, there was also need of a body. The body itself is composed of four diverse elements, water, earth, air and fire. Being, therefore, liable to decay, it is in continual danger of perishing from the external and internal enemies that perpetually assail it. Its external enemies, are such as wild beasts, drowning and conflagrations; its internal enemies, such as hunger and thirst. For the purpose of resisting these, it was in want of various internal and external forces, such as the hand and foot, sight and hearing, food and drink. And in this connection, for eating and drinking, it is in want of internal and external instruments like the hand, the mouth, the stomach, the powers of appetite and digestion. In addition to these instruments, there was need of means to guide in their occasional use, that is, for the internal senses. These are five, the faculties of perception, reflection, memory, recollection and imagination. Their home is in the brain, and each has a specific function, as is well known to the learned. If to any one of all these faculties and instruments an injury occurs, the actions of man are defective. Now all these are the agents of the heart and subject to its rule. If, for example, the heart gives permission to the ear, hearing results; if it gives permission to the eye, there follows sight; if it gives permission to the foot, there is movement. All the other members are obedient in the same manner to the commands of the heart. The divine plan in all this arrangement is, that while the members preserve [19] the body for a few days from harm, the heart, in its vehicle the body, should pursue its business of cultivating the seeds of happiness for eternity and prepare for its journey to its native country. So long as the various forces of the body are obedient to the dictates of the heart, in like manner as the angels obey in the presence of God, no contrariety of action can arise among them.
Know, O student of wisdom! that the body, which is the kingdom of the heart, resembles a great city. The hand, the foot, the mouth and the other members resemble the people of the various trades. Desire is a standard bearer; anger is a superintendent of the city, the heart is its sovereign, and reason is the vizier. The sovereign needs the service of all the inhabitants. But desire, the standard bearer, is a liar, vain and ambitious. He is always ready to do the contrary of what reason, the vizier, commands. He strives to appropriate to himself whatever he sees in the city, which is the body. Anger, the superintendent, is rebellious and corrupt, quick and passionate. He is always ready to be enraged, to spill blood, and to blast one's reputation. If the sovereign, the heart, should invariably consult with reason, his vizier, and, when desire was transgressing, should give to wrath to have power over him (yet, without giving him full liberty, should make him angry in subjection to reason, the vizier, so that passing all bounds he should not stretch out his hand upon the kingdom), there would then be an equilibrium in the condition of the kingdom, and all the members would perform the functions for which they were created, their service would be accepted at the mercy seat, and they would obtain eternal felicity....
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is, however, certain that many activities undertaken by some minds at the present time were not, in the remote past, undertaken by any minds at all. For this there are several obvious reasons. Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present. For long periods of history and prehistory it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems, which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example, there is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horses foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where theres a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors. Consequently the very means for thinking clearly and fruitfully about those things remained uninvented, not merely during prehistoric times, but even to the opening of the modern era.
The lack of a suitable vocabulary and an adequate frame of reference, and the absence of any strong and sustained desire to invent these necessary instruments of though there are two sufficient reasons why so many of the almost endless potentialities of the human mind remained for so long unactualized. Another and, on its own level, equally cogent reason is this: much of the worlds most original and fruitful thinking is done by people of poor physique and of a thoroughly unpractical turn of mind. Because this is so, and because the value of pure thought, whether analytical or integral, has everywhere been more or less clearly recognized, provision was and still is made by every civilized society for giving thinkers a measure of protection from the ordinary strains and stresses of social life. The hermitage, the monastery, the college, the academy and the research laboratory; the begging bowl, the endowment, patronage and the grant of taxpayers moneysuch are the principal devices that have been used by actives to conserve that rare bird, the religious, philosophical, artistic or scientific contemplative. In many primitive societies conditions are hard and there is no surplus wealth. The born contemplative has to face the struggle for existence and social predominance without protection. The result, in most cases, is that he either dies young or is too desperately busy merely keeping alive to be able to devote his attention to anything else. When this happens the prevailing philosophy will be that of the hardy, extraverted man of action.
All this sheds some lightdim, it is true, and merely inferentialon the problem of the perennialness of the Perennial Philosophy. In India the scriptures were regarded, not as revelations made at some given moment of history, but as eternal gospels, existent from everlasting to everlasting, inasmuch as coeval with man, or for that matter with any other kind of corporeal or incorporeal being possessed of reason. A similar point of view is expressed by Aristotle, who regards the fundamental truths of religion as everlasting and indestructible. There have been ascents and falls, periods (literally roads around or cycles) of progress and regress; but the great fact of God as the First Mover of a universe which partakes of His divinity has always been recognized. In the light of what we know about prehistoric man (and what we know amounts to nothing more than a few chipped stones, some paintings, drawings and sculptures) and of what we may legitimately infer from other, better documented fields of knowledge, what are we to think of these traditional doctrines? My own view is that they may be true. We know that born contemplatives in the realm both of analytic and of integral thought have turned up in fair numbers and at frequent intervals during recorded history. There is therefore every reason to suppose that they turned up before history was recorded. That many of these people died young or were unable to exercise their talents is certain. But a few of them must have survived. In this context it is highly significant that, among many contemporary primitives, two thought-patterns are foundan exoteric pattern for the unphilosophic many and an esoteric pattern (often monotheistic, with a belief in a God not merely of power, but of goodness and wisdom) for the initiated few. There is no reason to suppose that circumstances were any harder for prehistoric men than they are for many contemporary savages. But if an esoteric monotheism of the kind that seems to come natural to the born thinker is possible in modern savage societies, the majority of whose members accept the sort of polytheistic philosophy that seems to come natural to men of action, a similar esoteric doctrine might have been current in prehistoric societies. True, the modern esoteric doctrines may have been derived from higher cultures. But the significant fact remains that, if so derived, they yet had a meaning for certain members of the primitive society and were considered valuable enough to be carefully preserved. We have seen that many thoughts are unthinkable apart from an appropriate vocabulary and frame of reference. But the fundamental ideas of the Perennial Philosophy can be formulated in a very simple vocabulary, and the experiences to which the ideas refer can and indeed must be had immediately and apart from any vocabulary whatsoever. Strange openings and theophanies are granted to quite small children, who are often profoundly and permanently affected by these experiences. We have no reason to suppose that what happens now to persons with small vocabularies did not happen in remote antiquity. In the modern world (as Vaughan and Traherne and Wordsworth, among others, have told us) the child tends to grow out of his direct awareness of the one Ground of things; for the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral thinking, whether on the psychic or the spiritual level. Psychic preoccupations may be and often are a major obstacle in the way of genuine spirituality. In primitive societies now (and, presumably, in the remote past) there is much preoccupation with, and a widespread talent for, psychic thinking. But a few people may have worked their way through psychic into genuinely spiritual experiencejust as, even in modern industrialized societies, a few people work their way out of the prevailing preoccupation with matter and through the prevailing habits of analytical thought into the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things.
1.01 - The Ego, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
usually prove to be unsuitable instruments because they are too
vague and nebulous. I have therefore suggested that the term
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:Yoga-siddhi, the perfection that comes from the practice of Yoga, can be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments. There is, first, the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern the realisation -- sastra. Next comes a patient and persistent action on the lines laid down by the knowledge, the force of our personal effort -- utsaha. There intervenes, third, uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher -- guru. Last comes the instrumentality of Time -- kala; for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of the divine movement.
SHASTRA
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32:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, -- these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
33:The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character, which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the Sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We do not believe that our political salvation can be attained by enlargement of Councils, introduction of the elective principle, colonial self-government or any other formula of European politics. We do not deny the use of some of these things as instruments, as weapons in a political struggle, but we deny their sufficiency whether as instruments or ideals and look beyond to an end which they do not serve except in a trifling degree. They might be sufficient if it were our ultimate destiny to be an outlying province of the British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish.
We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work out her own independent life and civilisation, to stand in the forefront of the world and solve the political, social, economical and moral problems which Europe has failed to solve, yet the pursuit of whose solution and the feverish passage in that pursuit from experiment to experiment, from failure to failure she calls her progress. Our means must be as great as our ends and the strength to discover and use the means so as to attain the end can only be found by seeking the eternal source of strength in ourselves.
1.01 - The Mental Fortress, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Our difficulties always stem from the belief that we alone remedy them. As long as our intellectual power (or inadequacy) does not play a role and our greater or lesser capacities are not actively involved, we feel that our endeavor is doomed to failure. Such is the deep-seated belief of mental man. We know its results all too well. But even if they were flawless within their own scope, they would still conceal a supreme flaw, which is to bring in only what is contained in our own intelligence or muscles except when life or happenstance frustrates our plans. In other words, our mental existence is a closed system. Nothing gets into it but what we ourselves put in. This is the cornerstone of the Great Fortress. Its second inevitable trait is the mechanical rigor of its process: everything runs in a closed circuit according to the thought, plan, or muscle we set in motion, since nothing can come into the process except what we have concocted. And everything is measurable down to the least dyne, centidyne and millidyne we have expended: we get exactly what we bargained for but that was already anticipated in the intelligence quotient put into play. That is, the system is perfectly and hermetically sealed down to the last cranny. There is not a single crack, except, once again, when life happens to upset more or less opportunely our faultless measures. The third inevitable trait stemming from the other two is its impeccable thoroughness: nothing escapes its attention, and what does will soon be worked out, put into equation and programmed to be fed back into the machine and further inflate the great expanding balloon. Everything is, of course, perfectly objective, since we all wear the same glasses; even our instruments scrupulously behave according to the results we want them to show. In short, the system operates rigorously and flawlessly according to specification. Like the sorcerer of old, we have traced a mental circle on the ground, stepping into it, and here we are.
But that just may prove to be a stupendous illusion.
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But its use is not as the mind imagines in the arrogance of its knowledge and discoveries, for the mind always mistakes the instrument for the Master. We thought that the mental tool was both end and means, and that that end was an increasing, ever more triumphant and rigorous mastery over the mental field, which it has colonized with marvelous cities and less marvelous suburbs. But that is only a secondary end, a turbulent by-product, and it turns out that the major effect of the Mind in man has not been to make him more intelligent (intelligent with respect to what? The mouse in its hole has the perfect intelligence for its own terrain), but to individualize him within his own species and endow him with the power to change while the other species were invariable and only individualized as a general type and finally to make him capable of casting a look at what exceeds his own condition. With this individualization and power of variation began the errors of man, his sins, his afflicting dualities; yet his capacity for error is also a secret capacity for progress, which is why all our moralities based on right or wrong and all our flawless heavens have failed and will forever fail if we were flawless and irreproachable, we would be a stagnant and infallible species, like the shellfish or the opossum. In other words, the Mind is an instrument of accelerated evolution, an evolver. In fifty years of scientific development, man has progressed more than during all the prescientific milleniums. But progress in what sense? To be sure, not in the sense of the fallacious mastery, nor in the quality of life or the degree of comfort, but in the sense of the mental saturation of the species. One cannot leave a circle unless one has individually and collectively exhausted the circle. One cannot step alone onto the other side; either everybody does it (or is capable of doing it) or nobody does it; the whole species goes together, because there is but one human Body. Instead of a handful of initiates scattered among a semianimal and ignorant human mass, the entire species is now undergoing its initiation or, in evolutionary terms, its supreme variation. We have not passed through the mental circle for the sake of sending rockets to the moon, but in order to be individually, innumerably and voluntarily capable of effecting the passage to the next higher circle. The breaking of the circle is the great organic Fact of our times. All the dualities and opposite poles, the sins of virtue and the virtues of sin, all this dazzling chaos were the instruments of the Work, the tensors, we could say, bending us to the breaking point against a wall of iron which is a wall of illusion. But the illusion falls only when one decides to see it.
That is where we are. The illusion is not dead; it even rages with unprecedented violence, equipped with all the arms we have so obligingly polished up for it. But these are the last convulsions of a colossus with feet of clay which is actually a gnome, an oversized, overoutfitted gnome. The ancient sages of India knew it well. They divided human evolution into four concentric circles: that of the men of knowledge (Brahmins), who lived at the beginning of humanity, in the age of truth; that of the nobles and warriors (Kshatriya), when only three fourths of the truth was left; that of the merchants and middle class (Vaishya), who had only half of the truth; and finally ours, the age of the little men, the Shudra, the servants (of the machine, of the ego, of desire), the great proletariat of regimented liberties the Dark Age, Kali Yuga, when no truth is left at all. But because this circle is the most extreme, because all the truths have been tried and exhausted, and all possible roads explored, we are nearing the right solution, the true solution, the emergence of a new age of truth, the supramental age Sri Aurobindo spoke of, like the buttercup breaking its last envelope to free its golden fruit. If the parallel holds true between the collective body and our human body, we could say that the center governing the age of the sages was located at the level of the forehead, while that of the age of the nobles was at the level of the heart, that of the age of the merchants, at the stomach, and the one governing our age is at the level of sex and matter. The descent is complete. But that descent has a meaning a meaning for matter. Had we stayed forever at the forehead level of the divine truths of the mind, this earth and body would never have been changed, and we would have probably ended up escaping into some spiritual heaven or nirvana. Now, everything must be transformed, even the body and matter, since we are right in it. Ironically, this is the greatest service this dark, materialistic and scientific age may have rendered us: to compel such a plunge of the spirit into matter that it had either to lose itself in it or to be transformed with it. Absolute darkness is but the shadow of a greater Sun, which digs its abysses in order to raise up a more stable beauty, founded on the purified base of our earthly subconscious and seated erect in truth down to the very cells of our bodies.
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
(Illustration: Two generations ago it was supposed theoretically impossible that man should ever know the chemical composition of the fixed stars. It is known that our senses are adapted to receive only an infinitesimal fraction of the possible rates of vibration. Modern instruments have enabled us to detect some of these suprasensibles by indirect methods, and even to use their peculiar qualities in the service of man, as in the case of the rays of Hertz and Rntgen. As Tyndall said, man might at any moment learn to perceive and utilize vibrations of all conceivable and inconceivable kinds. The question of Magick is a question of discovering and employing hitherto unknown forces in nature. We know that they exist, and we cannot doubt the possibility of mental or physical instruments capable of bringing us in relation with them.)
13. Every man is more or less aware that his individuality comprises several orders of existence, even when he maintains that his subtler principles are merely symptomatic of the changes in his gross vehicle. A similar order may be assumed to extend throughout nature.
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(Illustration: When a man falls in love, the whole world becomes, to him, nothing but love boundless and immanent; but his mystical state is not contagious; his fellow-men are either amused or annoyed. He can only extend to others the effect which his love has had upon himself by means of his mental and physical qualities. Thus, Catullus, Dante, and Swinburne made their love a mighty mover of mankind by virtue of their power to put their thoughts on the subject in musical and eloquent language. Again, Cleopatra and other people in authority moulded the fortunes of many other people by allowing love to influence their political actions. The Magician, however well he succeeds in making contact with the secret sources of energy in nature, can only use them to the extent permitted by his intellectual and moral qualities. Mohammed's intercourse with Gabriel was only effective because of his statesmanship, soldiership, and the sublimity of his comm and of Arabic. Hertz's discovery of the rays which we now use for wireless telegraphy was sterile until reflected through the minds and wills of the people who could take his truth, and transmit it to the world of action by means of mechanical and economic instruments.)
22. Every individual is essentially sufficient to himself. But he is unsatisfactory to himself until he has established himself in his right relation with the Universe.
1.025 - Sadhana - Intensifying a Lighted Flame, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is said by anthropologists, historian's of mankind's evolution, and political historians, that a state was reached when it was felt necessary to organise people into groups, and this was the beginning of the governmental system. A government is nothing but an agreement among people in order that there may not be warfare among individuals and attacks every day. Otherwise there would be chaos and confusion, and anyone could attack at any moment, for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, an agreement was made, an organisation was set up, a rule was framed and a system was brought forth under which it was obligatory on the part of individuals to obey certain principles laid down by groups, of which some people were made leaders. It does not mean that these leaders were kings or autocrats; they were the governors of law, the dispensers of justice, and the instruments for the maintenance of order in the group of people who found it necessary to bring about this system.
Here we have a higher reality than the individual, quantitatively speaking, though qualitatively we cannot say that there was an improvement. While there is a quantitative improvement in an organisation or a set-up such as a government, in the sense that an individual is made a part of a larger body so that the egoism of the individual cannot operate as forcefully as it could have operated when it was left alone and given a long rope, a consideration for the welfare of other individuals in the system becomes obligatory on the part of every individual on account of the presence of this order and system. So far, so good. From the point of view of the quantity of the reality that has been introduced into life the mathematical measure of the order that has been set up we can say that a society is a larger reality than the individual. A nation is a larger reality than a community, and the entire set-up of mankind, the international system, may be regarded as a still larger reality than a single nation. This is a quantitative evaluation of the reality toward which the human mind seems to be aiming, for the purpose of bringing peace on earth, happiness, etc.
10.28 - Love and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Of course, there was always in the ancient days also, in some disciplines or others, an aspiration, an urge to immortalise the body, but the means they adopted, the instruments they chose for the operation were indirect and secondary. It was either through the force of a luminous mind influencing the body or through the pressure of concentrated vital force making the body an obedient and docile instrument. The former was the process followed by the Vaishnavas who envisaged a luminous body, the second was the aim of the Tantriks who sought to rejuvenate the body, possess it youthful and vigorous indefinitely. The Hatha yogis also in their turn through physico-vital exercises attempted to acquire a new body changing the modalities of the old. The ancient alchemists tried more material means, the use of alchemic substances for cleansing the body making it free from disease and, if possible, death. But the secret power lies in the body itself, that is, in the very self of the body, not anywhere else. The hidden consciousness lodged in the cell, the material cell, that is the key to the problem, that secret consciousness and its energy asleep in the cell, has to be awakened and brought into play. When the physical cell itself awakes and declares its purpose, the thing is done.
This secret consciousness-energy appearing as a material form is also intrinsically the delight of existence. Its other name is Divine Grace and Love.
1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Let us notice, also, the daily necessities of man, his need of food, of clothing and of a dwelling; his need of rain, clouds, wind, heat and cold : and that he needs the weaver, the cotton-spinner, the clothier and the fuller to provide him with clothing; and that each one of these has need of so many instruments, and of so many trades, like those of the blacksmith, the farmer, the carpenter, the dyer, and the tanner; and besides, their need of iron, lead, wood and the like. Notice at the same time, the adaptation of these workmen to their instruments, and of the instruments to the trades, and how each art has given rise to several others, and the mind is astonished and distracted. The adaptation of all these instruments comes from the pure grace and perfect mercy of God, and from the fountain of his benevolence. Moreover, God's creating prophets, sending them to us, and leading us to their law and to love them, is a perfume of His universal beneficence. He proclaims himself, "My mercy surpasses my anger," and the Prophet has said: "Verily, God is more full of compassion to his servants, than the affectionate mother to her nursing child."
It has been shown that man from his own existence, knows the existence of his creator, that from his analysis of the materials of which his body is composed and of its distinctive characters he understands the almighty power of God, that from the uses, the arrangement and the combination of his organs, he knows the omniscient wisdom of God, and that his clemency and compassion extend to [45] all. He knows, also, that these many mercies and bounties are bestowed upon him without his seeking or care, from God's rich and overflowing grace. Now in this way it is possible that the knowledge of the soul should become the key to the knowledge of God. For just as from a survey of your own being and attributes, you have in a contracted form learned the being and attributes of God, it is also possible to understand how the freedom and the holiness of God, bear a resemblance to the freedom of your soul.
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O seeker after the divine secrets, now that you have learned that within the body of man, there is a sovereign who possesses and controls it, it is time that you should learn the meaning of the sentences, "Glory to God," "God be praised," "There is no God but God," and "God is the greatest." These sentences are very current on the tongues of men, but they do not know the signification of them. [54] Although these four sentences are in appearance very short, yet there are no others that embrace so much of the knowledge of God. Since from the consideration of the freedom and independence of your own spirit, you have learned the freedom and independence of God, you have in consequence learned the meaning and import of the sentence, "Glory to God." Seeing that from the sovereignty which you exercise over your own spirit, you have learned the sovereignty which God exercises, and know that all causes and instruments are subject to his power, and that all outward and inward mercies, which are incalculable and innumerable, are from him, you therefore know the meaning and import of the phrase, "God be praised." As you know also that all things are of his creation, that his government extends over all things, and that without his will no motion or change can affect any thing, you see the meaning of the words, "There is no God but God. " Listen now to the explanation of the sentence, "God is the greatest."
Do not suppose that, from all that has hitherto been said, you can understand the greatness of God. His greatness and power are above and beyond the comprehension of the mind and wisdom of man. Moreover the phrase "God is the greatest" does not mean that God is larger than other things : it is a sin to indulge in such a belief. It is as much as to say, that there are large things, but that God is larger than they are. The holy meaning of the phrase "God is the greatest" is that God is so great, that he cannot be known or comprehended by the mind or understanding, or be compared with any thing,-that the knowledge of God cannot be attained by means of the knowledge which a man has of his own soul (which God forbid!), that a knowledge of his attributes cannot be attained from a knowledge of the attributes of man, and that his independence and holiness cannot be compared with the independence and holiness of man in any form whatever. God [55] forbid that His sovereignty and government should be compared and measured ! The doctors of the law have been allowed however, in the way of illustration to explain in a certain degree the knowledge, power, excellence and sovereignty of God to man, who is frail and weak in understanding.
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
the instruments? The Chitta, or mind-stuff, the Buddhi,
determinative faculty, the Manas, or mind, and the Indriyani,
or sense organs. These are the instruments for him to see the
external world, and the identification of the Self with the
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
14:Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members. He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and with each other, -- integrally, omitting no grain or strand or vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. All exclusive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary convenience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which he must labour.
15:Concentration is indeed the first condition of any Yoga, but it is an all-receiving concentration that is the very nature of the integral Yoga. A separate strong fixing of the thought, of the emotions or of the will on a single idea, object, state, inner movement or principle is no doubt a frequent need here also; but this is only a subsidiary helpful process. A wide massive opening, a harmonised concentration of the whole being in all its parts and through all its powers upon the One who is the All is the larger action of this Yoga without which it cannot achieve its purpose. For it is the consciousness that rests in the One and that acts in the All to which we aspire; it is this that we seek to impose on every element of our being and on every movement of our nature. This wide and concentrated totality is the essential character of the sadhana and its character must determine its practice.
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22:When once the object of concentration has possessed and is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the heart and the will, -- a consummation fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law, -- the perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the divine work. For the work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action, -- and that will be when personal desire and egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true Spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind arid life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves, -all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom, Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of the spirit's terrestrial adventure.
23:The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will in the end exclude nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world and our will's ignorance. For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, -- of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe' It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
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25:For here, there are two movements with a transitional stage between them, two periods of this Yoga, -- one of the process of surrender, the other of its crown and consequence. In the first the individual prepares himself for the reception o? the Divine into his members. For all this first period he has to work by means of the instruments of the lower Nature, but aided more and more from above. But in the later transitional stage of this movement our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more dwindles and a higher Nature acts; the eternal shakti descends into this limited form of mortality and progressively possesses and transmutes it. In the second period the greater movement wholly replaces the lesser, formerly indispensable first action; but this can be done only when our self-surrender is complete. The ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become. As long as the ego is at work in us, our personal action is and must always be in its nature a part of the lower grades of existence; it is obscure or half-enlightened, limited in its field, very partially effective in its power. If a spiritual transformation, not a mere illumining modification of our nature, is to be done at all, we must call in the Divine shakti to effect that miraculous work in the individual; for she alone has the needed force, decisive, all-wise and illimitable. But the entire substitution of the divine for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible. All interference from below that would falsify the truth of the superior action must first be inhibited or rendered impotent, and it must be done by our own free choice. A continual and always repeated refusal of the impulsions and falsehoods of the lower nature is asked from us and an insistent support to the Truth as it grows in our parts: for the progressive settling into our nature and final perfection of the incoming informing Light, Purity and Power needs for its development and sustenance our free acceptance of it and our stubborn rejection of all that is contrary to it, inferior or incompatible.
26:In the first movement of self-preparation, the period of personal effort, the method we have to use is this concentration of the whole being on the Divine that it seeks and, as its corollary, this constant rejection, throwing out, katharsis, of all that is not the true Truth of the Divine. An entire consecration of all that we are, think, feel and do will be the result of this persistence. This consecration in its turn must culminate in an integral self-giving to the Highest; for its crown and sign of completion is the whole nature's all-comprehending absolute surrender. In the second stage of the Yoga, transitional between the human and the divine working, there will supervene an increasing purified and vigilant passivity, a more and more luminous divine response to the Divine Force, -- but not to any other; and there will be as a result the growing inrush of a great and conscious miraculous working from above. In the last period there is no effort at all, no set method, no fixed sadhana; the place of endeavour and Tapasya will be taken by a natural, simple, powerful and happy disclosing of the flower of the Divine out of the bud of a purified and perfected terrestrial nature. These are the natural successions of the action of the Yoga.
1.02 - THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decline, as instruments in the
disintegration of Hellas, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek ("The Birth
1.02 - The Recovery, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
When Dr. Manilal arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief! He was not very happy to see the new development, but hoped that everything would be all right. He was confronted with three problems: the swelling, educating the patient to walk and the bending of the knee, all of which he dealt with in his characteristic efficient manner. The swelling according to him would subside in due course. Gentle massage and hot and cold compress continued, followed later by hot douche. We used to note its diminution week by week. But it took some months to disappear completely. The bending of the knee would also take some time in view of the adhesion of the patella to the underlying tissues, in spite of passive movements. The re-education in walking seemed to be rather a straightforward job, though it was the most awkward and difficult one, for Sri Aurobindo had to walk with crutches! All that was needed was a patient and persistent effort. For Sri Aurobindo's nature, unaccustomed to physical or mechanical contrivances, and the narrow space in the room made the venture somewhat risky. The first day he got up to use the crutches was a memorable one for us. In the presence of the Mother we made him stand up, handed him the crutches and showed him how to use them. He fumbled and remarked, "Yes, it is easy to say." Two or three different pairs were tried out, but as he could not handle them properly, the Mother proposed that he had better walk leaning on two persons one on either side; It was certainly a bright suggestion, for Sri Aurobindo walking on crutches would have reminded us of his own phrase about Hephaestus' "lame omnipotent motion", an insult to his shining majestic figure. Purani and Satyendra were selected by Dr. Manilal as his human supports, much less incongruous than the ungainly wooden instruments! That was how the re-education started. The paradox of the Divine seeking frail human aid gave food to my sense of humour. However, both men proved unequal in stature; the Mother made Champaklal replace Satyendra on the left side. Now the arrangement was just and perfect and Champaklal had his aspiration fulfilled. His was the last support Sri Aurobindo was to give up. For, as his steps gained in strength and firmness, he used a stick in the right hand, and Champaklal on the left. Finally he too was dropped. As soon as it came to be known that the Master was using a walking stick, several were presented to him and there was one even of tea-wood from Assam! Thus everyday after the noon and night meals the Mother would come to his room and present the stick, and he would walk about for half an hour in her presence.
While waiting for the Mother's arrival, he would practise various bending exercises for the knee which had been improvised by Dr. Manilal. He did them sitting on the edge of the bed. He actively obeyed whatever was demanded of him. One of the exercises was hanging of the leg which later became a common joke amongst us.
1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
14:A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
15:The Unknown is not the Unknowable;4 it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, "Forth now and push forward also in other fields."5
10.31 - The Mystery of The Five Senses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
How can that happen? The clue is given in one of the Upanishads. The Kena Upanishad says: This eye does not really see, there is an eye behind that sees, and so on with the other senses. Even this mind does not know, there is a mind of the mind that knows. That is the crucial point. With the eye of the eye one must see, with the hearing of an inner car one must hear, and one must know by the mind of the mind. Instead of opening these windows and doors outward they should be opened inward, turned round about as it were like the flare of a lighthouse. Then instead of being instruments of illusory knowledge or maya as now, they become instruments of real knowledge, receptacles or transmitters of the truth and reality behind and above.
Indeed we say habitually, when speaking of spiritual realisation, that one sees the truth, one has to see the truth: to know the truth, to know the reality is taken to mean to see the truth, to see the reality, and what does this signify? It signifies what one sees is the light, the light that emanates from truth, the form that the Truth takes, the radiant substance that is the Truth. This then is the special character or gift of this organ, the organ of sight, the eye. One sees the physical light, of course, but one sees also the supraphysical light. It is, as the Upanishad says, the eye of the eye, the third eye in the language of the occultists. What we say about the eye may be equally said in respect of the other sense-organs. Take hearing, for example. By the ear we hear the noises of the world, its deafening cries and no doubt at times also some earthly music. But when the ear is turned inward, we listen to unearthly things Indeed we know how stone-deaf Beethoven heard some of those harmonies of supreme beauty that are now the cherished possessions of humanity. This inner ear is able to take you by a process of regression to the very source of all sound and utterance, from where springs the anhata vk, the undictated voice, the nda-brahman, the original sound-seed, the primary vibration. So the ear gives that hearing which reveals to you a special aspect of the Divine: the vibratory rhythm of the being, that matrix of all utterance, of all speech that mark the material expression of consciousness. Next we come to the third sense, that of smell, Well, the nose is not a despicable organ, in any way; it is as important as any other more aristocratic sense-organ, as the eye or the ear. It is the gate to the perfumed atmosphere of the reality. Even like a flower, as a lotus for example, the truth is colourful, beautiful, shapely, radiant to the eye; to the nostrils it is exhilarating perfume, it distils all around a divine scent that sanctifies, elevates the whole being. After the third sense we come to the fourth, the tongue. The mouth gives you the taste of the truth and you find that the Truth is sweetness, the delicious nectar of the gods: for the truth is also soma, the surpreme rasa, amta, immortality itself. Here is Aswapathy's experience of the thing in Savitri:
1.036 - The Rise of Obstacles in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
There is a sudden rising into the wakefulness of reality from the dream of world perception. All instruments of knowing are hushed forever. We begin to be aware of the presence of objects by a sympathy of 'being' rather than by a relatedness of sensory cognition. At present we are repelled by objects due to the egoism of personalities, and as one ego cannot tolerate another ego, there is an automatic repulsion of objects, one throwing the other out into a remote distance. But when this interior consciousness arises, the repulsion that is consequent to the presence of egoism ceases, and the reverse action takes place, namely, a friendliness of attitude, not in the sense of an emotional affection that we are used to in this world, but the urge of kindred characters towards a fraternal embrace for a permanent union of their essential being.
This experience is uncommon, and humanly it is not possible, and we cannot call it human understanding, human awareness, or human relationship it is super-human, super-physical, super-psychical, super-intellectual, super- logical and super-relational. Such knowledge will rise as an emanation of being rather than as a faculty of understanding. This knowledge is a light that is shed by our essential being, and it is not merely a function of the psychological organ. This subject is explained in more detail in another sutra of Patanjali, which we shall study when we come to it later on. When this knowledge arises, there is a cessation of obstacles. Enmity ceases when the causes of enmity cease. The obstacles on the path to the realisation of Truth appear only as long as there is a hidden tendency of the individual to maintain itself in contradistinction with other individuals.
--
The centres of potentiality within our own selves, subconsciously and unconsciously present, are instruments in evoking the action or reaction of corresponding centres outside in the world of perception. So, there is a relativity of action and reaction even in the confronting of obstacles. We cannot wholly blame others for the sufferings of mankind or for the pains that we are undergoing in life. There is a corresponding action from outside in relation to the presence of potentialities inside.
As I mentioned, these obstacles sometimes appear with little indication of their coming, and sometimes without any indication whatsoever. One fine morning we may get up with a sudden, unprecedented and unexpected experience of a positive or a negative character, due to the sudden rise of a particular latency within, worked up into action by the practice of yoga. All the dirt and rubbish inside us is kept intact, ordinarily speaking; we do not touch it. But this intense, concentrated practice known as yoga calls to action every sleeping dog that is inside immediately every dog starts barking, and we do not know which is barking from which side. It is necessary to rouse every potential feeling in us on to the conscious level so that it may get exhausted, and we become completely cleansed. There is no use keeping these latencies inside, because though they may appear to be absent on account of their being on the lower level, they will take action one day or the other, just like a seed which is lying in dry soil germinates when rain falls and climatic conditions become favourable.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This creation as an expression of the Divine Truth may not be altogether a falsehood. It is an inadequate expression, as it stands at present, as it has been till now; but it is a growing, a progressive expression. In other words, the instruments of expression, to start with, are not fully developed, they have to be developed; they are being developed, through the evolutionary movement of Nature, in the course of advancing time. Indeed evolution in Nature means that and a great deal of that. Take for example, speech, which is a special organ of expression for man. Now, originally speech, that is to say, the vocabulary on man's tongue consisted of vocables related only to the familiar objects around him, in the ordinary day to day movement of life. The field was narrow and limited, level to the ground. Observe the language also, the written language. The original written language started with images, pictorial diagrams: there was no alphabet but things and movements were presented, that is represented, almost actually. Thus for man a figure of man was drawn, that is to say, straight lines sticking out representing hands and legs and a dot for the head; the sun was a circle and so on. As consciousness grew and as the mind developed and reason became active, the images, the figures and the symbols gradually changed into more and more abstract signs. At first there was the pictogram, then the ideogram, and then, at the end, came the alphabet. Evidently, it appears, language could not develop so quickly as the consciousness or the mind did, for we see even in the earlier epochs of human civilisation and culture, man could and did come in contact with the Truth and Realities beyond his normal sense-bound consciousness. And the experiences the seers had on those levels were of such a kind that whenever they sought to express them, communicate them to others in the outward mind and speech, they had to take refuge in symbolism: they had to use the words of everyday life as signs and symbols pointing to other realities, other-worldly and unfamiliar. Thus, horse was to them life-force, cow the radiance of truth, the wind thought energies, the sun consciousness or Truth, night as ignorance, light as knowledge, wine (soma means both wine and moon) as delight and ecstasy, the sky as infinity or transcendence. And so on.
Indeed, that is the hiatus, the inadequacy that still cripples and stultifies the mind, the physical mind in its attempt to seize other realities beyond. It is the mind which gives the formal structure, the pattern of expression in the material frame. The mind being bound to the life of the ignorant and outgoing senses is constitutionally incapable of receiving or holding or expressing facts of the higher life, the life beyondwhat we name as the spiritual or the divine. Not only so, the mind in trying to express the higher or supraterrestrial truths inevitably diminishes, dilutes, devalues, even negates and annuls them. The attempt through parables and allegories is the story of the difficulty the impossibility of expressing through the mind truths beyond the mind. We land into the weird and confused worlds of myths and mythologies,myths and mythologies for example about popular Radha and Krishna, and Kali or Shiva. We are compelled to reduce to our human measures, to accentuate our human failings in order to present graphically to us the inexpressible intensities or extensions of the high experiences above. The Vaishnava lyrics or the songs of Solomon become to us high spiritual documents.
--
The instruments being inadequate, it was necessary to bypass them and take to an indirect way for expressing realities that are beyond them. Neither the language nor the mental concepts were the vessels that could hold the divine drink. And sometimes the result was not very happy.
The movement of freeing the consciousness from the hold of sense-perceptions has continued and has attained an unprecedented success. Rational mind, in order to find its autonomy has abstracted itself so much from the data of life experiences that it has become almost an esoteric domain. Mathematical logic of today has brought forth a language that has almost no kinship with either the popular or the aristocratic tongue. Modern science has so much sublimated the facts of life, the contents of experience, that it has become only a system of geometrical formulae.
1.03 - Hieroglypics Life and Language Necessarily Symbolic, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Even so, as so often pointed out, all we do is to "record the behaviour of our instruments." Nor are we much better off when we've done it; for our symbol, referring as it does to a phenomenon unique in itself, and not to be apprehended by another, can mean nothing to one's neighbors. What happens, of course, is that similar, though not identical, Point-Events happen to many of us, and so we are able to construct a symbolic language. My memory of the mysterious Reality resembles yours sufficiently to induce us to agree that both belong to the same class.
But let me furthermore ask you to reflect on the formation of language itself. Except in the case of onomatopoeic words and a few others, there is no logical connection between a thing and the sound of our name for it. "Bow-wow" is a more rational name than "dog", which is a mere convention agreed on by the English, while other nations prefer chien, hund, cane, kalb, kutta and so on. All symbols, you see, my dear child, and it's no good your kicking!
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
the bell or other instruments. These various physical
acts have no goal other than to increase the immersion
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
When the Divine Power the Supramental Shakti works, She establishes harmony between the various instruments of nature and also harmony in the whole of our life. R and people like him feel that such a harmonisation of the being is a limitation. But it is not a limitation because that action is in keeping with the truth of our being and our becoming.
Disciple: Is the Transcendent Power the same as the Supramental Power ?
1.03 - Of some imperfections which some of these souls are apt to have, with respect to the second capital sin, which is avarice, in the spiritual sense, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
themselves to no visible instruments, nor do they burden themselves with such, nor
desire to know more than is necessary in order that they may act well; for they set
1.03 - On Knowledge of the World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
After you have learned, O student of the divine mysteries, what this world in its meaning really is, it is important that you should look at the world in detail. Every thing in the world of matter which grows, has been included under three classes, animal, vegetable and mineral, which are called the three generations or kingdoms. Animals were created some for riding, some for food, and some for tilling. Vegetables were created to afford food and conveniences to man, and sustenance to various animals. Minerals, like gold, silver, copper and iron, were created to serve as instruments to provide means of sustaining life in man. It was designed that by means of these three kingdoms, the spirit of man, while dwelling for a few days in the body, should be employed in making preparation for the future world. Man, however, forgetful of the end for which he had come hither, heedless of the fact that he was soon to depart, and that he would then repent to find that he was going unprepared, became engaged in strife with his fellows about the things of the world, fell in love with its ways, and attempted to gain its wealth. In consequence various qualities began to appear in the heart, such as avarice, envy, ambition and hatred, which are sources of its ruin. Finally the heart, forgetful of the duties for the performance of which it had come in to the world, exhausted all its energies in building up the world.
As man's primary necessities in the world are three, viz : clothing, food and shelter, so the arts of the world are three, viz: weaving, planting and building. The rest of the arts serve either for the purpose of perfecting the others, or for repairing injuries. Thus the spinner aids the work [69] of weaving, the tailor carries out that work to perfection, while the cloth-dresser adds beauty to the work. In the arts, there is need of iron, skins and wood, and for these many instruments are necessary. No person is able to work at all kinds of trades, but by the will of God, upon one is devolved one art and upon another two, and the whole community is made dependent, one member upon the other. When avarice, ambition and covetousness hold sway in the hearts of men, because some are not pleased to see others obtain honors, and because they do not endeavor to quell their wants, envy and hatred arise among them. Each one, dissatisfied with his own rights, plots against the property and honor of his fellows. On this account there was a necessity for three farther distinctions, viz: sovereignty, judicial authority, and jurisprudence, which contains the digest of the law. But alas ! poor and wretched man coming under the influence of all these causes, motives and instruments, spends his life in collecting wealth and lays up for himself sources of regret. And just as the pilgrim, who on his way to the Kaaba of Mecca, was engaged day and night in taking care of his camel, got separated from the caravan, and perished in the desert, so those who know not the real nature of the world and its worthlessness, and do not understand that it is the place where seed is sown for eternity, but spend all their thoughts upon it, are certainly fascinated and deceived; as the apostle of God declares. "The world is more enchanting than Harout and Marout: let men beware of it."1
After you have learned that the world is delusive, enchanting and treacherous, you need to know in what way its delusions and enchantment operate. I will, therefore, mention some things which are illustrative of the world. The world, beloved, is like an enchanter, who exhibits himself [70] to you as though he would dwell with you and would forever be at your side; while in truth this world is always upon the point of being snatched away from you, notwithstanding you are tranquilly unconscious of it. The world is like a shadow, which, while you look at it, seems fixed, although in reality, it is in motion. Life is like a running water, which is always advancing, yet yon think that it is still and permanent, and you wish to fix your abode by it. The world again is like an enchanter who performs for you acts of friendship and manifests love for yon, for the sake of winning your affections to him : but as soon as he has secured your love, he turns away his face from you and plots to destroy you....
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture,geniuslearningwitbookspaintingsstatuarymusic philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do,not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefa thers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the noblemans. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_ school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
1.03 - .REASON. IN PHILOSOPHY, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
And what delicate instruments of observation we have in our senses!
This human nose, for instance, of which no philosopher has yet spoken
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
But how then shall we continue to act at all? For ordinarily the human being acts because he has a desire or feels a mental, vital or physical want or need; he is driven by the necessities of the body, by the lust of riches, honours or fame, or by a craving for the personal satisfactions of the mind or the heart or a craving for power or pleasure. Or he is seized and pushed about by a moral need or, at least, the need or the desire of making his ideas or his ideals or his will or his party or his country or his gods prevail in the world. If none of these desires nor any other must be the spring of our action, it would seem as if all incentive or motive power had been removed and action itself must necessarily cease. The Gita replies with its third great secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness; our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and in the end a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only motive. This transformation of the motive force and very character of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its initiative.
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:It is true that the glimpse of supraphysical realities acquired by methodical research has been imperfect and is yet ill-affirmed; for the methods used are still crude and defective. But these rediscovered subtle senses have at least been found to be true witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justification, then, for scouting them as false witnesses when they testify to supraphysical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of consciousness. Like all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and arranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of great ranges of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are perceived by more subtle instruments than those of gross physical Matter, claims in the end the same validity as the truth of the material universe. The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses.
8:But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. To that witness the worlds and their objects appeal for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical equally with the supraphysical we have no other evidence that they exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.
9:If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to "live his life", as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not, - is, for it is present and compelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works. At the other end, if we stress too much the unreality of the objective world, we arrive by a different road at similar but still more trenchant conclusions, - the fictitious character of the individual ego, the unreality and purposelessness of human existence, the return into the Non-Being or the relationless Absolute as the sole rational escape from the meaningless tangle of phenomenal life.
10:And yet the question cannot be solved by logic arguing on the data of our ordinary physical existence; for in those data there is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. We have, normally, neither any definitive experience of a cosmic mind or supermind not bound up with the life of the individual body, nor, on the other hand, any firm limit of experience which would justify us in supposing that our subjective self really depends upon the physical frame and can neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body. Only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be decided.
11:The extension of our consciousness, to be satisfying, must necessarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and senses are dispensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord.
12:The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate.
13:Entering into that Consciousness, we may continue to dwell, like It, upon universal existence. Then we become aware, - for all our terms of consciousness and even our sensational experience begin to change, - of Matter as one existence and of bodies as its formations in which the one existence separates itself physically in the single body from itself in all others and again by physical means establishes communication between these multitudinous points of its being. Mind we experience similarly, and Life also, as the same existence one in its multiplicity, separating and reuniting itself in each domain by means appropriate to that movement. And, if we choose, we can proceed farther and, after passing through many linking stages, become aware of a supermind whose universal operation is the key to all lesser activities. Nor do we become merely conscious of this cosmic existence, but likewise conscious in it, receiving it in sensation, but also entering into it in awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the ego-sense, active, more and more in contact, even unified more and more with other minds, other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing effects not only on our own moral and mental being and on the subjective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events by means nearer to the divine than those possible to our egoistic capacity.
1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Sounds of conchshells and cymbals were carried on the air. The devotees came outside the room and saw the priests and servants gathering flowers in the garden for the divine service in the temples. From the nahabat floated the sweet melody of musical instruments, befitting the morning hours.
Narendra and the other devotees finished their morning duties and came to the Master.
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
That Nirvana and Samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe; but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality. For ordinary, nice, unregenerate people to accept this truth by hearsay, and to act upon it in practice, is merely to court disaster. All the dismal story of antinomianism is there to warn us of what happens when men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all. And hardly less depressing than the spectacle of antinomianism is that of the earnestly respectable well-rounded life of good citizens who do their best to live sacramentally, but dont in fact have any direct acquaintance with that for which the sacramental activity really stands. Dr. Oman, in his The Natural and the Supernatural, writes at length on the theme that reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal; and in a recent volume, Science, Religion and the Future, Canon Raven applauds Dr. Oman for having stated the principles of a theology, in which there could be no ultimate antithesis between nature and grace, science and religion, in which, indeed, the worlds of the scientist and the theologian are seen to be one and the same. All this is in full accord with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and with such Christian teachings as St. Augustines Ama et fac quod vis and Father Lallemants advice to theocentric contemplatives to go out and act in the world, since their actions are the only ones capable of doing any real good to the world. But what neither Dr. Oman nor Canon Raven makes sufficiently clear is that nature and grace, Samsara and Nirvana, perpetual perishing and eternity, are really and experientially one only to persons who have fulfilled certain conditions. Fac quod vis in the temporal world but only when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart and your neighbor as yourself. If you havent learnt this lesson, you will either be an antinomian eccentric or criminal or else a respectable well-rounded-lifer, who has left himself no time to understand either nature or grace. The Gospels are perfectly clear about the process by which, and by which alone, a man may gain the right to live in the world as though he were at home in it: he must make a total denial of selfhood, submit to a complete and absolute mortification. At one period of his career, Jesus himself seems to have undertaken austerities, not merely of the mind, but of the body. There is the record of his forty days fast and his statement, evidently drawn from personal experience, that some demons cannot be cast out except by those who have fasted much as well as prayed. (The Cur dArs, whose knowledge of miracles and corporal penance was based on personal experience, insists on the close correlation between severe bodily austerities and the power to get petitionary prayer answered in ways that are sometimes supernormal.) The Pharisees reproached Jesus because he came eating and drinking, and associated with publicans and sinners; they ignored, or were unaware of, the fact that this apparently worldly prophet had at one time rivalled the physical austerities of John the Baptist and was practising the spiritual mortifications which he consistently preached. The pattern of Jesus life is essentially similar to that of the ideal sage, whose career is traced in the Oxherding Pictures, so popular among Zen Buddhists. The wild ox, symbolizing the unregenerate self, is caught, made to change its direction, then tamed and gradually transformed from black to white. Regeneration goes so far that for a time the ox is completely lost, so that nothing remains to be pictured but the full-orbed moon, symbolizing Mind, Suchness, the Ground. But this is not the final stage. In the end, the herdsman comes back to the world of men, riding on the back of his ox. Because he now loves, loves to the extent of being identified with the divine object of his love, he can do what he likes; for what he likes is what the Nature of Things likes. He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas. For him, there is complete reconciliation to the evanescent and, through that reconciliation, revelation of the eternal. But for nice ordinary unregenerate people the only reconciliation to the evanescent is that of indulged passions, of distractions submitted to and enjoyed. To tell such persons that evanescence and eternity are the same, and not immediately to qualify the statement, is positively fatalfor, in practice, they are not the same except to the saint; and there is no record that anybody ever came to sanctity, who did not, at the outset of his or her career, behave as if evanescence and eternity, nature and grace, were profoundly different and in many respects incompatible. As always, the path of spirituality is a knife-edge between abysses. On one side is the danger of mere rejection and escape, on the other the danger of mere acceptance and the enjoyment of things which should only be used as instruments or symbols. The versified caption which accompanies the last of the Oxherding Pictures runs as follows.
Even beyond the ultimate limits there extends a passageway,
1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
The nature of death cannot be understood, unless we are acquainted with these two kinds of spirit and with the relations of dependence between them. Know, then, O seeker, that the animal spirit belongs to the inferior world. The elements of its four humors, blood, phlegm, bile and black bile, are fire, air, water and earth. The animal spirit is a product of a delicate exhalation from these elements. The variations in the measure of a man's health depend on the variations of heat, cold, dryness and moisture. Hence it is the object of the science of medicine to preserve these four elements in their due proportions, so that they may serve as instruments to secure perfection to the human spirit.2
The human spirit belongs to the superior world and is of an angelic substance. It has come into this world a stranger, and has descended from its original state to this temporary home, to receive its destiny from divine direction, and for the purpose of acquiring the knowledge of God. In accordance with this, God declares in his holy word, "We said to them - leave paradise all of you just as you are : a book destined for your guidance will come to you from me: fear shall never befall those who will follow it, and they shall not be afflicted."3 And that which God says in another place, points to the different degrees of worlds: "I create man of clay: and when I shall have formed man of clay and shall have breathed my spirit in him, prostrate yourselves before him in adoration."4First of all in his saying "from clay" he points to a material body. The phrase "I shall have formed" indicates the animal spirit. The phrase "shall have breathed my spirit [78] in him," means that I have given to the body of man a well balanced constitution with power and motion. I have made it capable of receiving the law, and to be a home for the knowledge of God.
1.04 - ON THE DESPISERS OF THE BODY, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
how vain they are. instruments and toys are sense and
spirit: behind them still lies the self. The self also
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:We have found already in the cosmic consciousness a meeting-place where Matter becomes real to Spirit, Spirit becomes real to Matter. For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are intermediaries and no longer, as they seem in the ordinary egoistic mentality, agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel between the positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality. Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulae of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it consents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend. Matter reveals itself to the realising thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit, - Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments of the supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its multiple centres of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a pure mirror of the Truth of Being which expresses itself in the symbols of the universe; Life, when it consciously lends its energies to the perfect self-figuration of the Divine in ever-new forms and activities of the universal existence.
3:In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a divine life for man in the world which will at once justify Science by disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the terrestrial evolution and realise by the transfiguration of the human soul into the divine the great ideal dream of all high religions.
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore in nations so circumstanced this tendency of self-finding has been most powerful and has even created in some of them a new type of national movement, as in Ireland and India. This and no other was the root-meaning of Swadeshism in Bengal and of the Irish movement in its earlier less purely political stages. The emergence of Bengal as a sub-nation in India was throughout a strongly subjective movement and in its later development it became very consciously that. The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves. We must not forget, however, that in the first stages these movements followed in their superficial thought the old motives of an objective and mostly political self-consciousness. The East indeed is always more subjective than the West and we can see the subjective tinge even in its political movements whether in Persia, India or China, and even in the very imitative movement of the Japanese resurgence. But it is only recently that this subjectivism has become self-conscious. We may therefore conclude that the conscious and deliberate subjectivism of certain nations was only the sign and precursor of a general change in humanity and has been helped forward by local circumstances, but was not really dependent upon them or in any sense their product.
This general change is incontestable; it is one of the capital phenomena of the tendencies of national and communal life at the present hour. The conception to which Ireland and India have been the first to give a definite formula, to be ourselves,so different from the impulse and ambition of dependent or unfortunate nations in the past which was rather to become like others,is now more and more a generally accepted motive of national life. It opens the way to great dangers and errors, but it is the essential condition for that which has now become the demand of the Time-Spirit on the human race, that it shall find subjectively, not only in the individual, but in the nation and in the unity of the human race itself, its deeper being, its inner law, its real self and live according to that and no longer by artificial standards. This tendency was preparing itself everywhere and partly coming to the surface before the War, but most prominently, as we have said, in new nations like Germany or in dependent nations like Ireland and India. The shock of the war brought about from its earliest moments an immediate and for the time being a militantemergence of the same deeper self-consciousness everywhere. Crude enough were most of its first manifestations, often of a really barbarous and reactionary crudeness. Especially, it tended to repeat the Teutonic lapse, preparing not only to be oneself, which is entirely right, but to live solely for and to oneself, which, if pushed beyond a certain point, becomes a disastrous error. For it is necessary, if the subjective age of humanity is to produce its best fruits, that the nations should become conscious not only of their own but of each others souls and learn to respect, to help and to profit, not only economically and intellectually but subjectively and spiritually, by each other.
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It may be said, indeed, that the last result of the something done the war, the collapse, the fierce reaction towards the rigid, armoured, aggressive, formidable Nazi State,is not only discouraging enough, but a clear warning to abandon that path and go back to older and safer ways. But the misuse of great powers is no argument against their right use. To go back is impossible; the attempt is always, indeed, an illusion; we have all to do the same thing which Germany has attempted, but to take care not to do it likewise. Therefore we must look beyond the red mist of blood of the War and the dark fuliginous confusion and chaos which now oppress the world to see why and where was the failure. For her failure which became evident by the turn her action took and was converted for the time being into total collapse, was clear even then to the dispassionate thinker who seeks only the truth. That befell her which sometimes befalls the seeker on the path of Yoga, the art of conscious self-finding,a path exposed to far profounder perils than beset ordinarily the average man,when he follows a false light to his spiritual ruin. She had mistaken her vital ego for herself; she had sought for her soul and found only her force. For she had said, like the Asura, I am my body, my life, my mind, my temperament, and become attached with a Titanic force to these; especially she had said, I am my life and body, and than that there can be no greater mistake for man or nation. The soul of man or nation is something more and diviner than that; it is greater than its instruments and cannot be shut up in a physical, a vital, a mental or a temperamental formula. So to confine it, even though the false formation be embodied in the armour-plated social body of a huge collective human dinosaurus, can only stifle the growth of the inner Reality and end in decay or the extinction that overtakes all that is unplastic and unadaptable.
It is evident that there is a false as well as a true subjectivism and the errors to which the subjective trend may be liable are as great as its possibilities and may well lead to capital disasters. This distinction must be clearly grasped if the road of this stage of social evolution is to be made safe for the human race.
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Take, for instance, the construction of Golconde. I am not going to enter into an elaborate description of its development. Considering that our resources in men and money were then limited, how such a magnificent building was erected is a wonder. An American architect with his Japanese and Czechoslovakian assistants foregathered. Old buildings were demolished, our sadhaks along with the paid workers laboured night and day and as if from a void, the spectacular mansion rose silently and slowly like a giant in the air. It is a story hardly believable for Pondicherry of those days. But my wonder was at the part the Mother played in it, not inwardly which is beyond my depth but in the daylight itself. She was in constant touch with the work through her chosen instruments. As many sadhaks as possible were pressed into service there; to anyone young or old asking for work, part time, whole time, her one cry: "Go to Golconde, go to Golconde." It was one of her daily topics with Sri Aurobindo who was kept informed of the difficulties, troubles innumerable, and at the same time, of the need of his force to surmount "them. Particularly when rain threatened to impede or spoil some important part of the work, she would invoke his special help: for instance, when the roof was to be built. How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now." Menacing clouds had mustered strong, stormy west winds blowing ominously, rain imminent, and torrential Pondicherry rain! We would look at the sky and speculate on the result of the fight between the Divine Force and the natural force. The Divine Force would of course win: slowly the Fury would leash her forces and withdraw into the cave. But as soon as the intended object was achieved, a deluge swept down as if in revenge. Sri Aurobindo observed that that was often the rule. During the harvesting season too, S.O.S. signals would come to Sri Aurobindo through the Mother to stop the rain. He would smile and do his work silently. If I have not seen any other miracle, I can vouch for this one repeated more than once. During the roof-construction, work had to go on all night long and the Mother would mobilise and marshal all the available Ashram hands and put them there. With what cheer and ardour our youth jumped into the fray at the call of the Mother, using often Sri Aurobindo's name to put more love and zeal into the strenuous enterprise! We felt the vibration of a tremendous energy driving, supporting, inspiring the entire collective body. This was how Golconde, an Ashram guest house, was built, one of the wonders of modern architecture lavishly praised by many visitors. Let me quote the relevant portion of a letter from Sri Aurobindo, written in 1945 with regard to Golconde:
"...It is on this basis that she (Mother) planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded architects and people with architectural knowledge have admired it with enthusiasm as a remarkable achievement; one spoke of it as the finest building of its kind he had seen, with no equal in all Europe or America; and a French architect, pupil of a great master, said it executed superbly the idea which his master had been seeking for but failed to realise..."2
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What is Mah or Mahas?The word means great, embracing, full, comprehensive. The Earth, also, because of its wideness & containing faculty is called mahi,just as it is called prithivi, dhara, medini, dharani, etc. In various forms, the root itself, mahi, mahitwam, maha, magha, etc, it recurs with remarkable profusion and persistence throughout the Veda. Evidently it expressed some leading thought of the Rishis, was some term of the highest importance in their system of psychology. Turning to the Purana we find the term mahat applied to some comprehensive principle which is supposed itself to be near to the unmanifest, avyaktam but to supply the material of all that is manifest and always to surround, embrace and uphold it. Mahat seems here to be an objective principle; but this need not trouble us; for in the old Hindu system all that is objective had something subjective corresponding to it and constituting its real nature. We find it explicitly declared in the Vishnu Purana that all things here are manifestations of vijnana, pure ideal knowledge, sarvani vijnanavijrimbhitaniideal knowledge vibrating out into intensity of various phenomenal existences each with its subjective reason for existence and objective case & form of existence. Is ideal knowledge then the subjective principle of mahat? If so, vijnanam and the Vedic mahas are likely to be terms identical in their philosophical content and psychological significance. We turn to the Upanishads and find mention made more than once of a certain subjective state of the soul, which is called Mahan Atma, a state into which the mind and senses have to be drawn up as we rise by samadhi of the instruments of knowledge into the supreme state of Brahman and which is superior therefore to these instruments. The Mahan Atma is the state of the pure Brahman out of which the vijnana or ideal truth (sattwa or beness of things) emerges and it is higher than the vijnana but nearer us than the Unmanifest or Avyaktam (Katha: III.10, 11,13 & VI.7). If we understand by the Mahan Atma that status of soul existence (Purusha) which is the basis of the objective mahat or mahati prakriti and which develops the vijnanam or ideal knowledge as its subjective instrument, then we shall have farther light on the nature of Mahas in the ancient conceptions. We shall see that it is ideal knowledge, vijnanam, or is connected with ideal knowledge.
But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice,the final & conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic & Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter & material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar & Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality & vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manasei ther in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted & enlightened by buddhipredominates & by the laws of mind determines the life & movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,not unknown to the Vedaconstitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyaktalost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain & only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength & being. Between the upper hemisphere & the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge & pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide & immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth & right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth & ideal knowledge.
We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Mahachamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being,therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth &ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat,the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam & ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihatSacchidananda objectivisedis the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth, the principle of infinite & divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things selfarranged; Brihat is full content & fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being & law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or half-illumined things of mind & sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true & self-existent. Nalpe sukham asti bhumaiva sukham. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness & constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power & peace. The harmony of creative power & peace, pravritti & nivritti, jana & shama, is the divine state which we feelas Wordsworth felt itwhen we go back to the brihat, the wide & infinite which, containing & contented with its works, says of it Sukritam, What I have made, is good. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smritisees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memoryjust as we say of a friend This is he and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselvesthough we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self-evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied & divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati & atmastha, confines itself to itself & does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satyapratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees,he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya,is in all things true. Truth is his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works & destinies from decay & dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas.The psychological conceptions of our remote forefa thers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought & experience that they may be a little difficult to follow & more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand & grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre & keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides & connects the human in us from the divine, & to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small & divided finite to that one, great & infinite, from this death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation & final aim of Veda & Vedanta.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Divine, the Eternal is the Lord of our sacrifice of works and union with him in all our being and consciousness and in its expressive instruments is the one object of the sacrifice; the steps of the sacrifice of works must therefore be measured, first, by the growth in our nature of something that brings us nearer to divine Nature, but secondly also by an experience of the Divine, his presence, his manifestation to us, an increasing closeness and union with that Presence. But the Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature.
There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to lifes hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.
--
All this difficult result can become possible only if there is an immense conversion, a total reversal of our consciousness, a supernormal entire transfiguration of the nature. There must be an ascension of the whole being, an ascension of spirit chained here and trammelled by its instruments and its environment to sheer Spirit free above, an ascension of soul towards some blissful Super-soul, an ascension of mind towards some luminous Supermind, an ascension of life towards some vast Super-life, an ascension of our very physicality to join its origin in some pure and plastic spirit-substance. And this cannot be a single swift upsoaring but, like the ascent of the sacrifice described in the Veda, a climbing from peak to peak in which from each summit one looks up to the much more that has still to be done. At the same time there must be a descent too to affirm below what we have gained above: on each height we conquer we have to turn to bring down its power and its illumination into the lower mortal movement; the discovery of the Light for ever radiant on high must correspond with the release of the same Light secret below in every part down to the deepest caves of subconscient Nature. And this pilgrimage of ascension and this descent for the labour of transformation must be inevitably a battle, a long war with ourselves and with opposing forces around us which, while it lasts, may well seem interminable. For all our old obscure and ignorant nature will contend repeatedly and obstinately with the transforming Influence, supported in its lagging unwillingness or its stark resistance by most of the established forces of environing universal Nature; the powers and principalities and the ruling beings of the Ignorance will not easily give up their empire.
At first there may have to be a prolonged, often tedious and painful period of preparation and purification of all our being till it is ready and fit for an opening to a greater Truth and Light or to the Divine Influence and Presence. Even when centrally fitted, prepared, open already, it will still be long before all our movements of mind, life and body, all the multiple and conflicting members and elements of our personality consent or, consenting, are able to bear the difficult and exacting process of the transformation. And hardest of all, even if all in us is willing, is the struggle we shall have to carry through against the universal forces attached to the present unstable creation when we seek to make the final supramental conversion and reversal of consciousness by which the Divine Truth must be established in us in its plenitude and not merely what they would more readily permit, an illumined Ignorance.
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
but also action as workers and instruments and a work to
be done in the world or a force to be brought in the world
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
telescopes and other advanced instruments cosmologists
have now at their disposal. Yet, the question is whether
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
are unfamiliar with the general conceptions held in mystic- ism as very strange indeed. But the idea of an inner man using a mind and body as instruments for the obtaining of experience and thus self-consciousness is inherent in every mystical system that has seen the light of the Sun. The classifications of the nature of man used by the various schools of Mysticism are tabulated on the opposite chart, using the ten Sephiros as the basis for comparison.
In their analysis of man, the Qabalists found that hand in hand with the physical body man had an automatic- or habit-forming or desire-consciousness, which gave him im- petus and volition in certain directions. It took care of the functions of his organism to which conscious attention was seldom directed, such as the circulation of the blood, the beating of the heart, and the involuntary motions of the diaphragm resulting in the inspiration and expiration of breath. They also noted the faculty of reason and criticism, the power whereby a man proceeds from premisses to con- clusion. And above and beyond this w r as the Spiritual entity who used this body, who used this desire and rational consciousness.
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Among the instruments of emancipation the supreme is devotion. Contemplation of the true form of the real Self (the Atman which is identical with Brahman) is said to be devotion.
In other words, the highest form of the love of God is an immediate spiritual intuition, by which knower, known and knowledge are made one. The means to, and earlier stages of, this supreme love-knowledge of Spirit by spirit are described by Shankara in the preceding verses of his philosophical poem, and consist in acts of a will directed towards the denial of selfness in thought, feeling and action, towards desirelessness and non-attachment or (to use the corresponding Christian term) holy indifference, towards a cheerful acceptance of affliction, without self-pity and without thought of returning evil for evil, and finally towards unsleeping and one-pointed mindfulness of the Godhead who is at once transcendent and, because transcendent, immanent in every soul.
1.05 - Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
including the mind, are only its openings on the different levels of universal reality, its instruments of transcription and expression. It is the traveller of the worlds,51 the explorer of the planes of consciousness; it connects our various modes of being together, from waking to sleep to death, when the small outer mind is no longer there to inform or guide us; it pervades the entire range of universal existence and communicates everywhere.
In other words, we have discovered consciousness. We have isolated what in ordinary man is constantly mixed with other things,
1.05 - Pratyahara and Dharana, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The next step is called Pratyhra. What is this? You know how perceptions come. First of all there are the external instruments, then the internal organs acting in the body through the brain centres, and there is the mind. When these come together and attach themselves to some external object, then we perceive it. At the same time it is a very difficult thing to concentrate the mind and attach it to one organ only; the mind is a slave.
We hear "Be good," and "Be good," and "Be good," taught all over the world. There is hardly a child, born in any country in the world, who has not been told, "Do not steal," "Do not tell a lie," but nobody tells the child how he can help doing them. Talking will not help him. Why should he not become a thief? We do not teach him how not to steal; we simply tell him, "Do not steal." Only when we teach him to control his mind do we really help him. All actions, internal and external, occur when the mind joins itself to certain centres, called the organs. Willingly or unwillingly it is drawn to join itself to the centres, and that is why people do foolish deeds and feel miserable, which, if the mind were under control, they would not do. What would be the result of controlling the mind? It then would not join itself to the centres of perception, and, naturally, feeling and willing would be under control. It is clear so far. Is it possible? It is perfectly possible. You see it in modern times; the faith-healers teach people to deny misery and pain and evil. Their philosophy is rather roundabout, but it is a part of Yoga upon which they have somehow stumbled. Where they succeed in making a person throw off suffering by denying it, they really use a part of Pratyahara, as they make the mind of the person strong enough to ignore the senses. The hypnotists in a similar manner, by their suggestion, excite in the patient a sort of morbid Pratyahara for the time being. The so-called hypnotic suggestion can only act upon a weak mind. And until the operator, by means of fixed gaze or otherwise, has succeeded in putting the mind of the subject in a sort of passive, morbid condition, his suggestions never work.
1.05 - Solitude, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving north-east rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially. I am tempted to reply to such,This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five
Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As the light of each of these higher powers is turned upon the human activities of knowledge, any distinction of sacred and profane, human and divine, begins more and more to fade until it is finally abolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and thoroughly penetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured and becomes a movement of its own Light and Power, free from the turbidity and limitations of the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a transformation of them all by the change of the informing consciousness that is the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and ever greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit.
If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition -- for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind -- has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, -- the secret heart-cave, hrdaye gunayam, as the Upanishads put it, -- and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle.
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It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the Divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun; it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards divinity and draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial of it, from all that is false and undivine. Yet the soul is at first but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when there is a formed psychic being, able to express itself with some directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller portion of the being -- "no bigger in the mass of the body than the thumb of a man" was the image used by the ancient seers -- and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity and ignorant smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature. This soul is obliged to accept the human mental, emotive, sensational life as it is, its relations, its activities, its cherished forms and figures; it has to labour to disengage and increase the divine element in all this relative truth mixed with continual falsifying error, this love turned to the uses of the animal body or the satisfaction of the vital ego, this life of an average manhood shot with rare and pale glimpses of Godhead and the darker luridities of the demon and the brute. Unerring in the essence of its will, it is obliged often under the pressure of its instruments to submit to mistakes of action, wrong placement of feeling, wrong choice of person, errors in the exact form of its will, in the circumstances of its expression of the infallible inner ideal. Yet is there a divination within it which makes it a surer guide than the reason or than even the highest desire, and through apparent errors and stumblings its voice can still lead better than the precise intellect and the considering mental judgment. This voice of the soul is not what we call conscience -- for that is only a mental and often conventional erring substitute; it is a deeper and more seldom heard call; yet to follow it when heard is wisest : even, it is better to wander at the call of one's soul than to go apparently straight with the reason and the outward moral mentor. But It is only when the life turns towards the Divine that the soul can truly come forward and impose its power on the outer members; for, itself a spark of the Divine, to grow in flame towards the Divine is its true life and its very reason of existence.
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on will and strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that surpasses the mere practical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, -- for it prefers rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, -- on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or with its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery as instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us. In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul movement. At once, emerging, it is ready and eager to break all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace them by a greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms and movements, but on condition that they are turned towards the One alone. It accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart's reverence for the Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for the ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the joy and happiness and satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere. It plunges the nature inward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in the heart's secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach of egoism, no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will deceive or divert it from its sacred longing and its obedience to the attraction of the Divinity within it. It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Ignorance. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness and the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture.
1.05 - THE NEW SPIRIT, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
even measured it, so far as their instruments permitted, as we do
now. But Time remained for them a homogeneous quantity, capa-
--- Overview of noun instrument
The noun instrument has 6 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
1. (23) instrument ::: (a device that requires skill for proper use)
2. (4) instrument, tool ::: (the means whereby some act is accomplished; "my greed was the instrument of my destruction"; "science has given us new tools to fight disease")
3. (1) instrument, pawn, cat's-paw ::: (a person used by another to gain an end)
4. legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument ::: ((law) a document that states some contractual relationship or grants some right)
5. instrumental role, instrument ::: (the semantic role of the entity (usually inanimate) that the agent uses to perform an action or start a process)
6. musical instrument, instrument ::: (any of various devices or contrivances that can be used to produce musical tones or sounds)
--- Overview of verb instrument
The verb instrument has 3 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
1. instrument ::: (equip with instruments for measuring, recording, or controlling)
2. instrument, instrumentate ::: (write an instrumental score for)
3. instrument ::: (address a legal document to)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun instrument
6 senses of instrument
Sense 1
instrument
=> device
=> instrumentality, instrumentation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
instrument, tool
=> means, agency, way
=> implementation, effectuation
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
instrument, pawn, cat's-paw
=> assistant, helper, help, supporter
=> worker
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 4
legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument
=> document, written document, papers
=> writing, written material, piece of writing
=> written communication, written language, black and white
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 5
instrumental role, instrument
=> semantic role, participant role
=> grammatical category, syntactic category
=> class, category, family
=> collection, aggregation, accumulation, assemblage
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
musical instrument, instrument
=> device
=> instrumentality, instrumentation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun instrument
3 of 6 senses of instrument
Sense 1
instrument
=> analyzer, analyser
=> cautery, cauterant
=> drafting instrument
=> engine
=> extractor
=> instrument of execution
=> instrument of punishment
=> measuring instrument, measuring system, measuring device
=> medical instrument
=> navigational instrument
=> optical instrument
=> plotter
=> scientific instrument
=> sonograph
=> surveying instrument, surveyor's instrument
=> tracer
=> weapon, arm, weapon system
=> whip
Sense 4
legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument
=> articles of incorporation
=> derivative instrument, derivative
=> negotiable instrument
=> passport
=> ship's papers
=> manifest
=> debenture
=> power of attorney
=> letters of administration
=> letters testamentary
=> working papers, work papers, work permit
=> act, enactment
=> law
=> bill, measure
=> brief, legal brief
=> will, testament
=> living will
=> deed, deed of conveyance, title
=> assignment
=> trust deed, deed of trust
=> conveyance
=> tax return, income tax return, return
=> license, licence, permit
=> patent, letters patent
=> opinion, legal opinion, judgment, judgement
=> acquittance, release
=> writ, judicial writ
=> mandate, authorization, authorisation
=> affidavit
=> written agreement
=> indictment, bill of indictment
=> impeachment
=> arraignment
=> security, certificate
Sense 6
musical instrument, instrument
=> barrel organ, grind organ, hand organ, hurdy gurdy, hurdy-gurdy, street organ
=> bass
=> calliope, steam organ
=> electronic instrument, electronic musical instrument
=> jew's harp, jews' harp, mouth bow
=> keyboard instrument
=> music box, musical box
=> percussion instrument, percussive instrument
=> stringed instrument
=> wind instrument, wind
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun instrument
6 senses of instrument
Sense 1
instrument
=> device
Sense 2
instrument, tool
=> means, agency, way
Sense 3
instrument, pawn, cat's-paw
=> assistant, helper, help, supporter
Sense 4
legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument
=> document, written document, papers
Sense 5
instrumental role, instrument
=> semantic role, participant role
Sense 6
musical instrument, instrument
=> device
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun instrument
6 senses of instrument
Sense 1
instrument
-> device
=> acoustic device
=> adapter, adaptor
=> afterburner
=> agglomerator
=> airfoil, aerofoil, control surface, surface
=> alarm, warning device, alarm system
=> appliance, contraption, contrivance, convenience, gadget, gizmo, gismo, widget
=> applicator, applier
=> aspergill, aspersorium
=> autopilot, automatic pilot, robot pilot
=> bait, decoy, lure
=> billiard marker
=> bird feeder, birdfeeder, feeder
=> blower
=> bootjack
=> breathalyzer, breathalyser
=> breathing device, breathing apparatus, breathing machine, ventilator
=> bubbler
=> buffer, fender
=> catapult, launcher
=> charger, battery charger
=> clip-on
=> comb
=> comforter, pacifier, baby's dummy, teething ring
=> conductor
=> contraceptive, preventive, preventative, contraceptive device, prophylactic device, birth control device
=> converter, convertor
=> corer
=> corrective, restorative
=> crusher
=> cryptograph
=> cutoff
=> dampener, moistener
=> damper, muffler
=> deflector
=> dental appliance
=> depressor
=> detector, sensor, sensing element
=> diestock
=> drive
=> drop forge, drop hammer, drop press
=> elastic device
=> electrical device
=> electronic device
=> energizer, energiser
=> exercise device
=> explosive device
=> fan
=> filter
=> fire extinguisher, extinguisher, asphyxiator
=> flare
=> fumigator
=> gas fixture
=> groover
=> guard, safety, safety device
=> heater, warmer
=> heat exchanger
=> holding device
=> horn
=> hydrofoil, foil
=> imprint
=> indicator
=> instrument
=> interlock, ignition interlock
=> interrupter
=> jig
=> key
=> keyboard
=> Kinetoscope
=> knocker, doorknocker, rapper
=> lift
=> lifting device
=> lighter, light, igniter, ignitor
=> machine
=> magnet
=> mechanism
=> memory device, storage device
=> musical instrument, instrument
=> nest egg
=> noisemaker
=> optical device
=> override
=> paper feed
=> peeler
=> pick, plectrum, plectron
=> power takeoff, PTO
=> prod, goad
=> prompter, autocue
=> pull
=> reflector
=> release, button
=> remote control, remote
=> reset
=> restraint, constraint
=> router
=> runner
=> scratcher
=> shoehorn
=> shoetree
=> shooting stick
=> shredder
=> signaling device
=> snowshoe
=> sounder
=> source of illumination
=> stabilizer, stabiliser
=> stemmer
=> straightener
=> strengthener, reinforcement
=> stylus
=> suction cup
=> support
=> sweatbox
=> synchroflash
=> take-up
=> teaser
=> throwing stick, throwing board, spear thrower, dart thrower
=> tilter
=> tongs, pair of tongs
=> toy
=> trap
=> trigger
=> valve
=> vaporizer, vaporiser
=> ventilator
=> washboard
=> water cooler
Sense 2
instrument, tool
-> means, agency, way
=> dint
=> escape
=> fast track
=> instrument, tool
=> road
=> stepping stone
=> expedient
=> desperate measure
=> open sesame
=> salvation
=> tooth
=> voice
=> wings
Sense 3
instrument, pawn, cat's-paw
-> assistant, helper, help, supporter
=> coadjutor
=> accomplice, confederate
=> aide, auxiliary
=> attendant, attender, tender
=> bat boy
=> dental assistant
=> deputy, lieutenant
=> dresser, actor's assistant
=> event planner
=> facilitator
=> flower girl
=> girl Friday
=> hatchet man, enforcer
=> instrument, pawn, cat's-paw
=> labor coach, birthing coach, doula, monitrice
=> underboss
=> mannequin, manikin, mannikin, manakin, fashion model, model
=> model, poser
=> paraprofessional
=> powder monkey
=> prompter, theater prompter
=> right-hand man, chief assistant, man Friday
=> secretary, secretarial assistant
=> sidesman
=> subordinate, subsidiary, underling, foot soldier
=> water boy, waterer
=> whipper-in
Sense 4
legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument
-> document, written document, papers
=> ballot
=> brevet
=> capitulation
=> certificate, certification, credential, credentials
=> charter
=> commercial document, commercial instrument
=> confession
=> copyright, right of first publication
=> enclosure, inclosure
=> form
=> legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument
=> papyrus
=> patent, patent of invention
=> platform, political platform, political program, program
=> resignation
=> resolution, declaration, resolve
=> source
=> specification
=> voucher
=> report, study, written report
Sense 5
instrumental role, instrument
-> semantic role, participant role
=> affected role, patient role, patient
=> agentive role, agent
=> benefactive role, beneficiary
=> instrumental role, instrument
=> locative role, locative
=> recipient role, recipient
=> resultant role, result
=> temporal role, temporal
Sense 6
musical instrument, instrument
-> device
=> acoustic device
=> adapter, adaptor
=> afterburner
=> agglomerator
=> airfoil, aerofoil, control surface, surface
=> alarm, warning device, alarm system
=> appliance, contraption, contrivance, convenience, gadget, gizmo, gismo, widget
=> applicator, applier
=> aspergill, aspersorium
=> autopilot, automatic pilot, robot pilot
=> bait, decoy, lure
=> billiard marker
=> bird feeder, birdfeeder, feeder
=> blower
=> bootjack
=> breathalyzer, breathalyser
=> breathing device, breathing apparatus, breathing machine, ventilator
=> bubbler
=> buffer, fender
=> catapult, launcher
=> charger, battery charger
=> clip-on
=> comb
=> comforter, pacifier, baby's dummy, teething ring
=> conductor
=> contraceptive, preventive, preventative, contraceptive device, prophylactic device, birth control device
=> converter, convertor
=> corer
=> corrective, restorative
=> crusher
=> cryptograph
=> cutoff
=> dampener, moistener
=> damper, muffler
=> deflector
=> dental appliance
=> depressor
=> detector, sensor, sensing element
=> diestock
=> drive
=> drop forge, drop hammer, drop press
=> elastic device
=> electrical device
=> electronic device
=> energizer, energiser
=> exercise device
=> explosive device
=> fan
=> filter
=> fire extinguisher, extinguisher, asphyxiator
=> flare
=> fumigator
=> gas fixture
=> groover
=> guard, safety, safety device
=> heater, warmer
=> heat exchanger
=> holding device
=> horn
=> hydrofoil, foil
=> imprint
=> indicator
=> instrument
=> interlock, ignition interlock
=> interrupter
=> jig
=> key
=> keyboard
=> Kinetoscope
=> knocker, doorknocker, rapper
=> lift
=> lifting device
=> lighter, light, igniter, ignitor
=> machine
=> magnet
=> mechanism
=> memory device, storage device
=> musical instrument, instrument
=> nest egg
=> noisemaker
=> optical device
=> override
=> paper feed
=> peeler
=> pick, plectrum, plectron
=> power takeoff, PTO
=> prod, goad
=> prompter, autocue
=> pull
=> reflector
=> release, button
=> remote control, remote
=> reset
=> restraint, constraint
=> router
=> runner
=> scratcher
=> shoehorn
=> shoetree
=> shooting stick
=> shredder
=> signaling device
=> snowshoe
=> sounder
=> source of illumination
=> stabilizer, stabiliser
=> stemmer
=> straightener
=> strengthener, reinforcement
=> stylus
=> suction cup
=> support
=> sweatbox
=> synchroflash
=> take-up
=> teaser
=> throwing stick, throwing board, spear thrower, dart thrower
=> tilter
=> tongs, pair of tongs
=> toy
=> trap
=> trigger
=> valve
=> vaporizer, vaporiser
=> ventilator
=> washboard
=> water cooler
--- Grep of noun instrument
beating-reed instrument
bowed stringed instrument
brass instrument
commercial instrument
debt instrument
derivative instrument
double-reed instrument
drafting instrument
electronic instrument
electronic musical instrument
execution of instrument
free-reed instrument
instrument
instrument flying
instrument landing
instrument of execution
instrument of punishment
instrument of torture
instrument panel
instrumental conditioning
instrumental music
instrumental role
instrumentalism
instrumentalist
instrumentality
instrumentation
keyboard instrument
legal instrument
measuring instrument
medical instrument
musical instrument
musical instrument digital interface
navigational instrument
negotiable instrument
optical instrument
percussion instrument
percussive instrument
reed instrument
scientific instrument
sealed instrument
single-reed instrument
stringed instrument
surgical instrument
surveying instrument
surveyor's instrument
test instrument vehicle
time-delay measuring instrument
transit instrument
wind instrument
woodwind instrument