TERMS STARTING WITH
profound ::: a. --> Descending far below the surface; opening or reaching to a great depth; deep.
Intellectually deep; entering far into subjects; reaching to the bottom of a matter, or of a branch of learning; thorough; as, a profound investigation or treatise; a profound scholar; profound wisdom.
Characterized by intensity; deeply felt; pervading; overmastering; far-reaching; strongly impressed; as, a profound sleep.
profoundly ::: adv. --> In a profound manner.
profound ::: n. 1. That which is eminently deep, or the deepest part of something; a vast depth; an abyss. lit. and fig; chiefly poetical. adj. 2. Situated at or extending to great depth; too deep to have been sounded or plumbed. 3. Coming as if from the depths of one"s being. 4. Of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance. 5. Being or going far beneath what is superficial, external, or obvious. 6. Showing or requiring great knowledge or understanding. profounder.
profoundness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being profound; profundity; depth.
Profound Virtue and Mysterious Power, through the cultivation of one's original nature and the returning to the character of Tao. Thus one "becomes identified with the Beginning, attains emptiness and vastness, and enters into mystic union with the Universe." (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.) -- W.T.C
TERMS ANYWHERE
AbhAsvarAloka. (P. Abhassaraloka; T. 'od gsal ba; C. jiguangjing tian/guangyintian; J. gokukojoten/koonten; K. kŭkkwangjong ch'on/kwangŭmch'on 極光淨天/光音天). In Sanskrit, the "heaven of radiant light" (in Chinese, the name is also parsed as the "heaven of radiant sound"), the highest of the three heavens associated with the second concentration (DHYANA) of the realm of subtle materiality (RuPADHATU). As the BRAHMA divinities dwelling in this realm perpetually experience this profound state of meditation, they are described as subsisting on bliss (PRĪTI) and abiding in ease (SUKHA). Their bodies radiate light in all directions like lightning or like flames from a torch. While the bodies of the divinities of this realm are uniform, their perceptions are diverse, and there is no assurance that they will not be reborn in a lower realm of existence after their death. At the beginning of a world cycle, when the physical world (BHAJANALOKA) of the sensuous realm (KAMADHATU) has not yet been formed, and at the end of a world cycle when that physical world has been destroyed, many beings are reborn into the AbhAsvarAloka. A BODHISATTVA is never reborn in the immaterial realm (ARuPYADHATU) even if he has achieved meditative states consistent with that realm, but he may be reborn in the AbhAsvarAloka. The Buddha once disabused a BrahmA god dwelling in that realm of the mistaken view that he was eternal. This god, whose name was Baka, had been the first living being born in the AbhAsvarAloka after a period of world dissolution, and presumed that no one had existed before him. When the divinities (DEVA) of the AbhAsvarAloka are first reborn in the realm of human beings (MANUsYA), they may retain their divine attributes for a time, being spontaneously generated rather than born viviparously, and possessing bodies made from subtle materiality rather than gross matter. However, as time passes and they take on the physical and mental characteristics of ordinary human beings, they lose their luminosity, develop sexual characteristics, and come to subsist on solid foods.
Abhidhamma (Pali) Abhidhamma [from abhi towards, with intensified meaning + dhamma law, religion, duty from the verbal root dhr to hold fast, preserve, sustain] The supreme dhamma or law as expounded in the third and last portion of the Pali Tipitaka (Sanskrit Tripitaka) or “three baskets” of the canonical books of the Southern School of Buddhism. The Abhidhamma-pitaka, which deals with profound metaphysical themes, is believed to be the source from which the Mahayana and Hinayana got their fundamental doctrines.
abhidhammika. [alt. Abhidhammika]. In PAli, "specialist in the ABHIDHAMMA"; scholarly monks who specialized in study of the abhidhamma (S. ABHIDHARMA) section of the Buddhist canon. In the PAli tradition, particular importance has long been attached to the study of abhidharma. The AttHASALINĪ says that the first ABHIDHAMMIKA was the Buddha himself, and the abhidhammikas were presumed to be the most competent exponents of the teachings of the religion. Among the Buddha's immediate disciples, the premier abhidhammika was SAriputta (S. sARIPUTRA), who was renowned for his systematic grasp of the dharma. Monastic "families" of abhidhamma specialists were known as abhidhammikagana, and they passed down through the generations their own scholastic interpretations of Buddhist doctrine, interpretations that sometimes differed from those offered by specialists in the scriptures (P. sutta; S. SuTRA) or disciplinary rules (VINAYA) . In medieval Sri Lanka, the highest awards within the Buddhist order were granted to monks who specialized in this branch of study, rather than to experts in the scriptures or disciplinary rules. Special festivals were held in honor of the abhidhamma, which involved the recital of important texts and the granting of awards to participants. In contemporary Myanmar (Burma), where the study of abhidhamma continues to be highly esteemed, the seventh book of the PAli ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, the PAttHANA ("Conditions"), is regularly recited in festivals that the Burmese call pathan pwe. Pathan pwe are marathon recitations that go on for days, conducted by invited abhidhammikas who are particularly well versed in the PatthAna, the text that is the focus of the festival. The pathan pwe serves a function similar to that of PARITTA recitations, in that it is believed to ward off baleful influences, but its main designated purpose is to forestall the decline and disappearance of the Buddha's dispensation (P. sAsana; S. sASANA). The TheravAda tradition considers the PatthAna to be the Buddha's most profound exposition of ultimate truth (P. paramatthasacca; S. PARAMARTHASATYA), and according to the PAli commentaries, the PatthAna is the first constituent of the Buddha's dispensation that will disappear from the world as the religion faces its inevitable decline. The abhidhammikas' marathon recitations of the PatthAna, therefore, help to ward off the eventual demise of the Buddhist religion. This practice speaks of a THERAVADA orientation in favor of scholarship that goes back well over a thousand years. Since at least the time of BUDDHAGHOSA (c. fifth century CE), the life of scholarship (P. PARIYATTI), rather than that of meditation or contemplation (P. PAtIPATTI), has been the preferred vocational path within PAli Buddhist monasticism. Monks who devoted themselves exclusively to meditation were often portrayed as persons who lacked the capacity to master the intricacies of PAli scholarship. Even so, meditation was always recommended as the principal means by which one could bring scriptural knowledge to maturity, either through awakening or the realization (P. pativedha; S. PRATIVEDHA) of Buddhist truths. See also ABHIDHARMIKA.
abhijNA. (P. abhiNNA; T. mngon shes; C. shentong; J. jinzu; K. sint'ong 神通). In Sanskrit, "superknowledges"; specifically referring to a set of supranormal powers that are by-products of meditation. These are usually enumerated as six: (1) various psychical and magical powers (ṚDDHIVIDHABHIJNA [alt. ṛddhividhi], P. iddhividhA), such as the ability to pass through walls, sometimes also known as "unimpeded bodily action" (ṛddhisAksAtkriyA); (2) clairvoyance, lit. "divine eye" (DIVYACAKsUS, P. dibbacakkhu), the ability to see from afar and to see how beings fare in accordance with their deeds; (3) clairaudience, lit. "divine ear" (DIVYAsROTRA, P. dibbasota), the ability to hear from afar; (4) the ability to remember one's own former lives (PuRVANIVASANUSMṚTI, P. pubbenivAsAnunssati); (5) "knowledge of others' states of mind" (CETOPARYAYABHIJNANA/PARACITTAJNANA, P. cetopariyaNAna), e.g., telepathy; and (6) the knowledge of the extinction of the contaminants (ASRAVAKsAYA, P. AsavakkhAya). The first five of these superknowledges are considered to be mundane (LAUKIKA) achievements, which are gained through still more profound refinement of the fourth stage of meditative absorption (DHYANA). The sixth power is said to be supramundane (LOKOTTARA) and is attainable through the cultivation of insight (VIPAsYANA) into the nature of reality. The first, second, and sixth superknowledges are also called the three kinds of knowledge (TRIVIDYA; P. tevijjA).
abhimukhī. (T. mngon du 'gyur ba/mngon du phyogs pa; C. xianqian [di]; J. genzen[chi]; K. hyonjon [chi] 現前[地]). In Sanskrit, "manifest" or "evident"; used with reference to a twofold classification of phenomena as manifest (abhimukhī)-viz., those things that are evident to sense perception-and hidden (S. PAROKsA, T. lkog gyur)-viz., those things whose existence must be inferred through reasoning. ¶ Abhimukhī, as "immediacy" or "face-to-face," is the sixth of the ten stages (BHuMI) of the BODHISATTVA path described in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA. The MAHAYANASuTRALAMKARA interprets this bhumi as "directly facing," or "face-to-face," implying that the bodhisattva at this stage of the path stands at the intersection between SAMSARA and NIRVAnA. The bodhisattva here realizes the equality of all phenomena (dharmasamatA), e.g., that all dharmas are signless and free of characteristics, unproduced and unoriginated, and free from the duality of existence and nonexistence. Turning away from the compounded dharmas of saMsAra, the bodhisattva turns to face the profound wisdom of the buddhas and is thus "face-to-face" with both the compounded (SAMSKṚTA) and uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) realms. This bhumi is typically correlated with mastery of the sixth perfection (PARAMITA), the perfection of wisdom (PRAJNAPARAMITA).
A profound lore of numbers, measures, and their relation to the cosmic plan impelled their architects to build their records according to these now forgotten mathematical principles. Many investigators have discovered fragments of this lore but have not succeeded in reconstructing the whole out of the fragments.
Absolute ::: A term which unfortunately is much abused and often misused even in theosophical writings. It is aconvenient word in Occidental philosophy by which is described the utterly unconditioned; but it is apractice which violates both the etymology of the word and even the usage of some keen and carefulthinkers as, for instance, Sir William Hamilton in his Discussions (3rd edition, p.13n), who apparentlyuses the word absolute in the exactly correct sense in which theosophists should use it as meaning"finished," "perfected," "completed." As Hamilton observes: "The Absolute is diametrically opposed to,is contradictory of, the Infinite." This last statement is correct, and in careful theosophical writings theword Absolute should be used in Hamilton's sense, as meaning that which is freed, unloosed, perfected,completed.Absolute is from the Latin absolutum, meaning "freed," "unloosed," and is, therefore, an exact Englishparallel of the Sanskrit philosophical term moksha or mukti, and more mystically of the Sanskrit term socommonly found in Buddhist writings especially, nirvana -- an extremely profound and mysticalthought.Hence, to speak of parabrahman as being the Absolute may be a convenient usage for Occidentals whounderstand neither the significance of the term parabrahman nor the etymology, origin, and proper usageof the English word Absolute -- "proper" outside of a common and familiar employment.In strict accuracy, therefore, the student should use the word Absolute only when he means what theHindu philosopher means when he speaks of moksha or mukti or of a mukta -- i.e., one who has obtainedmukti or freedom, one who has arrived at the acme or summit of all evolution possible in any onehierarchy, although as compared with hierarchies still more sublime, such jivanmukta is but a merebeginner. The Silent Watcher in theosophical philosophy is an outstanding example of one who can besaid to be absolute in the fully accurate meaning of the word. It is obvious that the Silent Watcher is notparabrahman. (See also Moksha, Relativity)
abysmal ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or resembling, an abyss; bottomless; unending; profound.
abysmally ::: adv. --> To a fathomless depth; profoundly.
abyss ::: 1. The great deep, the primal chaos; the ‘bowels of the earth", the supposed cavity of the lower world; the ‘infernal pit". 2. A bottomless gulf; any unfathomable or apparently unfathomable cavity or void space; a profound gulf, chasm, or void extending beneath. Abyss, abyss"s, abysses.
Accelerating change - a perceived increase in the rate of technological (and sometimes social and cultural) progress throughout history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future.
accelerating change ::: A perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.
acroamatical ::: a. --> Communicated orally; oral; -- applied to the esoteric teachings of Aristotle, those intended for his genuine disciples, in distinction from his exoteric doctrines, which were adapted to outsiders or the public generally. Hence: Abstruse; profound.
ad.ha-supta svapna (gadha-supta swapna) ::: svapnasamadhi in profound sleep; the deepest sus.upta-svapna.
AD), king of Persia, widely respected for both his extensive knowledge and his profound wisdom.
adoration ::: n. --> The act of playing honor to a divine being; the worship paid to God; the act of addressing as a god.
Homage paid to one in high esteem; profound veneration; intense regard and love; fervent devotion.
A method of electing a pope by the expression of homage from two thirds of the conclave.
adore ::: v. t. --> To worship with profound reverence; to pay divine honors to; to honor as deity or as divine.
To love in the highest degree; to regard with the utmost esteem and affection; to idolize.
To adorn.
Akasic Samadhi [adjective of ākāśa ether, space + samādhi profound meditation from sam-ā-dha to hold or fix together (in abstract thought)] Used for the state of consciousness into which victims of accidental death enter: “a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams, during which, they have no recollection of the accident, but move and live among their familiar friends and scenes, until their natural life-term is finished, when they find themselves born in the Deva-Chan . . .” (ML 109).
“All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite’s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit’s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being,—an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves,—but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” The Life Divine
All of these factors were seen by the Faxiang school as being simply projections of consciousness (VIJNAPTIMĀTRALĀ). As noted earlier, consciousness (VIJNĀNA) was itself subdivided into an eightfold schema: the six sensory consciousnesses (visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and mental), plus the seventh ego consciousness (manas, or KLIstAMANAS), which invests these sensory experiences with selfhood, and an eighth "storehouse consciousness" (ālayavijNāna), which stores the seeds or potentialities (BĪJA) of these experiences until they sprout as new cognition. One of the most controversial doctrines of the Faxiang school was its rejection of a theory of inherent enlightenment or buddhahood (i.e., TATHĀGATAGARBHA) and its advocacy of five distinct spiritual lineages or destinies (PANCAGOTRA): (1) the TATHĀGATA lineage (GOTRA), for those destined to become buddhas; (2) the PRATYEKABUDDHA lineage, for those destined to become ARHATs via the pratyekabuddha vehicle; (3) the sRĀVAKAYĀNA lineage, for those who will become arhats via the sRĀVAKA vehicle; (4) those of indefinite (ANIYATA) lineage, who may follow any of three vehicles; and (5) those without lineage (agotra), who are ineligible for liberation or who have lost the potential to become enlightened by becoming "incorrigibles" (ICCHANTIKA). The Faxiang school's claim that beings belonged to these various lineages because of the seeds (BĪJA) already present in the mind seemed too fatalistic to its East Asian rivals. In addition, Faxiang's acceptance of the notion that some beings could completely lose all yearning for enlightenment and fall permanently into the state of icchantikas so profoundly conflicted with the pervasive East Asian acceptance of innate enlightenment that it thwarted the school's aspirations to become a dominant tradition in China, Korea, or Japan. Even so, much in the Faxiang analysis of consciousness, as well as its exegetical techniques, were incorporated into mainstream scholasticism in East Asia and continued to influence the subsequent development of Buddhism in the region.
(a) Mysterious; profound; abstruse.
ananda ::: delight, bliss, ecstasy, beatitude; "a profound concentrated ananda intense self-existent bliss extended to all that our being does, envisages, creates, a fixed divine rapture"; same as sama ananda, the universal delight which constitutes active / positive samata, "an equal delight in all the cosmic manifestation of the Divine", whose "foundation is the Atmajnana or Brahmajnana by which we perceive the whole universe as a perception of one Being that manifests itself in multitudinous forms and activities"; the highest of the three stages of active / positive . 12 samata, "the joy of Unity" by which "all is changed into the full and pure ecstasy" of the Spirit; the third and highest state of bhukti, consisting of the delight of existence experienced "throughout the system" in seven principal forms (kamananda, premananda, ahaituka ananda, cidghanananda, suddhananda, cidananda and sadananda) corresponding to the seven kosas or sheaths of the being and the seven lokas or planes of existence; physical ananda or sarirananda in its five forms, also called vividhananda (various delight), the fourth member of the sarira catus.t.aya; (especially in the plural, "anandas") any of these forms of ananda; same as anandaṁ brahma, the last aspect of the fourfold brahman; bliss of infinite conscious existence, "the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding delight", the third aspect of saccidananda and the principle manifested in its purity in janaloka or anandaloka, also present in an involved or subordinated form on every other plane.
ANANDA. ::: Delight; essential principle of delight; bliss; spiritual ecstasy; the bliss of the Spirit which is the secret source· and support of all existence.
Ānanda is the secret delight from which all things are born, by which all is sustained in existence and to which all can rise in the spiritual culmination.
It is the Divine Bliss which comes from above. It is not joy or pleasure, but something self-existent, pure and quite beyond what any joy or pleasure can be.
Something greater than peace or joy, something that, like Truth and Light, is the very nature of the supramental Divine. It can come by frequent inrushes or descents, partially or for a time, but it cannot -remain in the system so long as the system has not been prepared for it.
It can come not only with its fullest intensity but with a more enduring persistence when the mind is at peace and the heart delivered from ordinary joy and sorrow. If the mind and heart are restless, changeful, unquiet, Ānanda of a kind may come, but it is mixed with vital excitement and cannot abide. One must get peace and calm fixed in the consciousness first, then there is a solid basis on which Ānanda can spread itself and in its turn become an enduring part of the consciousness and the nature.
Ānanda (ascension into) ::: It is quite impossible to ascend to the real Ānanda plane (except in a profound trance), until after the supramental consciousness has been entered, realised and possessed; but it is quite possible and normal to feel some form of Ānanda consciousness on any level. This consciousness, wherever it is felt, is a derivation from the Ānanda plane, but it is very much diminished in power and modified to suit the lesser power of receptivity of the inferior levels.
Ānanda (divine) in the physical ::: self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine.
Ānanda (of the Brahman) ::: there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a concentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture.
AngulimAla. (S. alt. AngulimAlīya; T. Sor mo phreng ba; C. Yangjuemoluo; J. okutsumara; K. Anggulmara 央掘摩羅). In Sanskrit and PAli, literally, "Garland of Fingers"; nickname given to AhiMsaka, a notorious murderer and highwayman who was converted by the Buddha and later became an ARHAT; the Sanskrit is also seen written as AngulimAlya and AngulimAlīya. AhiMsaka was born under the thieves' constellation as the son of a brAhmana priest who served the king of KOsALA. His given name means "Harmless," because even though his birth was attended by many marvels, no one was injured. The boy was intelligent and became a favorite of his teacher. His classmates, out of jealousy, poisoned his teacher's mind against him, who thenceforth sought AhiMsaka's destruction. His teacher instructed AhiMsaka that he must collect one thousand fingers as a gift. (In an alternate version of the story, the brAhmana teacher's wife, driven by lust, attempted to seduce the handsome student, but when he rebuffed her, the resentful wife informed her husband that it was instead he who had attempted to seduce her. Knowing that he could not defeat his disciple by force, the vengeful brAhmana teacher told his student that he must kill a thousand people and string together a finger from each victim into a garland as the final stage of his training.) Following his teacher's instructions, he began to murder travelers, cutting off a single finger from each victim. These he made into a garland that he wore around his neck, hence his nickname AngulimAla, or "Garland of Fingers." With one finger left to complete his collection, AngulimAla resolved to murder his own mother, who was then entering the forest where he dwelled. It was at this time that the Buddha decided to intervene. Recognizing that the thief was capable of attaining arhatship in this life but would lose that chance if he killed one more person, the Buddha taunted AngulimAla and converted him through a miracle: although the Buddha continued to walk sedately in front of the brigand, AngulimAla could not catch him no matter how fast he ran. Intrigued at this feat, AngulimAla called out to the Buddha to stop, but the Buddha famously responded, "I have stopped, AngulimAla; may you stop as well." AngulimAla thereupon became a disciple of the Buddha and spent his time practicing the thirteen austere practices (see DHUTAnGA), eventually becoming an ARHAT. Because of his former misdeeds, even after he was ordained as a monk and became an arhat, he still had to endure the hatred of the society he used to terrorize, sometimes suffering frightful beatings. The Buddha explained that the physical pain he suffered was a consequence of his violent past and that he should endure it with equanimity. His fate illustrates an important point in the theory of KARMAN: viz., even a noble one who has overcome all prospect of future rebirth and who is certain to enter NIRVAnA at death can still experience physical (but not mental) pain in his last lifetime as a result of past heinous deeds. AngulimAla also became the "patron saint" of pregnant women in Buddhist cultures. Once, while out on his alms round, AngulimAla was profoundly moved by the suffering of a mother and her newborn child. The Buddha recommended that AngulimAla cure them by an "asseveration of truth" (SATYAVACANA). The Buddha first instructed him to say, "Sister, since I was born, I do not recall that I have ever intentionally deprived a living being of life. By this truth, may you be well and may your infant be well." When AngulimAla politely pointed out that this was not entirely accurate, the Buddha amended the statement to begin, "since I was born with noble birth." The phrase "noble birth" can be interpreted in a number of ways, but here it seems to mean "since I became a monk." When AngulimAla spoke these words to the mother and her child, they were cured. His statement has been repeated by monks to pregnant women over the centuries in the hope of assuring successful childbirth. See also AnGULIMALĪYASuTRA.
anupubbikathA. (S. anupurvikathA; T. mthar gyis pa; C. cidi shuofa/jianwei shuofa; J. shidai seppo/zen'i seppo; K. ch'aje solbop/chomwi solbop 次第法/漸爲法). In PAli, "graduated discourse" or "step-by-step instruction"; the systematic outline of religious benefits that the Buddha used to mold the understanding of new lay adherents and to guide them toward the first stage of enlightenment. In this elementary discourse, the Buddha would outline the benefits of generosity (dAnakathA) and morality (sīlakathA) before finally holding out for the laity the prospect of rebirth in the heavens (svargakathA). Once their minds were pliant and impressionable, the Buddha then would instruct his listeners in the dangers (ADĪNAVA) inherent in sensuality (KAMA) in order to turn them away from the world and toward the advantages of renunciation (P. nekkhamme AnisaMsa). Only after his listeners' minds were made fully receptive would the Buddha then go on to teach them the doctrine that was unique to the buddhas: the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS of suffering, origination, cessation, and path. Understanding the pervasive reality of the fact that "all that is subject to production is subject to cessation" (yaM kiNci samudayadhammaM taM nirodhadhammaM), the laity would then gain a profound personal understanding of the dharma, which often prompted the experience of "stream-entry" (SROTAAPANNA). The "graduated discourse" was such a stock formula in the standard sermon to the laity that it appears only in summary form in the NIKAYAs and AGAMAs. The only detailed treatment of the graduated discourse appears in the TundilovAdasutta (Advice to Layman Tundila), a late PAli apocryphon (see APOCRYPHA) probably composed in Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century. This late text provides a systematic outline of the specifics of the practice of generosity (DANA), morality (sĪLA), the heavens (SVARGA), the dangers in sensual desires, and the benefits of renunciation, leading up to the "perfect peace" of nibbAna (S. NIRVAnA).
Apocrypha [from Greek apokryphos secret] Esoteric, hid, secret; later spurious. First applied to writings regarded as esoteric, for private instruction, and of profounder import than the exoteric writings; but the rise of bogus esoteric schools gradually brought the word into contempt and clothed it with its later meaning of spurious or doubtful.
Arudha (Sanskrit) Ārūḍha [from ā-ruh to mount, rise up] Mounted, ascended, raised up, attained; attainment. Used in compounds, such as indriyarudha (perceived, brought under the cognizance of the senses); yogarudha (absorbed in profound meditation, attainment of yoga or union).
ASANA. ::: Fixed posture habituating the body to certain attitudes of immobility. The system of Asana has at its basis two profound ideas ::: control by physical immobility, power by immobility.
The sitting motionless posture is the natural posture for concentrated meditation - walking and standing are active conditions. It is only when one has gained the enduring rest and passivity of the consciousness that it is easy to concentrate and receive when walking or doing anything. A fundamental passive condition of the consciousness gathered into itself is the proper poise for concentration and a seated gathered immobility in the body is the best position for that. It can be done also lying down, but that position is too passive, tending to be inert rather than gathered. This is the reason why yogis always sit in an āsana. One can accustom oneself to meditate walking. standing, lying but sitting is the first natural position.
Asanga. (T. Thogs med; C. Wuzhao; J. Mujaku; K. Much'ak 無著) (c. 320-c. 390 CE). a.k.a. Arya Asanga, Indian scholar who is considered to be a founder of the YOGACARA school of MAHAYANA Buddhism. In the Tibetan tradition, he is counted as one of the "six ornaments of JAMBUDVĪPA" ('dzam gling rgyan drug), together with VASUBANDHU, NAGARJUNA and ARYADEVA, and DIGNAGA and DHARMAKĪRTI. Born into a brAhmana family in Purusapura (modern-day Peshawar, Pakistan), Asanga originally studied under SARVASTIVADA (possibly MAHĪsASAKA) teachers but converted to the MahAyAna later in life. His younger brother was the important exegete Vasubandhu; it is said that he was converted to the MahAyAna by Asanga. According to traditional accounts, Asanga spent twelve years in meditation retreat, after which he received a vision of the future buddha MAITREYA. He visited Maitreya's abode in TUsITA heaven, where the bodhisattva instructed him in MahAyAna and especially YogAcAra doctrine. Some of these teachings were collected under the name MaitreyanAtha, and the Buddhist tradition generally regards them as revealed by Asanga through the power of the future buddha. Some modern scholars, however, have posited the existence of a historical figure named MAITREYANATHA or simply Maitreya. Asanga is therefore associated with what are known as the "five treatises of MaitreyanAtha" (the ABHISAMAYALAMKARA, the DHARMADHARMATAVIBHAGA, the MADHYANTAVIBHAGA, the MAHAYANASuTRALAMKARA, and the RATNAGOTRAVIBHAGA). Asanga was a prolific author, composing commentaries on the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA and the VAJRACCHEDIKAPRAJNAPARAMITASuTRA. Among his independent treatises, three are particularly important. The ABHIDHARMASAMUCCAYA sets forth the categories of the ABHIDHARMA from a YogAcAra perspective. The MAHAYANASAMGRAHA is a detailed exposition of YogAcAra doctrine, setting forth such topics as the ALAYAVIJNANA and the TRISVABHAVA as well as the constituents of the path. His largest work is the compendium entitled YOGACARABHuMIsASTRA. Two of its sections, the sRAVAKABHuMI and the BODHISATTVABHuMI, circulated as independent works, with the former important for its exposition of the practice of DHYANA and the latter for its exposition of the bodhisattva's practice of the six PARAMITA; the chapter on sĪLA is particularly influential. These texts have had a lasting and profound impact on the development of Buddhism, especially in India, Tibet, and East Asia. Among the great figures in the history of Indian Buddhism, Asanga is rare for the breadth of his interests and influence, making significant contributions to philosophy (as the founder of YogAcAra), playing a key role in TATHAGATAGARBHA thought (through the RatnagotravibhAga), and providing significant expositions of Buddhist practice (in the YogAcArabhumi).
Asat (Sanskrit) Asat [from a not + sat being from the verbal root as to be] Not being, non-being; used in the Indian philosophies with two meanings almost diametrically opposed: firstly, as the false, the unreal, or the manifested universe, in contrast with sat, the real; secondly, in a profoundly mystical sense, as all that is beyond or higher than sat. “Sat is born from Asat, and Asat is begotten by Sat: the perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Paranirvana” (SD 2:449-50). In its lower sense, asat signifies the realms of objective nature built out of and from the various prakritis, and therefore regarded as illusory in contrast to the enduring Be-ness or sat. In its higher sense asat is that boundless and eternal metaphysical essence of space out of which, in which, and from which even sat or Be-ness itself is and endures. Asat here is parabrahman-mulaprakriti in its most abstract meaning.
Asat(Sanskrit) ::: A term meaning the "unreal" or the manifested universe; in contrast with sat , the real. Inanother and even more mystical sense, asat means even beyond or higher than sat, and therefore asat -"not sat." In this significance, which is profoundly occult and deeply mystical, asat really signifies theunevolved or rather unmanifested nature of parabrahman -- far higher than sat, which is the reality ofmanifested existence.
Augustinianism. Alexander of Hales (+1245) is the founder of this line and the first great Scholastic to utilize all of Aristotle's works, whose terminology and concepts he adopted rather than the spirit. Others worthy of mention are John de la Rochelle (+1145), Adam of Marsh (+1258) and Thomas of York (+1260). The Metaphysica of this latter constitutes a milestone in philsophy's fight for autonomy. The outstanding representative of this group is Bonaventure (+1274), who combined great constructive ability with profound psychological and mystical insight. Prominent among his pupils were Matthew of Aquasparta (+1302), John Peckham (+1292), William de la Mare (+1298) and Walter of Brügge (+1306). Also prominent in this line are Roger of Marston, Richard of Middleton (+1308), a forerunner of Duns Scotus, William of Ware, Duns Scotus' master, and Peter Johannis Olivi (+1298). Among the Dominicans who belonged to this group should be mentioned Roland of Cremona, Peter of Tarantaise (+1276), Richard Fitzacre (+1248) and Robert Kilwardby (+1279). Among the secular clergy, although more independent in their allegiance, we may place here Gerard of Abbeville and Henri of Ghent (1293).
aum; Om appears first in the Upanishads as a mystic monosyllable used as the object of profound religious meditation, the highest spiritual effects being attributed not only to the whole word but also to the three sounds a, u, m of which it consists. In later times is used as the mystic name for the Hindu triad, the union of the three gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Also considered as a divine affirmation of respectful assent sometimes translated by 'yes, verily, so be it'(in this sense compared with Amen), and also regarded as a divine salutation as 'hail!'.
Avatamsaka Sutra (Sanskrit) Avataṃsaka Sutra The Flower Ornament Scripture or The Flower Adornment Scripture; a long and very profound Buddhist scripture, which Nagarjuna “brought back from the Realm of the Nagas” (adepts) (BCW 14:510). The basis for modern translations is the Chinese translation of Shikshananda (652-710). (BCW 14:285, 423; 6:100-1)
AvataMsakasutra. (T. Mdo phal po che; C. Huayan jing; J. Kegongyo; K. Hwaom kyong 華嚴經). In Sanskrit, "Garland Scripture"; also known as the BUDDHAVATAMSAKASuTRA ("Scripture of the Garland of Buddhas"), or *BuddhAvataMsakanAmamahAvaipulyasutra, the Sanskrit reconstruction of the title of the Chinese translation Dafangguang fo huayan jing, which is usually abbreviated in Chinese simply as the HUAYAN JING ("Flower Garland Scripture"). The sutra is one of the most influential Buddhist scriptures in East Asia and the foundational text of the indigenous East Asian HUAYAN ZONG. The first major edition of the AvataMsakasutra was said to have been brought from KHOTAN and was translated into Chinese by BUDDHABHADRA in 421; this recension consisted of sixty rolls and thirty-four chapters. A second, longer recension, in eighty rolls and thirty-nine chapters, was translated into Chinese by sIKsANANDA in 699; this is sometimes referred to within the Huayan tradition as the "New [translation of the] AvataMsakasutra" (Xin Huayan jing). A Tibetan translation similar to the eighty-roll recension also exists. The AvataMsakasutra is traditionally classified as a VAIPULYASuTRA; it is an encyclopedic work that brings together a number of heterogeneous texts, such as the GAndAVYuHA and DAsABHuMIKASuTRA, which circulated independently before being compiled together in this scripture. No Sanskrit recension of the AvataMsakasutra has been discovered; even the title is not known from Sanskrit sources, but is a reconstruction of the Chinese. (Recent research in fact suggests that the correct Sanskrit title might actually be BuddhAvataMsakasutra, or "Scripture of the Garland of Buddhas," rather than AvataMsakasutra.) There are, however, extant Sanskrit recensions of two of its major constituents, the Dasabhumikasutra and Gandavyuha. Given the dearth of evidence of a Sanskrit recension of the complete AvataMsakasutra, and since the scripture was first introduced to China from Khotan, some scholars have argued that the scripture may actually be of Central Asian provenance (or at very least was heavily revised in Central Asia). There also exists in Chinese translation a forty-roll recension of the AvataMsakasutra, translated by PRAJNA in 798, which roughly corresponds to the Gandavyuha, otherwise known in Chinese as the Ru fajie pin or "Chapter on the Entry into the DHARMADHATU." Little attempt is made to synthesize these disparate materials into an overarching narrative, but there is a tenuous organizational schema involving a series of different "assemblies" to which the different discourses are addressed. The Chinese tradition presumed that the AvataMsakasutra was the first sermon of the Buddha (see HUAYAN ZHAO), and the sutra's first assembly takes place at the BODHI TREE two weeks after he had attained enlightenment while he was still immersed in the samAdhi of oceanic reflection (SAGARAMUDRASAMADHI). The AvataMsaka is therefore believed to provide a comprehensive and definitive description of the Buddha's enlightenment experience from within this profound state of samAdhi. The older sixty-roll recension includes a total of eight assemblies held at seven different locations: three in the human realm and the rest in the heavens. The later eighty-roll recension, however, includes a total of nine assemblies at seven locations, a discrepancy that led to much ink in Huayan exegesis. In terms of its content, the sutra offers exuberant descriptions of myriads of world systems populated by buddhas and bodhisattvas, along with elaborate imagery focusing especially on radiant light and boundless space. The scripture is also the inspiration for the famous metaphor of INDRAJALA (Indra's Net), a canopy made of transparent jewels in which each jewel is reflected in all the others, suggesting the multivalent levels of interaction between all phenomena in the universe. The text focuses on the unitary and all-pervasive nature of enlightenment, which belongs to the realm of the Buddha of Pervasive Light, VAIROCANA, the central buddha in the AvataMsaka, who embodies the DHARMAKAYA. The sutra emphasizes the knowledge and enlightenment of the buddhas as being something that is present in all sentient beings (see TATHAGATAGARBHA and BUDDHADHATU), just as the entire universe, or trichiliocosm (S. TRISAHASRAMAHASAHASRALOKADHATU) is contained in a minute mote of dust. This notion of interpenetration or interfusion (YUANRONG) is stressed in the thirty-second chapter of Buddhabhadra's translation, whose title bears the influential term "nature origination" (XINGQI). The sutra, especially in FAZANG's authoritative exegesis, is presumed to set forth a distinctive presentation of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA) in terms of the dependence of the whole on its parts, stressing the unity of the universe and its emptiness (suNYATA) of inherent nature; dependent origination here emerges as a profound ecological vision in which the existence of any one thing is completely dependent on the existence of all other things and all things on any one thing. Various chapters of the sutra were also interpreted as providing the locus classicus for the exhaustive fifty-two stage MahAyAna path (MARGA) to buddhahood, which included the ten faiths (only implied in the scripture), the ten abodes, ten practices, ten dedications, and ten stages (DAsABHuMI), plus the two stages of awakening itself: virtual enlightenment (dengjue) and sublime enlightenment (miaojue). This soteriological process was then illustrated through the peregrinations of the lad SUDHANA to visit his religious mentors, each of whom is identified with one of these specific stages; Sudhana's lengthy pilgrimage is described in great detail in the massive final chapter (a third of the entire scripture), the Gandavyuha, titled in the AvataMsakasutra the "Entry into the DharmadhAtu" chapter (Ru fajie pin). The evocative and widely quoted statement in the "Brahmacarya" chapter that "at the time of the initial arousal of the aspiration for enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPADA), complete, perfect enlightenment (ANUTTARASAMYAKSAMBODHI) is already achieved" was also influential in the development of the East Asian notion of sudden enlightenment (DUNWU), since it implied that awakening could be achieved in an instant of sincere aspiration, without requiring three infinite eons (ASAMKHYEYAKALPA) of religious training. Chinese exegetes who promoted this sutra reserved the highest place for it in their scriptural taxonomies (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) and designated it the "perfect" or "consummate" teaching (YUANJIAO) of Buddhism. Many commentaries on and exegeses of the sutra are extant, among which the most influential are those written by FAZANG, ZHIYAN, CHENGGUAN, LI TONGXUAN, GUIFENG ZONGMI, WoNHYO, ŬISANG, and MYoE KoBEN.
awe ::: n. --> Dread; great fear mingled with respect.
The emotion inspired by something dreadful and sublime; an undefined sense of the dreadful and the sublime; reverential fear, or solemn wonder; profound reverence. ::: v. t. --> To strike with fear and reverence; to inspire with awe; to
awful ::: 1. Inspiring fear; terrible, dreadful, appalling, awe-inspiring. 2. Extremely impressive. 3. Profoundly inspired by a feeling of fearful wonderment or reverence.
awful ::: a. --> Oppressing with fear or horror; appalling; terrible; as, an awful scene.
Inspiring awe; filling with profound reverence, or with fear and admiration; fitted to inspire reverential fear; profoundly impressive.
Struck or filled with awe; terror-stricken.
Worshipful; reverential; law-abiding.
Frightful; exceedingly bad; great; -- applied intensively;
awfulness ::: n. --> The quality of striking with awe, or with reverence; dreadfulness; solemnity; as, the awfulness of this sacred place.
The state of being struck with awe; a spirit of solemnity; profound reverence.
bar do. In Tibetan, literally "between two"; often translated as "intermediate state"; the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit ANTARABHAVA, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, posited by some, but not all, Buddhist schools (the STHAVIRANIKAYA, for example, rejects the notion). In Tibet, the term received considerable elaboration, especially in the RNYING MA sect, most famously in a cycle of treasure texts (GTER MA) discovered in the fourteenth century by KARMA GLING PA entitled "The Profound Doctrine of Self-Liberation of the Mind [through Encountering] the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities" (Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol) also known as the "Peaceful and Wrathful Deities According to Karmalingpa" (Kar gling zhi khro). A group of texts from this cycle is entitled BAR DO THOS GROL CHEN MO ("Great Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing"). Selections from this group were translated by KAZI DAWA-SAMDUP and published by WALTER Y. EVANS-WENTZ in 1927 as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In Karma gling pa's texts, the universe through which the dead wander is composed of three bar dos. The first, and briefest, is the bar do of the moment of death ('chi kha'i bar do), which occurs with the dawning of the profound state of consciousness called the clear light (PRABHASVARACITTA). If one is able to recognize the clear light as reality, one is immediately liberated from rebirth. If not, the second bar do begins, called the bar do of reality (chos nyid bar do). The disintegration of the personality brought on by death reveals reality, but in this case, not in the form of clear light, but in the form of a MAndALA of fifty-eight wrathful deities and a mandala of forty-two peaceful deities from the GUHYAGARBHATANTRA. These deities appear in sequence to the consciousness of the deceased in the days immediately following death. If reality is not recognized in this second bar do, then the third bar do, the bar do of existence (srid pa'i bar do), dawns, during which one must again take rebirth in one of the six realms (sAdGATI) of divinities, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, or hell denizens. The entire sequence may last as long as seven days and then be repeated seven times, such that the maximum length of the intermediate state between death and rebirth is forty-nine days. This is just one of many uses of the term bar do in Tibetan Buddhism; it was used to describe not only the period between death and rebirth but also that between rebirth and death, and between each moment of existence, which always occurs between two other moments. Cf. also SISHIJIU [RI] ZHAI.
Bar do thos grol chen mo. (Bardo Todrol Chenmo). In Tibetan, "Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State." It is a section of large cycle of mortuary texts entitled "The Profound Doctrine of Self-Liberation of the Mind [through Encountering] the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities" (Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol) also known as the "Peaceful and Wrathful Deities according to Karmalingpa" (Kar gling zhi khro). The Bar do thos grol chen mo is a treasure text (GTER MA) of the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism, discovered in the fourteenth century by KARMA GLING PA. Selections from it were translated by KAZI DAWA SAMDUP and published by WALTER Y. EVANS-WENTZ in 1927 as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. See also ANTARABHAVA, BAR DO.
behaviorism ::: An approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. It is a form of materialism, denying any independent significance for the mind. Its significance for psychological treatment has been profound, making it one of the pillars of pharmacological therapy. It should not be confused with the behavioralism of political science.
bhAvanAmayīprajNA. (P. bhAvanAmayapaA; T. bsgoms pa las byung ba'i shes rab; C. xiuhui; J. shue; K. suhye 修慧). In Sanskrit, lit. "wisdom generated by cultivation"; often translated as "wisdom derived from meditation"; the third of the three types of wisdom, together with sRUTAMAYĪPRAJNA (wisdom derived from what is heard, viz., learning) and CINTAMAYĪPRAJNA (wisdom derived from reflection or analysis). Although the general understanding is that this third and final manifestation of wisdom comes after, and is largely dependent on, the previous two types, bhAvanAmayīprajNA is considered to be the highest of these three because it is the culmination of one's efforts to cultivate the path (MARGA) and the product of direct spiritual experience. This third type of wisdom is a form of VIPAsYANA, an understanding of reality at the level of sAMATHA-profound concentration coupled with tranquility.
Bhutesa or Bhutesvara (Sanskrit) Bhūteśa, Bhūteśvara [from bhūta living being + īśa, īśvara lord] Lord of beings, lord of manifested entities and things; a name applied to each member of the Hindu Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, Siva). Siva in exoteric mythology and popular superstition is supposed to possess the special status of lord of the bhutas or kama-lokic spooks, and is the special patron of ascetics, students of occultism, and of those training themselves in mystical knowledge; so that this superstitious characterization of Siva is an entirely exoteric distortion of a profound esoteric fact. The real meaning is that Siva, often figurated as the supreme initiator, is the lord of those who “have been,” but who now are become regenerates through initiation — the mystical idea here being of the preservation of self-conscious effort through darkness into light, from ignorance to wisdom, and from selfishness into the divine compassion of the cosmic heart. In view of the karmic past of such progressed entities, their former selves in this cosmic time period are the bhutas (have-beens) of what now they are. Bhutesa is also applied to Krishna in this sense.
Bija (sometimes Vija)(Sanskrit) ::: This word signifies "seed" or "life-germ," whether of animals or of plants. But esoterically itssignification is far wider and incomparably more abstruse, and therefore difficult to understand withoutproper study. The term is used in esotericism to designate the original or causal source and vahana or"vehicle" of the mystic impulse or urge of life, or of lives, to express itself or themselves when the timefor such self-expression arrives after a pralaya, or after an obscuration, or again, indeed, duringmanvantara. Whether it be a kosmos or universe, or the reappearance of god, deva, man, animal, plant,mineral, or elemental, the seed or life-germ from and out of which any one of these arises is technicallycalled bija, and the reference here is almost as much to the life-germ or vehicle itself as it is to theself-urge for manifestation working through the seed or life-germ. Mystically and psychologically, theappearance of an avatara, for instance, is due to an impulse arising in Maha-Siva, or in Maha-Vishnu(according to circumstances), to manifest a portion of the divine essence, in either case, when theappropriate world period arrives for the appearance of an avatara. Or again, when from the chela is bornthe initiate during the dread trials of initiation, the newly-arisen Master is said to have been born from themystic bija or seed within his own being. The doctrine connected with this word bija in its occult andesoteric aspects is far too profound to receive more than a cursory and superficial treatment.
bīja. (T. sa bon; C. zhongzi; J. shuji; K. chongja 種子). In Sanskrit, "seed," a term used metaphorically in two important contexts: (1) in the theory of KARMAN, an action is said to plant a "seed" or "potentiality" in the mind, where it will reside until it fructifies as a future experience or is destroyed by wisdom; (2) in tantric literature, many deities are said to have a "seed syllable" or seed MANTRA that is visualized and recited in liturgy and meditation in order to invoke the deity. In the Chinese FAXIANG (YOGACARA) school, based on similar lists found in Indian Buddhist texts like the MAHAYANASAMGRAHA, a supplement to the YOGACARABHuMI, various lists of two different types of seeds are mentioned. (1) The primordial seeds (BENYOU ZHONGZI) and the continuously (lit. newly) acquired seeds (XINXUN ZHONGZI). The former are present in the eighth "storehouse consciousness" (ALAYAVIJNANA) since time immemorial, and are responsible for giving rise to a sentient being's basic faculties, such as the sensory organs (INDRIYA) and the aggregates (SKANDHA). The latter are acquired through the activities and sense impressions of the other seven consciousnesses (VIJNANA), and are stored within the eighth storehouse consciousness as pure, impure, or indeterminate seeds that may become activated again once the right conditions are in place for it to fructify. (2) Tainted seeds (youlou zhongzi) and untainted seeds (wulou zhongzi). The former are sowed whenever unenlightened activities of body, speech, and mind and the contaminants (ASRAVA) of mental defilements take place. The latter are associated with enlightened activities that do not generate such contaminants. In all cases, "full emergence" (SAMUDACARA, C. xiangxing) refers to the sprouting of those seeds as fully realized action. ¶ In tantric Buddhism the buddha field (BUDDHAKsETRA) is represented as a MAndALA with its inhabitant deities (DEVATA). The sonic source of the mandala and the deities that inhabit it is a "seed syllable" (bīja). In tantric practices (VIDHI; SADHANA) the meditator imagines the seed syllable emerging from the expanse of reality, usually on a lotus flower. The seed syllable is then visualized as transforming into the mandala and its divine inhabitants, each of which often has its own seed syllable. At the end of the ritual, the process is reversed and collapsed back into the seed syllable that then dissolves back into the nondual original expanse. Seed syllables in tantric Buddhism are connected with DHARAnĪ, mnemonic codes widespread in MahAyAna sutras that consist of strings of letters, often the first letter of profound terms or topics. These strings of letters in the dhAranĪ anticipate the MANTRAs found in tantric ritual practices. The tantric "seed syllable" is thought to contain the essence of the mantra, the letters of which are visualized as standing upright in a circle around the seed syllable from which the letters emerge and to which they return.
bodhisattva: A profoundly enlightened person – not always a mage –who has decided to stop short of personal Ascension in order to help other beings. (See Oracle.)
bodhisattvasaMvara. (T. byang chub sems dpa'i sdom pa; C. pusa jie; J. bosatsukai; K. posal kye 菩薩戒). In Sanskrit, lit. "restraints for the BODHISATTVA"; the "restraints," "precepts," or code of conduct (SAMVARA) for someone who has made the bodhisattva vow (BODHISATTVAPRAnIDHANA; PRAnIDHANA) to achieve buddhahood in order to liberate all beings from suffering. The mainstream moral codes for monastics that are recognized across all forms of Buddhism are listed in the PRATIMOKsA, which refers to rules of discipline that help adepts restrain themselves from all types of unwholesome conduct. With the rise of various groups that came to call themselves the MAHAYANA, different sets of moral codes developed. These are formulated, for example, in the BODHISATTVABHuMI and Candragomin's BodhisattvasaMvaraviMsaka, and in later Chinese apocrypha, such as the FANWANG JING. The mainstream prAtimoksa codes are set forth in the Bodhisattvabhumi as saMvarasīla, or "restraining precepts." These are the first of three types of bodhisattva morality, called the "three sets of restraints" (TRISAMVARA), which are systematized fully in Tibet in works like TSONG KHA PA's Byang chub gzhung lam. It seems that in the early MahAyAna, people publicly took the famous bodhisattva vow, promising to achieve buddhahood in order to liberate all beings. A more formal code of conduct developed later, derived from a number of sources, with categories of root infractions and secondary infractions. The bodhisattva precepts, however, could be taken equally by laypeople and monastics, men and women, and formal ceremonies for conferring the precepts are set forth in a number of MahAyAna treatises. In addition, there appear to have been ceremonies for the confession of infractions, modeled on the UPOsADHA rituals. Some of the precepts have to do with interpersonal relations, prescribing the kind of altruistic behavior that one might expect from a bodhisattva. Others are grander, such as the precept not to destroy cities, and appear to presuppose a code of conduct for kings or other important figures in society. There is also the suggestion that the bodhisattva precepts supersede the prAtimoksa precepts: one of the secondary infractions of the bodhisattva code is not to engage in killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, or senseless speech when in fact it would be beneficial to do so. The great weight given to the precept not to reject the MahAyAna as being the word of the Buddha (BUDDHAVACANA) suggests that, throughout the history of the MahAyAna in India, there were concerns raised about the questionable origin of the MahAyAna sutras. With the rise of TANTRA, the "three restraints" (trisaMvara) of bodhisattva morality were refigured as the second of a new set of precepts, preceded by the prAtimoksa precepts and followed by the tantric vows. There was much discussion, especially in Tibetan SDOM GSUM (dom sum) literature, of the relationships among the three sets of restraints and of their compatibility with each other. ¶ Although there is much variation in the listings of bodhisattva precepts, according to one common list, the eighteen root infractions are: (1) to praise oneself and slander others out of attachment to profit or fame; (2) not to give one's wealth or the doctrine, out of miserliness, to those who suffer without protection; (3) to become enraged and condemn another, without listening to his or her apology; (4) to abandon the MahAyAna and teach a poor facsimile of its excellent doctrine; (5) to steal the wealth of the three jewels (RATNATRAYA); (6) to abandon the excellent doctrine; (7) to steal the saffron robes of a monk and beat, imprison, and or expel him from his life of renunciation, even if he has broken the moral code; (8) to commit the five deeds of immediate retribution (ANANTARYAKARMAN) i.e., patricide, matricide, killing an arhat, wounding a buddha, or causing dissent in the saMgha; (9) to hold wrong views; (10) to destroy cities and so forth; (11) to discuss emptiness (suNYATA) with sentient beings whose minds have not been trained; (12) to turn someone away from buddhahood and full enlightenment; (13) to cause someone to abandon completely the prAtimoksa precepts in order to practice the MahAyAna; (14) to believe that desire and so forth cannot be abandoned by the vehicle of the sRAVAKAs and to cause others to believe that view; (15) to claim falsely, "I have withstood the profound emptiness (sunyatA)"; (16) to impose fines on renunciates; to take donors and gifts away from the three jewels; (17) to cause meditators to give up the practice of sAMATHA; to take the resources of those on retreat and give them to reciters of texts; (18) to abandon the two types of BODHICITTA (the conventional and the ultimate). See also BODHISATTVAsĪLA.
profound ::: a. --> Descending far below the surface; opening or reaching to a great depth; deep.
Intellectually deep; entering far into subjects; reaching to the bottom of a matter, or of a branch of learning; thorough; as, a profound investigation or treatise; a profound scholar; profound wisdom.
Characterized by intensity; deeply felt; pervading; overmastering; far-reaching; strongly impressed; as, a profound sleep.
profoundly ::: adv. --> In a profound manner.
profound ::: n. 1. That which is eminently deep, or the deepest part of something; a vast depth; an abyss. lit. and fig; chiefly poetical. adj. 2. Situated at or extending to great depth; too deep to have been sounded or plumbed. 3. Coming as if from the depths of one"s being. 4. Of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance. 5. Being or going far beneath what is superficial, external, or obvious. 6. Showing or requiring great knowledge or understanding. profounder.
profoundness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being profound; profundity; depth.
brahman ::: [Ved.]: the sacred or inspired word, expression of the heart or soul; heart; the Vedic word or mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being; the Soul that emerges out of the subconscient in Man and rises towards the superconscient and also word of creative Power welling upward out of the soul. [Vedanta]: the Reality; the Eternal; the Absolute; the Spirit; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent; in relation to the universe [cf. atman] the Supreme is brahman, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit. ::: brahma [nominative] ::: brahmana [instrumental], by the hymn. ::: brahmani [locative], into the brahman. [cf. Brahma]
Brentano, Franz: (1838-1917) Who had originally been a Roman Catholic priest may be described as an unorthodox neo-scholastic. According to him the only three forms of psychic activity, representation, judgment and "phenomena of love and hate", are just three modes of "intentionality", i.e., of referring to an object intended. Judgments may be self-evident and thereby characterized as true and in an analogous way love and hate may be characterized as "right". It is on these characterizations that a dogmatic theory of truth and value may be based. In any mental experience the content is merely a "physical phenomenon" (real or imaginary) intended to be referred to, what is psychic is merely the "act" of representing, judging (viz. affirming or denying) and valuing (i.e. loving or hating). Since such "acts" are evidently immaterial, the soul by which they are performed may be proved to be a purely spiritual and imperishable substance and from these and other considerations the existence, spirituality, as also the infinite wisdom, goodness and justice of God may also be demonstrated. It is most of all by his classification of psychic phenomena, his psychology of "acts" and "intentions" and by his doctrine concerning self-evident truths and values that Brentano, who considered himself an Aristotelian, exercised a profound influence on subsequent German philosophers: not only on those who accepted his entire system (such as A. Marty and C. Stumpf) but also those who were somewhat more independent and original and whom he influenced either directly (as A. Meinong and E. Husserl) or indirectly (as M. Scheler and Nik. Hartmann). Main works: Psychologie des Aristoteles, 1867; Vom Dasein Gottes, 1868; Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874; Vom Ursprung sittliches Erkenntnis, 1884; Ueber die Zukunft der Philosophie, 1893; Die vier Phasen der Philos., 1895. -- H.Go. Broad, C.D.: (1887) As a realistic critical thinker Broad takes over from the sciences the methods that are fruitful there, classifies the various propositions used in all the sciences, and defines basic scientific concepts. In going beyond science, he seeks to reach a total view of the world by bringing in the facts and principles of aesthetic, religious, ethical and political experience. In trying to work out a much more general method which attacks the problem of the connection between mathematical concepts and sense-data better than the method of analysis in situ, he gives a simple exposition of the method of extensive abstraction, which applies the mutual relations of objects, first recognized in pure mathematics, to physics. Moreover, a great deal can be learned from Broad on the relation of the principle of relativity to measurement.
buddhadhAtu. (T. sangs rgyas kyi khams; C. foxing; J. bussho; K. pulsong 佛性). In Sanskrit, "buddha-element," or "buddha-nature"; the inherent potential of all sentient beings to achieve buddhahood. The term is also widely used in Buddhist Sanskrit with the sense of "buddha relic," and the term DHATU alone is used to mean "buddha-element" (see also GOTRA, KULA). The term first appears in the MAHAYANA recension of the MAHAPARINIRVAnASuTRA, now available only in Chinese translation, which states that all sentient beings have the "buddha-element" (FOXING). (The Chinese translation foxing literally means "buddha-nature" and the Chinese has often been mistakenly back-translated as the Sanskrit buddhatA; buddhadhAtu is the accepted Sanskrit form.) The origin of the term may, however, be traced back as far as the AstASAHASRIKAPRAJNAPARAMITA, one of the earliest MahAyAna SuTRAs, where the fundamental substance of the mind is said to be luminous (prakṛtis cittasya prabhAsvarA), drawing on a strand of Buddhism that has its antecedents in such statements as the PAli AnGUTTARANIKAYA: "The mind, O monks, is luminous but defiled by adventitious defilements" (pabhassaraM idaM bhikkhave cittaM, taN ca kho Agantukehi upakkilesehi upakkilitthaM). Because the BODHISATTVA realizes that the buddha-element is inherent in him at the moment that he arouses the aspiration for enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPADA) and enters the BODHISATTVAYANA, he achieves the profound endurance (KsANTI) that enables him to undertake the arduous training, over not one, but three, incalculable eons of time (ASAMKHYEYAKALPA), that will lead to buddhahood. The buddhadhAtu is a seminal concept of the MahAyAna and leads to the development of such related doctrines as the "matrix of the tathAgatas" (TATHAGATAGARBHA) and the "immaculate consciousness" (AMALAVIJNANA). The term is also crucial in the development of the teachings of such indigenous East Asian schools of Buddhism as CHAN, which telescope the arduous path of the bodhisattva into a single moment of sudden awakening (DUNWU) to the inherency of the "buddha-nature" (foxing), as in the Chan teaching that merely "seeing the nature" is sufficient to "attain buddhahood" (JIANXING CHENGFO).
Buddhaghosa. (S. Buddhaghosa) (fl. c. 370-450 CE). The preeminent PAli commentator, who translated into PAli the Sinhalese commentaries to the PAli canon and wrote the VISUDDHIMAGGA ("Path of Purification"), the definitive outline of THERAVADA doctrine.There are several conflicting accounts of Buddhaghosa's origins, none of which can be dated earlier than the thirteenth century. The Mon of Lower Burma claim him as a native son, although the best-known story, which is found in the CulAVAMSA (chapter 37), describes Buddhaghosa as an Indian brAhmana who grew up in the environs of the MAHABODHI temple in northern India. According to this account, his father served as a purohita (brAhmana priest) for King SangAma, while he himself became proficient in the Vedas and related Brahmanical sciences at an early age. One day, he was defeated in a debate by a Buddhist monk named Revata, whereupon he entered the Buddhist SAMGHA to learn more about the Buddha's teachings. He received his monk's name Buddhaghosa, which means "Voice of the Buddha," because of his sonorous voice and impressive rhetorical skills. Buddhaghosa took Revata as his teacher and began writing commentaries even while a student. Works written at this time included the NAnodaya and AttHASALINĪ. To deepen his understanding (or according to some versions of his story, as punishment for his intellectual pride), Buddhaghosa was sent to Sri Lanka to study the Sinhalese commentaries on the PAli Buddhist canon (P. tipitaka; S. TRIPItAKA). These commentaries were said to have been brought to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, where they were translated from PAli into Sinhalese and subsequently preserved at the MAHAVIHARA monastery in the Sri Lankan capital of ANURADHAPURA. At the MahAvihAra, Buddhghosa studied under the guidance of the scholar-monk SanghapAla. Upon completing his studies, he wrote the great compendium of TheravAda teachings, Visuddhimagga, which summarizes the contents of the PAli tipitaka under the threefold heading of morality (sīla; S. sĪLA), meditative absorption (SAMADHI), and wisdom (paNNA; S. PRAJNA). Impressed with his expertise, the elders of the MahAvihAra allowed Buddhaghosa to translate the Sinhalese commentaries back into PAli, the canonical language of the TheravAda tipitaka. Attributed to Buddhaghosa are the VINAYA commentaries, SAMANTAPASADIKA and KankhAvitaranī; the commentaries to the SUTTAPItAKA, SUMAnGALAVILASINĪ, PAPANCASuDANĪ, SARATTHAPPAKASINĪ, and MANORATHAPuRAnĪ; also attributed to him is the PARAMATTHAJOTIKA (the commentary to the KHUDDAKAPAtHA and SUTTANIPATA). Buddhaghosa's commentaries on the ABHIDHAMMAPItAKA (see ABHIDHARMA) include the SAMMOHAVINODANĪ and PANCAPPAKARAnAttHAKATHA, along with the AtthasAlinī. Of these many works, Buddhaghosa is almost certainly author of the Visuddhimagga and translator of the commentaries to the four nikAyas, but the remainder are probably later attributions. Regardless of attribution, the body of work associated with Buddhaghosa was profoundly influential on the entire subsequent history of Buddhist scholasticism in the TheravAda traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
“But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master—a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within.” The Life Divine
Catalepsy (Greek) katalepsis [from kata down + lambanein to seize] A psychomotor condition of morbid sleep, associated with a peculiar plastic rigidity of the muscles which may be made to assume strained attitudes and retain them for an indefinite time. There is more or less profound loss of consciousness and of the skin sensibility. The origin of the name reflects the ancient view that the attacks are due to the sudden seizure of the victim by some supernatural influence, such as an evil spirit; the causes assigned by medical writers are extremely varied and oftentimes absurd. The cataleptic state may occur in attacks of epilepsy, hysteria, chronic alcoholism, in various functional and organic mental and nervous diseases, and in that variety of dementia praecox known as catatonia. This list of diseases, characterized by general nervous and emotional instability, suggests the rationale of the ancient view that catalepsy is one of the many types of astral obsession. Textbook descriptions of typical cases are consistent pictures of an abnormal displacement of the conscious human ego whose helpless body then is subjected to purposeless, unnatural, and strained conditions and attitudes by some low-grade astral entity.
Chakra(Cakra, Sanskrit) ::: A word signifying in general a "wheel," and from this simple original meaning therewere often taken for occult and esoteric purposes a great many subordinate, very interesting, and in somecases highly mystical and profound derivatives. Chakra also means a cycle, a period of duration, inwhich the wheel of time turns once. It also means the horizon, as being circular or of a wheel-form. Itlikewise means certain centers or pranic spherical loci of the body in which are supposed to collectstreams of pranic energy of differing qualities, or pranic energies of different kinds. These physiologicalchakras, which are actually connected with the pranic circulations and ganglia of the auric egg, andtherefore function in the physical body through the intermediary of the linga-sarira or astral model-body,are located in different parts of the physical frame, reaching from the parts about the top of the skull tothe parts about the pubis. It would be highly improper, having at heart the best interests of humanity, togive the occult or esoteric teaching concerning the exact location, functions, and means of controlling thephysiological chakras of the human body; for it is a foregone conclusion that were this mysticalknowledge broadcast, it would be sadly misused, leading not only in many cases to death or insanity, butto the violation of every moral instinct. Alone the high initiates, who as a matter of fact have risen abovethe need of employing the physiological chakras, can use them at will, and for holy purposes -- which infact is something that they rarely, if indeed they ever do.
Chaos(Greek) ::: A word usually thought to mean a sort of helter-skelter treasury of original principles and seedsof beings. Well, so it verily is, in one profound sense; but it is most decidedly and emphatically nothelter-skelter. It is properly the kosmic storehouse of all the latent or resting seeds of beings and thingsfrom former manvantaras. Of course it is this, simply because it contains everything. It means space, notthe highest mystical or actual space, not the parabrahma-mulaprakriti, the Boundless -- not that. But thespace of any particular hierarchy descending into manifestation, what space for it is at that particularperiod of its beginning of development. The directive principles in chaos are the gods when they awakenfrom their pralayic sleep. Chaos in one sense may very truly be called the condition of the space of asolar system or even of a planetary chain during its pralaya. When awakening to planetary action begins,chaos pari passu ceases.
Chhinnamasta Tantrika (Sanskrit) Chinnamastā Tāntrika [from chinna severed + masta head] Buddhist tantric sect named for the goddess Chhinnamasta, represented with a decapitated head. In their highest initiation, the adept “must ‘cut off his own head with the right hand, holding it in the left.’ Three streams of blood gush out from the headless trunk. One of these is directed into the mouth of the decapitated head . . .; the other is directed toward the earth as an offering of the pure, sinless blood to mother Earth; and the third gushes toward heaven, as a witness for the sacrifice of ‘self-immolation.’ Now, this had a profound Occult significance which is known only to the initiated . . .” (BCW 4:265-6).
Chos kyi 'byung gnas. (Chokyi Jungne) (1700-1774). Tibetan Buddhist scholar recognized as the eighth TAI SI TU incarnation, remembered for his wide learning and his editorial work on the Tibetan Buddhist canon. He traveled extensively throughout his life, maintaining strong relationships with the ruling elite of eastern Tibet and the Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley. Born in the eastern Tibetan region of SDE DGE, Chos kyi 'byung gnas was recognized as a reincarnate lama (SPRUL SKU) by the eighth ZHWA DMAR, from whom he received his first vows. He would go on to study with KAḤ THOG Rigs 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu (1698-1755), from whom he learned about GZHAN STONG ("other emptiness"). At the age of twenty-one, he accompanied several important Bka' brgyud hierarchs, the Zhwa dmar and the twelfth KARMA PA, to Kathmandu, a journey that was to have a profound impact on the young Si tu's life. He returned to eastern Tibet in 1724, where he was received favorably by the king of Sde dge, Bstan pa tshe ring (Tenpa Tsering, 1678-1738). Under the latter's patronage, Chos kyi 'byung gnas founded DPAL SPUNGS monastery in 1727, which became the new seat for the Si tu lineage (they are sometimes called the Dpal spungs si tu). Between the years 1731 and 1733, he undertook the monumental task of editing and correcting a new redaction of the BKA' 'GYUR section of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, to be published at the printing house of Sde dge. Although in his day Tibetan knowledge of Indian linguistic traditions had waned, Chos kyi 'byung gnas devoted much of his later life to the study of Sanskrit grammar and literature, which he had first studied with Newar panditas during his time in Kathmandu. He sought out new Sanskrit manuscripts in order to establish more precise translations of Sanskrit works already translated in the Tibetan canon; he is esteemed in Tibet for his knowledge of Sanskrit grammar. In addition to his prolific scholarly work, Chos kyi 'byung gnas was an accomplished painter as well as a gifted physician, much sought after by the aristocracy of eastern Tibet. In 1748, he visited Nepal once again, where he translated the SvayambhupurAna, the legends concerning the SVAYAMBHu STuPA, into Tibetan. He was received amicably by the rulers JayaprakAsamalla (1736-1768) of Kathmandu, Ranajitamalla (1722-1769) of what is now Bhaktapur, and PṛthvīnArAyana sAha, who would unify the Kathmandu Valley under Gorkhali rule several decades later. Chos kyi 'byung gnas' collected writings cover a vast range of subjects including lengthy and detailed diaries and an important history of the KARMA BKA' BRGYUD sect coauthored by his disciple Be lo Tshe dbang kun khyab (Belo Tsewang Kunkyap, b. 1718). He is retrospectively identified as an originator of what would become known as Khams RIS MED movement, which gained momentum in early nineteenth century Sde dge.
cimmerian ::: a. --> Pertaining to the Cimmerii, a fabulous people, said to have lived, in very ancient times, in profound and perpetual darkness.
Without any light; intensely dark.
cintAmayīprajNA. (P. cintAmayapaNNA; T. bsam pa las byung ba'i shes rab; C. sihui; J. shie; K. sahye 思慧). In Sanskrit, "wisdom derived from reflection [or analysis]"; the second of the three types of wisdom, together with sRUTAMAYĪPRAJNA (wisdom derived from what is heard, viz., study) and BHAVANAMAYĪPRAJNA (wisdom generated by cultivation or meditation). Building upon what one has learned through srutamayīprajNA, the practitioner deepens that knowledge by reflecting upon its significance and its application in understanding the nature of this world and beyond. This reflection may involve a certain level of mental attention and concentration, but not yet full meditative calmness (sAMATHA). This level of understanding is therefore not as profound as the third and final stage of wisdom, bhAvanAmayīprajNA, where the knowledge first learned and subsequently developed over the preceding two stages of wisdom is now authenticated at the level of VIPAsYANA.
coma ::: n. --> A state of profound insensibility from which it is difficult or impossible to rouse a person. See Carus.
The envelope of a comet; a nebulous covering, which surrounds the nucleus or body of a comet.
A tuft or bunch, -- as the assemblage of branches forming the head of a tree; or a cluster of bracts when empty and terminating the inflorescence of a plant; or a tuft of long hairs on certain seeds.
Consciousness: (Lat. conscire, to know, to be cognizant of) A designation applied to conscious mind as opposed to a supposedly unconscious or subconscious mind (See Subconscious Mind; Unconscious Mind), and to the whole domain of the physical and non-mental. Consciousness is generally considered an indefinable term or rather a term definable only by direct introspective appeal to conscious experiences. The indefinability of consciousness is expressed by Sir William Hamilton: "Consciousness cannot be defined: we may be ourselves fully aware what consciousness is, but we cannot without confusion convey to others a definition of what we ourselves clearly apprehend. The reason is plain: consciousness lies at the root of all knowledge." (Lectures on Metaphysics, I, 191.) Ladd's frequently quoted definition of consciousness succeeds only in indicating the circumstances under which it is directly observable: "Whatever we are when we are awake, as contrasted with what we are when we sink into a profound and dreamless sleep, that is to be conscious."
crapplet "web, abuse" A badly written or profoundly useless {Java} {applet}. "I just wasted 30 minutes downloading this stinkin' crapplet!" (1997-03-30)
crapplet ::: (World-Wide Web, abuse) A badly written or profoundly useless Java applet. I just wasted 30 minutes downloading this stinkin' crapplet! (1997-03-30)
(c) The Supremely Profound Principle. See T'a hsuan.
Cycles or Law of Cycles ::: An exceedingly interesting branch of theosophical study, and one dealing with a fact which is soobviously manifest in the worlds surrounding us that its existence can hardly be denied, except by thewillfully blind, is what may be called the law of cycles, or nature's repetitive operations.We find nature repeating herself everywhere, although such repetition of course is not merely a runningin the same old ruts on each recurrence of the cyclic activity; for each recurrence is of course theexpression of a modification, more or less great, of what has preceded. Day succeeds night, wintersucceeds summer, the planets circulate around the suns in regular and periodical courses; and these arebut familiar examples of cyclical activity.Cycles in nature show the time periods of periodic recurrence along and in which any evolving entity orthing expresses the energies and powers which are itself, so that cycles and evolution are like the twosides of a coin: the one shows the time periods or cycles, and the other side manifests the energic orsubstantial qualities appearing in manifestation according to these cyclical time-periods; but back of thisapparently double but actually single process always lie profound karmic causes.
daijue ermiao. (待絶二妙). In Chinese, "marvelous in comparison and marvelous in its own right." In the TIANTAI school's system of doctrinal classification (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI), Buddhist teachings and scriptures were classified into four modes of instruction (according to their different doctrinal themes; see TIANTAI BAJIAO) and five periods (according to the presumed chronological order by which the Buddha propounded them; see WUSHI). The most sophisticated pedagogical mode and the culminating chronological period are called, respectively, "the perfect teaching" (YUANJIAO) and the "Fahua-Niepan period." The teachings and scriptures associated with the highest mode and the culminating period-the paradigmatic example being the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") and the teachings it embodied for the Tiantai school-are called truly "marvelous" for two reasons. First, they are "marvelous in comparison to the teachings and scriptures of all other 'modes' and 'periods'" (xiangdai miao) because they are the definitive expressions of the Buddha's teachings; second, they are also "marvelous in their own right" (juedai miao), i.e., they are wonderful and profound in an absolute sense, and not just comparatively.
Dainichi(bo) Nonin. (大日[房]能忍) (d.u.). Japanese monk of the late Heian and early Kamakura eras; his surname was Taira. Nonin is the reputed founder of the short-lived ZEN sect known as the DARUMASHu, one of the earliest Zen traditions to develop in Japan. Nonin was something of an autodidact and is thought to have achieved awakening through his own study of scriptures and commentaries, rather than through any training with an established teacher. He taught at the temple of Sanboji in Suita (present-day osaka prefecture) and established himself as a Zen master. Well aware that he did not have formal authorization (YINKE) from a Chan master in a recognized lineage, Nonin sent two of his disciples to China in 1189. They returned with a portrait of BODHIDHARMA inscribed by the Chan master FOZHAO DEGUANG (1121-1203) and the robe of Fozhao's influential teacher DAHUI ZONGGAO. Fozhao also presented Nonin with a portrait of himself (see DINGXIANG), on which he wrote a verse at the request of Nonin's two disciples. Such bestowals suggested that Nonin was a recognized successor in the LINJI lineage. In 1194, the monks of HIEIZAN, threatened by Nonin's burgeoning popularity, urged the court to suppress Nonin and his teachings as an antinomian heresy. His school did not survive his death, and many of his leading disciples subsequently became students of other prominent teachers, such as DoGEN KIGEN; this influx of Nonin's adherents introduced a significant Darumashu component into the early SoToSHu tradition. Nonin was later given the posthumous title Zen Master Shinpo [alt. Jinho] (Profound Dharma).
dAna. (T. sbyin pa; C. bushi; J. fuse; K. posi 布施). In Sanskrit and PAli, "giving," "generosity," or "charity"; one of the most highly praised of virtues in Buddhism and the foundational practice of the Buddhist laity, presumably because of its value in weaning the layperson from attachment to material possessions while providing essential material support to the SAMGHA. It is the chief cause of prosperity in future lives and rebirth as a divinity (DEVA) in one of the heavens of the sensuous realm (KAMADHATU). There are numerous stories in the AVADANA and JATAKA literatures that illustrate the virtues of giving, the most famous being that of Prince VisvaMtara (P. VESSANTARA), whose generosity was so profound that he gave away not only all his worldly possessions but even his wife and children. In other stories, BODHISATTVAs often give away their body or parts of their body (see DEHADANA; SHESHEN). The immediate karmic result of the practice of giving is said to be wealth in the future, especially as a divinity in one of the heavens. Giving, especially to the SAMGHA, is presumed to generate merit (PUnYA) that will accrue to the benefit of the donor in both this and future lifetimes; indeed, giving is the first in a standard list of meritorious acts, along with morality (sĪLA) and religious development (BHAVANA). In the "graduated discourse" (S. ANUPuRVIKATHA; P. ANUPUBBIKATHA) that the Buddha commonly used in instructing the laity, the discourse on giving (dAnakathA) was even more fundamental than the succeeding discourses on right conduct (sīlakathA) and the joys of rebirth in the heavens (svargakathA). Eight items are typically presumed to make appropriate offerings: food, water, clothing, vehicles, garlands, perfume, beds and dwellings, and lights. In yet another enumeration, there are three kinds of dAna: the "gift of material goods" (AMIsADANA); the gift of fearlessness (ABHAYADANA), and the "gift of the dharma" (DHARMADANA). Of all gifts, however, the greatest was said to be the "gift of the dharma" (dharmadAna), viz., spiritual instruction that will lead not just to better rebirths but to liberation from SAMSARA; it is this gift that the saMgha offers reciprocally to the laity. In MAHAYANA soteriology, giving is listed as the first of the six perfections (PARAMITA) cultivated on the bodhisattva path (see DANAPARAMITA). According to the PAli tradition, dAna is the first of ten perfections (P. pAramī). In some schools, a being who is incapable of even the modicum of detachment that is required to donate one's possessions through charity is thought to have eradicated his wholesome spiritual faculties (SAMUCCHINNAKUsALAMuLA; see also ICCHANTIKA) and to have lost for an indeterminate period any prospect of enlightenment.
dasabhumi. (T. sa bcu; C. shidi; J. juji; K. sipchi 十地). In Sanskrit, lit., "ten grounds," "ten stages"; the ten highest reaches of the bodhisattva path (MARGA) leading to buddhahood. The most systematic and methodical presentation of the ten BHuMIs appears in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA ("Ten Bhumis Sutra"), where each of the ten stages is correlated with seminal doctrines of mainstream Buddhism-such as the four means of conversion (SAMGRAHAVASTU) on the first four bhumis, the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (CATVARY ARYASATYANI) on the fifth bhumi, and the chain of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA) on the sixth bhumi, etc.-as well as with mastery of one of a list of ten perfections (PARAMITA) completed in the course of training as a bodhisattva. The list of the ten bhumis of the Dasabhumikasutra, which becomes standard in most MahAyAna traditions, is as follows: (1) PRAMUDITA (joyful) corresponds to the path of vision (DARsANAMARGA) and the bodhisattva's first direct realization of emptiness (suNYATA). The bodhisattva masters on this bhumi the perfection of giving (DANAPARAMITA), learning to give away those things most precious to him, including his wealth, his wife and family, and even his body (see DEHADANA); (2) VIMALA (immaculate, stainless) marks the inception of the path of cultivation (BHAVANAMARGA), where the bodhisattva develops all the superlative traits of character incumbent on a buddha through mastering the perfection of morality (sĪLAPARAMITA); (3) PRABHAKARĪ (luminous, splendrous), where the bodhisattva masters all the various types of meditative experiences, such as DHYANA, SAMAPATTI, and the BRAHMAVIHARA; despite the emphasis on meditation in this bhumi, it comes to be identified instead with the perfection of patience (KsANTIPARAMITA), ostensibly because the bodhisattva is willing to endure any and all suffering in order to master his practices; (4) ARCIsMATĪ (radiance, effulgence), where the flaming radiance of the thirty-seven factors pertaining to enlightenment (BODHIPAKsIKADHARMA) becomes so intense that it incinerates obstructions (AVARAnA) and afflictions (KLEsA), giving the bodhisattva inexhaustible energy in his quest for enlightenment and thus mastering the perfection of vigor or energy (VĪRYAPARAMITA); (5) SUDURJAYA (invincibility, hard-to-conquer), where the bodhisattva comprehends the various permutations of truth (SATYA), including the four noble truths, the two truths (SATYADVAYA) of provisional (NEYARTHA) and absolute (NĪTARTHA), and masters the perfection of meditative absorption (DHYANAPARAMITA); (6) ABHIMUKHĪ (immediacy, face-to-face), where, as the name implies, the bodhisattva stands at the intersection between SAMSARA and NIRVAnA, turning away from the compounded dharmas of saMsAra and turning to face the profound wisdom of the buddhas, thus placing him "face-to-face" with both the compounded (SAMSKṚTA) and uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) realms; this bhumi is correlated with mastery of the perfection of wisdom (PRAJNAPARAMITA); (7) DuRAnGAMA (far-reaching, transcendent), which marks the bodhisattva's freedom from the four perverted views (VIPARYASA) and his mastery of the perfection of expedients (UPAYAPARAMITA), which he uses to help infinite numbers of sentient beings; (8) ACALA (immovable, steadfast), which is marked by the bodhisattva's acquiescence or receptivity to the nonproduction of dharmas (ANUTPATTIKADHARMAKsANTI); because he is now able to project transformation bodies (NIRMAnAKAYA) anywhere in the universe to help sentient beings, this bhumi is correlated with mastery of the perfection of aspiration or resolve (PRAnIDHANAPARAMITA); (9) SADHUMATĪ (eminence, auspicious intellect), where the bodhisattva acquires the four analytical knowledges (PRATISAMVID), removing any remaining delusions regarding the use of the supernatural knowledges or powers (ABHIJNA), and giving the bodhisattva complete autonomy in manipulating all dharmas through the perfection of power (BALAPARAMITA); and (10) DHARMAMEGHA (cloud of dharma), the final bhumi, where the bodhisattva becomes autonomous in interacting with all material and mental factors, and gains all-pervasive knowledge that is like a cloud producing a rain of dharma that nurtures the entire world; this stage is also described as being pervaded by meditative absorption (DHYANA) and mastery of the use of codes (DHARAnĪ), just as the sky is filled by clouds; here the bodhisattva achieves the perfection of knowledge (JNANAPARAMITA). As the bodhisattva ascends through the ten bhumis, he acquires extraordinary powers, which CANDRAKĪRTI describes in the eleventh chapter of his MADHYAMAKAVATARA. On the first bhumi, the bodhisattva can, in a single instant (1) see one hundred buddhas, (2) be blessed by one hundred buddhas and understand their blessings, (3) live for one hundred eons, (4) see the past and future in those one hundred eons, (5) enter into and rise from one hundred SAMADHIs, (6) vibrate one hundred worlds, (7) illuminate one hundred worlds, (8) bring one hundred beings to spiritual maturity using emanations, (9) go to one hundred BUDDHAKsETRA, (10), open one hundred doors of the doctrine (DHARMAPARYAYA), (11) display one hundred versions of his body, and (12) surround each of those bodies with one hundred bodhisattvas. The number one hundred increases exponentially as the bodhisattva proceeds; on the second bhumi it becomes one thousand, on the third one hundred thousand, and so on; on the tenth, it is a number equal to the particles of an inexpressible number of buddhaksetra. As the bodhisattva moves from stage to stage, he is reborn as the king of greater and greater realms, ascending through the Buddhist cosmos. Thus, on the first bhumi he is born as king of JAMBUDVĪPA, on the second of the four continents, on the third as the king of TRAYATRIMsA, and so on, such that on the tenth he is born as the lord of AKANIstHA. ¶ According to the rather more elaborate account in chapter eleven of the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimAtratAsiddhi), each of the ten bhumis is correlated with the attainment of one of the ten types of suchness (TATHATA); these are accomplished by discarding one of the ten kinds of obstructions (Avarana) by mastering one of the ten perfections (pAramitA). The suchnesses achieved on each of the ten bhumis are, respectively: (1) universal suchness (sarvatragatathatA; C. bianxing zhenru), (2) supreme suchness (paramatathatA; C. zuisheng zhenru), (3) ubiquitous, or "supreme outflow" suchness (paramanisyandatathatA; C. shengliu zhenru), (4) unappropriated suchness (aparigrahatathatA; C. wusheshou zhenru), (5) undifferentiated suchness (abhinnajAtīyatathatA; C. wubie zhenru), (6) the suchness that is devoid of maculations and contaminants (asaMklistAvyavadAtatathatA; C. wuranjing zhenru), (7) the suchness of the undifferentiated dharma (abhinnatathatA; C. fawubie zhenru), (8) the suchness that neither increases nor decreases (anupacayApacayatathatA; C. buzengjian), (9) the suchness that serves as the support of the mastery of wisdom (jNAnavasitAsaMnisrayatathatA; C. zhizizai suoyi zhenru), and (10) the suchness that serves as the support for mastery over actions (kriyAdivasitAsaMnisrayatathatA; C. yezizai dengsuoyi). These ten suchnessses are obtained by discarding, respectively: (1) the obstruction of the common illusions of the unenlightened (pṛthagjanatvAvarana; C. yishengxing zhang), (2) the obstruction of the deluded (mithyApratipattyAvarana; C. xiexing zhang), (3) the obstruction of dullness (dhandhatvAvarana; C. andun zhang), (4) the obstruction of the manifestation of subtle afflictions (suksmaklesasamudAcArAvarana; C. xihuo xianxing zhang), (5) the obstruction of the lesser HĪNAYANA ideal of parinirvAna (hīnayAnaparinirvAnAvarana; C. xiasheng niepan zhang), (6) the obstruction of the manifestation of coarse characteristics (sthulanimittasamudAcArAvarana; C. cuxiang xianxing zhang), (7) the obstruction of the manifestation of subtle characteristics (suksmanimittasamudAcArAvarana; C. xixiang xianxing zhang), (8) the obstruction of the continuance of activity even in the immaterial realm that is free from characteristics (nirnimittAbhisaMskArAvarana; C. wuxiang jiaxing zhang), (9) the obstruction of not desiring to act on behalf of others' salvation (parahitacaryAkAmanAvarana; C. buyuxing zhang), and (10) the obstruction of not yet acquiring mastery over all things (fa weizizai zhang). These ten obstructions are overcome by practicing, respectively: (1) the perfection of giving (dAnapAramitA), (2) the perfection of morality (sīlapAramitA), (3) the perfection of forbearance (ksAntipAramitA), (4) the perfection of energetic effort (vīryapAramitA), (5) the perfection of meditation (dhyAnapAramitA), (6) the perfection of wisdom (prajNApAramitA), (7) the perfection of expedient means (upAyapAramitA), (8) the perfection of the vow (to attain enlightenment) (pranidhAnapAramitA), (9) the perfection of power (balapAramitA), and (10) the perfection of knowledge (jNAnapAramitA). ¶ The eighth, ninth, and tenth bhumis are sometimes called "pure bhumis," because, according to some commentators, upon reaching the eighth bhumi, the bodhisattva has abandoned all of the afflictive obstructions (KLEsAVARAnA) and is thus liberated from any further rebirth. It appears that there were originally only seven bhumis, as is found in the BODHISATTVABHuMI, where the seven bhumis overlap with an elaborate system of thirteen abidings or stations (vihAra), some of the names of which (such as pramuditA) appear also in the standard bhumi schema of the Dasabhumikasutra. Similarly, though a listing of ten bhumis appears in the MAHAVASTU, a text associated with the LOKOTTARAVADA subsect of the MAHASAMGHIKA school, only seven are actually discussed there, and the names given to the stages are completely different from those found in the later Dasabhumikasutra; the stages there are also a retrospective account of how past buddhas have achieved enlightenment, rather than a prescription for future practice. ¶ The dasabhumi schema is sometimes correlated with other systems of classifying the bodhisattva path. In the five levels of the YogAcAra school's outline of the bodhisattva path (PANCAMARGA; C. wuwei), the first bhumi (pramuditA) is presumed to be equivalent to the level of proficiency (*prativedhAvasthA; C. tongdawei), the third of the five levels; while the second bhumi onward corresponds to the level of cultivation (C. xiuxiwei), the fourth of the five levels. The first bhumi is also correlated with the path of vision (DARsANAMARGA), while the second and higher bhumis correlate with the path of cultivation (BHAVANAMARGA). In terms of the doctrine of the five acquiescences (C. ren; S. ksAnti) listed in the RENWANG JING, the first through the third bhumis are equivalent to the second acquiescence, the acquiescence of belief (C. xinren; J. shinnin; K. sinin); the fourth through the sixth stages to the third, the acquiescence of obedience (C. shunren; J. junnin; K. sunin); the seventh through the ninth stages to the fourth, the acquiescence to the nonproduction of dharmas (anutpattikadharmaksAnti; C. wushengren; J. mushonin; K. musaengin); the tenth stage to the fifth and final acquiescence, to extinction (jimieren; J. jakumetsunin; K. chongmyorin). FAZANG's HUAYANJING TANXUAN JI ("Notes Plumbing the Profundities of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA") classifies the ten bhumis in terms of practice by correlating the first bhumi to the practice of faith (sRADDHA), the second bhumi to the practice of morality (sĪLA), the third bhumi to the practice of concentration (SAMADHI), and the fourth bhumi and higher to the practice of wisdom (PRAJNA). In the same text, Fazang also classifies the bhumis in terms of vehicle (YANA) by correlating the first through third bhumis with the vehicle of humans and gods (rentiansheng), the fourth through the seventh stage to the three vehicles (TRIYANA), and the eighth through tenth bhumis to the one vehicle (EKAYANA). ¶ Besides the list of the dasabhumi outlined in the Dasabhumikasutra, the MAHAPRAJNAPARAMITASuTRA and the DAZHIDU LUN (*MahAprajNApAramitAsAstra) list a set of ten bhumis, called the "bhumis in common" (gongdi), which are shared between all the three vehicles of sRAVAKAs, PRATYEKABUDDHAs, and bodhisattvas. These are the bhumis of: (1) dry wisdom (suklavidarsanAbhumi; C. ganhuidi), which corresponds to the level of three worthies (sanxianwei, viz., ten abidings, ten practices, ten transferences) in the srAvaka vehicle and the initial arousal of the thought of enlightenment (prathamacittotpAda) in the bodhisattva vehicle; (2) lineage (gotrabhumi; C. xingdi, zhongxingdi), which corresponds to the stage of the "aids to penetration" (NIRVEDHABHAGĪYA) in the srAvaka vehicle, and the final stage of the ten transferences in the fifty-two bodhisattva stages; (3) eight acquiescences (astamakabhumi; C. barendi), the causal incipiency of stream-enterer (SROTAAPANNA) in the case of the srAvaka vehicle and the acquiescence to the nonproduction of dharmas (anutpattikadharmaksAnti) in the bodhisattva path (usually corresponding to the first or the seventh through ninth bhumis of the bodhisattva path); (4) vision (darsanabhumi; C. jiandi), corresponding to the fruition or fulfillment (PHALA) level of the stream-enterer in the srAvaka vehicle and the stage of nonretrogression (AVAIVARTIKA), in the bodhisattva path (usually corresponding to the completion of the first or the eighth bhumi); (5) diminishment (tanubhumi; C. baodi), corresponding to the fulfillment level (phala) of stream-enterer or the causal incipiency of the once-returner (sakṛdAgAmin) in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage following nonretrogression before the attainment of buddhahood in the bodhisattva path; (6) freedom from desire (vītarAgabhumi; C. liyudi), equivalent to the fulfillment level of the nonreturner in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage where a bodhisattva attains the five supernatural powers (ABHIJNA); (7) complete discrimination (kṛtAvibhumi), equivalent to the fulfillment level of the ARHAT in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage of buddhahood (buddhabhumi) in the bodhisattva path (buddhabhumi) here refers not to the fruition of buddhahood but merely to the state in which a bodhisattva has the ability to exhibit the eighteen qualities distinctive to the buddhas (AVEnIKA[BUDDHA]DHARMA); (8) pratyekabuddha (pratyekabuddhabhumi); (9) bodhisattva (bodhisattvabhumi), the whole bodhisattva career prior to the fruition of buddhahood; (10) buddhahood (buddhabhumi), the stage of the fruition of buddhahood, when the buddha is completely equipped with all the buddhadharmas, such as omniscience (SARVAKARAJNATĀ). As is obvious in this schema, despite being called the bhumis "common" to all three vehicles, the shared stages continue only up to the seventh stage; the eighth through tenth stages are exclusive to the bodhisattva vehicle. This anomaly suggests that the last three bhumis of the bodhisattvayāna were added to an earlier srāvakayāna seven-bhumi scheme. ¶ The presentation of the bhumis in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ commentarial tradition following the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA uses the names found in the Dasabhumikasutra for the bhumis and understands them all as bodhisattva levels; it introduces the names of the ten bhumis found in the Dazhidu lun as levels that bodhisattvas have to pass beyond (S. atikrama) on the tenth bodhisattva level, which it calls the buddhabhumi. This tenth bodhisattva level is not the level of an actual buddha, but the level on which a bodhisattva has to transcend attachment (abhinivesa) to not only the levels reached by the four sets of noble persons (ĀRYAPUDGALA) but to the bodhisattvabhumis as well. See also BHuMI.
Dasheng xuanlun. (J. Daijo genron; K. Taesŭng hyon non 大乗玄論). In Chinese, "Profound Treatise on the MAHĀYĀNA"; one of most influential treatises of the SAN LUN ZONG, the Chinese branch of the MADHYAMAKA school of Indian philosophy; composed by JIZANG, in five rolls. The treatise is primarily concerned with eight general topics: the two truths (SATYADVAYA), eight negations, buddha-nature (FOXING), EKAYĀNA, NIRVĀnA, two wisdoms, teachings, and treatises. The section on teachings explains the notions of sympathetic resonance (GANYING) and the PURE LAND. Explanations of Madhyamaka epistemology, the "four antinomies" (CATUsKOtI), and the MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ appear in the last section on treatises.
DEATH PROCESS The process at the end of incarnation, when the monad in the superphysical envelopes leaves the two physical envelopes (organism and etheric envelope), after the tie that unifies the monad with these, the sutratma, is severed definitively.
Even during profound sleep, the emotional envelope along with the higher envelopes is separated from the physical ones. The difference here is that the sutratma upholds the connection between the monad and the physical. (K 1.34.26f, 3.5.11)
At the same time as the etheric envelope frees itself from the organism in the so-called process of death, the emotional envelope frees itself from the etheric envelope which remains near the organism and dissolves along with it. K 1.34.26
deeply ::: adv. --> At or to a great depth; far below the surface; as, to sink deeply.
Profoundly; thoroughly; not superficially; in a high degree; intensely; as, deeply skilled in ethics.
Very; with a tendency to darkness of color.
Gravely; with low or deep tone; as, a deeply toned instrument.
With profound skill; with art or intricacy; as, a deeply
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
deepness ::: n. --> The state or quality of being deep, profound, mysterious, secretive, etc.; depth; profundity; -- opposed to shallowness.
Craft; insidiousness.
deep-read ::: a. --> Profoundly book- learned.
depth ::: n. --> The quality of being deep; deepness; perpendicular measurement downward from the surface, or horizontal measurement backward from the front; as, the depth of a river; the depth of a body of troops.
Profoundness; extent or degree of intensity; abundance; completeness; as, depth of knowledge, or color.
Lowness; as, depth of sound.
That which is deep; a deep, or the deepest, part or place;
Deva(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning celestial being, of which there are various classes. This has been a greatpuzzle for most of our Occidental Orientalists. They cannot understand the distinctions that thewonderful old philosophers of the Orient make as regards the various classes of the devas. They say, insubstance: "What funny contradictions there are in these teachings, which in many respects are profoundand seem wonderful. Some of these devas or divine beings are said to be less than man; some of thesewritings even say that a good man is nobler than any god. And yet other parts of these teachings declarethat there are gods higher even than the devas, and yet are called devas. What does this mean?"The devas or celestial beings, one class of them, are the unself-conscious sparks of divinity, cyclingdown into matter in order to bring out from within themselves and to unfold or evolve self-consciousness,the svabhava of divinity within. They then begin their reascent always on the luminous arc, which neverends, in a sense; and they are gods, self-conscious gods, henceforth taking a definite and divine part inthe "great work," as the mystics have said, of being builders, evolvers, leaders of hierarchies. In otherwords, they are monads which have become their own innermost selves, which have passed thering-pass-not separating the spiritual from the divine.
Dhammapada (Pali) Dhammpada [from dhamma law, moral conduct (cf Sanskrit dharma) + pada a step, line, stanza] A fundamental text of Southern Buddhism: a collection of 423 verses believed to be the sayings of Gautama Buddha, gathered from older sources and strung together on 26 selected topics. Dealing with a wide range of philosophic and religious thought, with particular emphasis on ethics, they are often couched in beautiful imagery, so that they make a ready and profound appeal to the reader. Self-culture and self-control are forcibly inculcated, and when the precepts are followed they lead to the living of an exalted as well as useful life.
dharmadhātu. (P. dhammadhātu; T. chos kyi dbyings; C. fajie; J. hokkai; K. popkye 法界). In Sanskrit, "dharma realm," viz., "realm of reality," or "dharma element"; a term that has two primary denotations. In the ABHIDHARMA tradition, dharmadhātu means an "element of the dharma" or the "reality of dharma." As one of the twelve ĀYATANA and eighteen DHĀTU, the dharmadhātu encompasses every thing that is or could potentially be an object of cognition and refers to the "substance" or "quality" of a dharma that is perceived by the mind. Dhātu in this context is sometimes read as "the boundary" or "delineation" that separates one distinct dharma from the other. The ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA lists the sensation aggregate (VEDANĀ-SKANDHA), the perception aggregate (SAMJNĀ-skandha), the conditioning forces aggregate (SAMSKĀRA-skandha), unmanifest materiality (AVIJNAPTIRuPA), and unconditioned dharmas (viz., NIRVĀnA) to be the constituents of this category. ¶ In the MAHĀYĀNA, dharmadhātu is used primarily to mean "sphere of dharma," which denotes the infinite domain in which the activity of all dharmas takes place-i.e., the universe. It also serves as one of several terms for ultimate reality, such as TATHATĀ. In works such as the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA, the purpose of Buddhist practice is to recognize and partake in this realm of reality. ¶ In East Asian Mahāyāna, there is a list of "ten dharmadhātus," which are the six traditional levels of nonenlightened existence-hell denizens (NĀRAKA), hungry ghosts (PRETA), animals (TIRYAK), demigods (ASURA), humans (MANUsYA), and divinities (DEVA)-together with the four categories of enlightened beings, viz., sRĀVAKAs, PRATYEKABUDDHAs, BODHISATTVAs, and buddhas. ¶ The Chinese HUAYAN school recognizes a set of four dharmadhātus (SI FAJIE), that is, four successively more profound levels of reality: (1) the dharmadhātu of phenomena (SHI FAJIE); (2) the dharmadhātu of principle (LI FAJIE); (3) the dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomena and principle (LISHI WU'AI FAJIE); and (4) the dharmadhātu of unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). ¶ In YOGATANTRA, the dharmadhātu consists of the realms of vajradhātu (see KONGoKAI) and garbhadhātu (see TAIZoKAI), categories that simultaneously denote the bivalence in cosmological structure, in modes of spiritual practice, and in the powers and qualities of enlightened beings. Dharmadhātu is believed to be the full revelation of the body of the cosmic buddha VAIROCANA.
Dharmakīrti. (T. Chos kyi grags pa; C. Facheng; J. Hosho; K. Popch'ing 法稱) (c. 600-670 CE). Indian Buddhist logician, who was one of the most important and influential figures in the history of Buddhist philosophy. Dharmakīrti was the author of a series of seminal works building on his predecessor DIGNĀGA's PRAMĀnASAMUCCAYA ("Compendium on Valid Knowledge"), defending it against criticism by Brahmanical writers and explaining how accurate knowledge could be gleaned (see PRAMĀnA). His "seven treatises on pramāna" (T. TSHAD MA SDE 'DUN) are the PRAMĀnAVĀRTTIKA ("Commentary on Valid Knowledge") and PRAMĀnAVINIsCAYA ("Determination of Valid Knowledge"), as well as the NYĀYABINDU ("Drop of Reasoning"), the Hetubindu ("Drop of Reasons"), the Sambandhaparīksā ("Analysis of Relations"), the SaMtānāntarasiddhi ("Proof of Other Mental Continuums"), and the Vādanyāya ("Reasoning for Debate"). Dharmakīrti proposed a causal efficacy connecting the sense object and sensory perception as the basis of reliable perception (PRATYAKsA), thereby attempting to remove the potential fallacy in Dignāga's acceptance of the infallibility of sense data themselves. Dharmakīrti wrote explanations of many of his own works, and DHARMOTTARA, sākyamati, PRAJNĀKARAGUPTA, and Manorathanandin, among others, wrote detailed commentaries on his works. He had a profound influence on the exchange between subsequent Indian Buddhist writers, such as sĀNTARAKsITA, KAMALAsĪLA, and HARIBHADRA, and contemporary Brahmanical Naiyāyika and MīmāMsaka thinkers. His work subsequently became the focus of intense study in Tibet, first in GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery where RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB and later PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE established through their commentaries on the PRAMĀnAVINIsCAYA an influential tradition of interpretation; it was questioned by SA SKYA PAndITA in his TSHAD MA RIGS GTER, giving rise to a second line of interpretation more in line with Dharmakīrti's original works. There is a question of Dharmakīrti's philosophical affiliation, with elements in his works that reflect both SAUTRĀNTIKA and YOGĀCĀRA doctrinal positions.
Dharmaskandha[pādasāstra]. (T. Chos kyi phung po; C. Fayun zu lun; J. Hounsokuron; K. Pobon chok non 法蘊足論). In Sanskrit, "Aggregation of Factors," or "Collection of Factors"; one of the two oldest works in the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA, along with the SAMGĪTIPARYĀYA, and traditionally placed as the third of the six "feet" (pāda) of the JNĀNAPRASTHĀNA, the central treatise in the Sarvāstivāda ABHIDHARMAPItAKA. The text is attributed to sĀRIPUTRA or MAHĀMAUDGALYĀYANA. It is considered an early work, with some scholars dating it as early as c. 300 BCE. It draws principally from the ĀGAMA scriptures to provide an account of Buddhist soteriological practices, as well as the afflictions that hinder spiritual progress. In coverage, the closest analogues to the Dharmaskandha are the VIBHAnGA of the Pāli abhidhammapitaka and the first half of the sāriputrābhidharmasāstra (probably associated with the DHARMAGUPTAKA school), but it appears to be the most primitive of the three in the way it organizes DHARMA classifications, listing them as sense-fields or bases (ĀYATANA), aggregates (SKANDHA), and elements (DHĀTU), rather than the standard Sarvāstivāda listing of aggregates, bases, and elements (as is also found in the Pāli abhidhamma). The exposition of dharmas in the first half of the text follows the primitive arrangement of the thirty-seven factors pertaining to enlightenment (BODHIPĀKsIKADHARMA), probably the earliest of the MĀTṚKĀ (matrices) listings that were the origin of the abhidharma style of dharma analysis. The Dharmaskandha provides one of the earliest attempts in Sarvāstivāda literature to organize the constituents of the path (MĀRGA) and introduce the crucial innovation of distinguishing between a path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA) and a path of cultivation (BHĀVANĀMĀRGA). This distinction would be of crucial importance in the mature systematizations of the path made by the VAIBHĀsIKAs and would profoundly influence later MAHĀYĀNA presentations of the path. The second half of the text covers various other classification schema, including the āyatanas and dhātus. The sixteenth chapter synthesizes these two divisions, and focuses especially on the afflictions (KLEsA) and their removal. Despite being one of the earliest of the Sarvāstivāda abhidharma texts, the mature tradition considers the Dharmaskandha to be one of the "feet" (pāda) of the JNĀNAPRASTHĀNA, the central treatise in the Sarvāstivāda abhidharmapitaka. The Dharmaskandha does not survive in an Indic language and is only extant in a Chinese translation made by XUANZANG's translation team in 659 CE.
Dhyana-marga (Sanskrit) Dhyāna-mārga [from dhyāna meditation + mārga path] The path of meditation or profound spiritual-intellectual contemplation.
Dhyana(Sanskrit) ::: A term signifying profound spiritualintellectual contemplation with utter detachment from allobjects of a sensuous and lower mental character. In Buddhism it is one of the six paramitas ofperfection. One who is adept or expert in the practice of dhyana, which by the way is a wonderfulspiritual exercise if the proper idea of it be grasped, is carried in thought entirely out of all relations withthe material and merely psychological spheres of being and of consciousness, and into lofty spiritualplanes. Instead of dhyana being a subtraction from the elements of consciousness, it is rather a throwingoff or casting aside of the crippling sheaths of ethereal matter which surround the consciousness, thusallowing the dhyanin, or practicer of this form of true yoga, to enter into the highest parts of his ownconstitution and temporarily to become at one with and, therefore, to commune with the gods. It is atemporary becoming at one with the upper triad of man considered as a septenary, in other words, withhis monadic essence. Man's consciousness in this state or condition becomes purely buddhi, or ratherbuddhic, with the highest parts of the manas acting as upadhi or vehicle for the retention of what theconsciousness therein experiences. From this term is drawn the phrase dhyani-chohans ordhyani-buddhas -- words so frequently used in theosophical literature and so frequently misconceived asto their real meaning. (See also Samadhi)
Dhyana (Sanskrit) Dhyāna [from the verbal root dhyai to contemplate, meditate] Profound spiritual-intellectual contemplation, with utter detachment from all objects of sense and of a lower mental character; one of the six paramitas in Buddhism. See also JHANA
Dhyana Yoga (Sanskrit) Dhyāna Yoga Profound spiritual mediation on the divinity within, imbodying six or seven stages of advancement, accompanied by the simultaneous abstraction of thought from external existence; the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita treats of dhyana yoga. Likewise, one of the paramitas of Buddhism.
Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite (florished 6th century) Author of the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, influential Neoplatonic, neo-Pythagorean texts attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite of the New Testament. The mystical hierarchical ideas imbodied in these texts exercised a profound spiritualizing influence on later Christian thought.
dread ::: n. **1. Profound fear; terror. 2. An object of fear, awe, or reverence. v. 3. To be in fear or terror of. 4. To anticipate with alarm, distaste, or reluctance. adj. 5. Fearful terrible; causing terror. 6. Held in awe or reverential fear. Dread, dreads, dreaded.**
Dreamless Sleep The state of human consciousness in which a person is wrapped in profound self-oblivion, a state quite distinct from the waking state as also from the dreaming state. It is used in theosophical writings as an equivalent for the Sanskrit sushupti.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: (1803-1882) American poet and essayist. His spirit of independence early led him to leave the pulpit for the lecture platform where he earned high rank as the leading transcendentalist and the foremost figure in the famous Concord group. His profound vision, his ringing spirit of individualism and his love of democracy place him among the New World's philosophic pantheon. His "The American Scholar," "The Over-Soul," ''Self-Reliance," "Compensation" and the Divinity School Address are perhaps the most famous of his lectures and essays. He edited The Dial, the official organ of the transcendental movement. His several trips to Europe brought him into contact with Coleridge and Wordsworth, but particularly with Carlyle.
Enlightenment, Enlightened: Capitalized, another term for Awakening – commonly but not exclusively used by the Technocracy. In lower case form, enlightenment simply refers to the state of profound understanding.
Evans-Wentz, Walter Y. (1878-1965). American Theosophist, best known as the editor of THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. Walter Wentz was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of a German immigrant and an American Quaker. As a boy he took an early interest in books on spiritualism he found in his father's library, reading as a teen both Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine by Madame HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY of the Theosophical Society. He moved to California at the turn of the century, where in 1901, he joined the American section of the Theosophical Society. After graduating from Stanford University, Wentz went to Jesus College at Oxford in 1907 to study Celtic folklore. He later traveled to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and then on to India. In 1919, he arrived in the British hill station of Darjeeling, where he acquired a Tibetan manuscript. The manuscript was a portion of a cycle of treasure texts (GTER MA) discovered by RATNA GLING PA, entitled "The Profound Doctrine of Self-Liberation of the Mind [through Encountering] the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities" (Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol), said to have been discovered in the fourteenth century. Since he could not read Tibetan, Evans-Wentz took the text to KAZI DAWA SAMDUP, the English teacher at a local school. Kazi Dawa Samdup provided Evans-Wentz with a translation of a portion of the text, which Evans-Wentz augmented with his own introduction and notes, publishing it in 1927 as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since its publication, various editions of the book have sold over 500,000 copies in English, making it the most famous Tibetan Buddhist text in the world. The text describes the process of death and rebirth, focusing on the intervening transition period called the BAR DO, or "intermediate state" (ANTARĀBHAVA). The text provides instructions on how to recognize reality in the intermediate state and thus gain liberation from rebirth. Through listening to the instructions in the text being read aloud, the departed consciousness is able to gain liberation; the Tibetan title of the text, BAR DO THOS GROL CHEN MO, means "Great Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing." Evans-Wentz's approach to the text reflects his lifelong commitment to Theosophy. Other translations that Kazi Dawa Samdup made for Evans-Wentz were included in Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935). In 1924, after Kazi Dawa Samdup's death, Evans-Wentz visited his family in Kalimpong, from whom he received a manuscript translation of the MI LA RAS PA'I RNAM THAR, a biography of MI LA RAS PA, which Evans-Wentz subsequently edited and published as Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa (1928). He returned to Darjeeling in 1935 and employed two Sikkimese monks to translate another work from the same cycle of texts as the Bar do thos grol, entitled "Self-Liberation through Naked Vision Recognizing Awareness" (Rig pa ngo sprod gcer mthong rang grol). During the same visit, he received a summary of a famous biography of PADMASAMBHAVA. These works formed the last work in his series, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, eventually published in 1954.
experience, logic, and belief of some of the boldest and profoundest minds of all times—minds
Fahua wuchong xuanyi. (J. Hokke gojugengi; K. Pophwa ojung hyonŭi 法華五重玄義). In Chinese, "The Five Layers of Profound Meaning according to the Fahua (TIANTAI) [school]," a standardized set of interpretive tools devised by TIANTAI ZHIYI to be used in composing Buddhist scriptural commentaries. The five topics of exegesis that Zhiyi states should be covered in any comprehensive sutra commentary are: (1) "explanation of the title [of the sutra]" (shiming); (2) "discernment of its main theme" (bianti); (3) "elucidation of its cardinal doctrine or main tenet" (mingzong); (4) "discussion of the sutra's intent or purpose" (lunyong); (5) "adjudication of its position in a hermeneutical taxonomy of the scriptures" (panjiao; see JIAOXIANG PANSHI). These five topics are covered in most East Asian sutra commentaries written after Zhiyi's time.
Fahua xuanyi. (J. Hokke gengi; K. Pophwa hyonŭi 法華玄義). In Chinese, "Profound Meaning of the 'Lotus Sutra,'" taught by the eminent Chinese monk TIANTAI ZHIYI and put into writing by his disciple Guanding (561-632). Along with the MOHE ZHIGUAN and FAHUA WENJU, the Fahua xuanyi is considered one of Zhiyi's three great commentaries. The lectures that form the basis of the Fahua xuanyi were delivered by Zhiyi in 593, perhaps at the monastery of Yuquansi in Jingzhou (present-day Hubei province), and they are concerned with the thorough analysis of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA. The treatise is divided into two broader methods of interpretation: general (tongshi) and specific (bieshi). The general interpretation further consists of seven subtypes, such as a listing of the chapters, citations, provenance, and so forth. The specific interpretation consists of five subtypes (see FAHUA WUCHONG XUANYI): the interpretation of the title, determination of its main theme, clarification of its main tenet, discussion of its purpose, and classification of its teachings (panjiao; see JIAOXIANG PANSHI). Nearly two-thirds of the treatise is dedicated to the first two characters in the title of the Chinese translation of the Saddharmapundarīka, "subtle" (miao) and "dharma" (fa).
Fahua xuanzan. (T. Dam pa'i chos punda rī ka'i 'grel pa [rgya las bsgyur pa]; J. Hokke genzan; K. Pophwa hyonch'an 法華玄贊). In Chinese, "Profound Panegyric to the 'Lotus Sutra,'" a commentary to the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA composed by KUIJI, whose unique YOGĀCĀRA perspective on the text set him at odds with the more influential commentaries written by earlier and contemporaneous TIANTAI and HUAYAN exegetes. This commentary is still extant in both Chinese and, notably, a Tibetan translation.
fajie jiachi. (J. hokkai kaji; K. popkye kaji 法界加持). In Chinese "the empowerment of the DHARMADHĀTU." According to the MAHĀVAIROCANĀBHISAMBODHISuTRA, the buddhas, the TANTRAS, and sentient beings (SATTVA) mutually pervade and "empower" (ADHIstHĀNA) each other. This mutual interfusion is what makes the dharmadhātu unfathomably profound and interconnected.
fajie yuanqi. (J. hokkai engi; K. popkye yon'gi 法界起). In Chinese, "conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) of the dharma-element (DHARMADHĀTU)," an East Asian theory of causality elaborated within the HUAYAN school. Unlike the Indian systematization of the twelvefold chain of pratītyasamutpāda, which views existence as an endless cycle of painful rebirths that begins with ignorance (AVIDYĀ) and ends with old age and death (jarāmarana; see JARĀ), this Huayan vision of causality instead regards the infinitely interdependent universe as the manifestation of the truth to which the Buddha awakens. The term "fajie yuanqi" does not appear in the Huayan jing (AVATAMSAKASuTRA) itself and seems to have been first coined by ZHIYAN (602-668), the "second patriarch" of the Huayan lineage. Zhiyan used fajie yuanqi to refer to the concurrency between cause (C. yin; S. HETU) and fruition (C. guo; S. PHALA), here meaning the "causal" practices (hsing) that are conducive to enlightenment and their "fruition" in the realization (zheng) of the quiescence that is NIRVĀnA. As this Huayan theory of pratītyasamutpāda is elaborated within the tradition, it is broadened to focus on the way in which every single phenomenal instantiation of existence both contains, and is contained by, all other instantiations, so that one existence is subsumed by all existences (yi ji yiqie) and all existences by one existence (yiqie ji yi); in this vision, all things in the universe are thus mutually creative and mutually defining, precisely because they all lack any independent self-identity (SVABHĀVA). Each phenomenon constitutes a part of an organic whole that is defined by the harmonious relationship between each and every member: just as the whole is defined by all of its independent constituents, each independent constituent is defined by the whole with which it is integrated. This relationship is called endless multiplication (chongchong wujin), because the process of mutual penetration and mutual determination (xiangru xiangji) is infinite. Due to this unlimited interdependence among all phenomena, this type of pratītyasamutpāda may also be termed "inexhaustible conditioned origination" (wujin yuanqi). This interdependence between one phenomenon and all other phenomena developed through fajie yuanqi is indicative also of the Huayan "dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon with phenomena" (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). The Huayan doctrines of the "ten profound mysteries" (SHI XUANMEN) and the "consummate interfusion of the six aspects" (LIUXIANG YUANRONG) also offer systematic elaborations of the doctrine of fajie yuanqi.
Farsi ma'navī ::: important, ideals, spiritual, profound spiritual meaning. Rumi's great mystical work is often referred to as Masnavi-i Ma'navi which means couplets of profound spiritual meaning. (see also Masnavi and Rumi)
Fons Vitae (Latin) Fount of life; Latin title of the chief work of Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), the Arab Jewish philosopher of the 11th century, believed by many to be a profound Kabbalist. The Hebrew title is Meqor Hayyim (Fountain of Lives).
Frog One of the oldest symbols in Egypt, for although associated particularly with the frog goddess Heqet, the four primeval gods of Egypt — Heh, Kek, Nau, and Amen — were each depicted with a frog’s head, the reference here being to the cosmic waters of space, out of which all things arose in the beginnings. Frog gods and goddesses were associated with the beginning or formation of the world, the symbol of the frog itself being that of resurrection and hence of renewed birth. “There must have been some very profound and sacred meaning attached to this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoolatry, the early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad enshrined in a lotus flower, or simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the Church lamps, on which were engraved the words ‘I am the resurrection’ . . . These frog goddesses are also found on all the mummies” (SD 1:386).
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
Gravity ::: A fundamental phenomenon of the Universe. Scientifically there is still much to this that is a mystery and spiritually it is also profoundly intriguing and an active area of research. The idea, in terms of the occult sciences, is that there is a scaling effect as consciousness recursively subsets and that this tethers Spirit to matter. At distinct stages there is cohesion and stability and these are perceived as planes of reality. Divergent forms at the levels of these planes stay within that plane and once the Physical Plane is encountered in order for the complexity nodes that are our brains to emerge, a world was needed that was only formed through a scaling of masses downward through galaxy supercluster to galaxy to solar system to planet to body. The lensing effect of consciousness seems to relate to some of this orbital mathematics, especially in terms of the "shape" and "feel" of the sphere of awareness. Additionally, spacetime is warped by mass and vice-versa, so there are many interesting aspects to gravity, the perception of spacetime, and the evolution of consciousness.
Gyonen. (凝然) (1240-1321). Japanese monk associated with the Kegonshu doctrinal school (HUAYAN ZONG). Gyonen was a scion of the Fujiwara clan, one of the most influential aristocratic families in Japan, who ordained at sixteen and subsequently moved to ToDAIJI, where he eventually became abbot. At Todaiji, he lectured frequently on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the central text of the Kegonshu, and was also invited to lecture on FAZANG's WUJIAO CHANG at the imperial court, which awarded him the honorary title of state preceptor (J. kokushi; C. GUOSHI). Gyonen wrote over 125 works, all in literary Chinese, which ran the gamut from SuTRA exegesis, to biography, to ritual music. Gyonen's interest in Buddhist doctrine was not limited to the Kegon school. His most famous work is his HASSHu KoYo ("Essentials of the Eight Traditions"), which provides a systematic overview of the history and doctrines of the eight major schools that were dominant in Japanese Buddhism during the Nara and Heian periods. Gyonen's portrayal of Japanese Buddhism as a collection of independent schools identified by discrete doctrines and independent lines of transmission had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhist studies into the modern period.
Hasshu koyo. (八宗綱要). In Japanese, "Essentials of the Eight Traditions"; an influential history of Buddhism in Japan composed by the Japanese KEGONSHu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) monk GYoNEN (1240-1321). Gyonen first divides the teachings of the Buddha into the two vehicles of MAHĀYĀNA and HĪNAYĀNA, the two paths of the sRĀVAKA and BODHISATTVA, and the three baskets (PItAKA) of SuTRA, VINAYA, and ABHIDHARMA. He then proceeds to provide a brief history of the transmission of Buddhism from India to Japan. Gyonen subsequently details the division of the Buddha's teachings into the eight different traditions that dominated Japanese Buddhism during the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods. This outline provides a valuable summary of the teachings of each tradition, each of their histories, and the development of their distinctive doctrines in India, China, and Japan. The first roll describes the Kusha (see ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA), Jojitsu (*Tattvasiddhi; see CHENGSHI LUN), and RITSU (see VINAYA) traditions. The second roll describes the Hosso (see FAXIANG ZONG; YOGĀCĀRA), Sanron (see SAN LUN), TENDAI (see TIANTAI), Kegon (see HUAYAN), and SHINGON traditions. Brief introductions to the ZENSHu and JoDOSHu, which were more recent additions to Japanese Buddhism, appear at the end of the text. The Hasshu koyo has been widely used in Japan since the thirteenth century as a textbook of Buddhist history and thought. Indeed, Gyonen's portrayal of Japanese Buddhism as a collection of independent schools identified by discrete doctrines and independent lineages of transmission had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhist studies into the modern period.
Heart Doctrine In Mahayana Buddhism, the hidden or esoteric teachings as opposed to the eye doctrine, the public or exoteric teachings. In theosophy, the heart doctrine is considered to contain the more profound and compassionate teachings which go beyond the literal interpretation of the publicly given doctrines. ( )
heavy ::: 1. Having relatively great weight. lit. and fig. 2. Weighed down; burdened. 3. Marked by or exhibiting weariness. 4. Without vivacity or interest; ponderous; dull. 5. Not easily borne; oppressive; burdensome; harsh. 6. Hard to cope with; trying; difficult. 7. Weighed down with sorrow or grief; sorrowful, sad, grieved, despondent. 8. Deep, profound, intense. 9. Of great import or seriousness; grave. 10. Sober, serious, sombre or tragic. 11. With great force, intensity, turbulence, etc. 12. Having considerable thickness or substance. 13. Lacking vitality; deficient in vivacity or grace. 14. Emotionally weighed down; despondent. heavier.
Hermes says that matter becomes; formerly it was — profound expressions indeed; and Fichte expresses the same idea in his distinction between Seyn and Daseyn. In this sense, matter or worlds may be said to be brought forth or created, with the significance of becoming. See also PRIMARY CREATION; SECONDARY CREATION
Hermes was the Greek god of mystical thinking and interpretations, corresponding to the Egyptian Thoth, both divinities being overseers or hierophants of works of initiation concealing the archaic secrets of the god-wisdom. Thus the ascription to Hermes of profoundly mystical allegories is properly assigned, whoever their actual writers may have been.
history ::: “History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.” The Human Cycle etc.
Holocaust ::: Madhav: “Holocaust—this profound sacrifice of the soul, the soul of the ‘burdened great’, those who sacrifice their celestial status and accept to undergo the yoke of Fate and Death. Their holocaust, chosen sacrifice, is not a sacrifice imposed by their karma for they have no karma, but a self-chosen sacrifice in furtherance of God’s work.” Sat-Sang Talk, 25/8/91
Hsuan hsueh: The system of profound and mysterious doctrines, with special reference to Taoism from the third to the fifth centuries A.D. -- W.T.C.
Hsuan te: (Profound Virtue) "The Way produces things but does not take possession of them. It does its work but does not take pride in it. It rules over things but does not dominate them. This is called Profound Virtue." (Lao Tzu.)
Huanglong pai. (J. oryoha/oryuha; K. Hwangnyong p'a 龍派). In Chinese, "Huanglong school"; collateral lineage of the CHAN school's LINJI ZONG, one of the five houses and seven schools (WU JIA QI ZONG) of the Chan during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126). The school's name comes from the toponym of its founder, HUANGLONG HUINAN (1002-1069), who taught at Mt. Huanglong in present-day Jiangxi province; Huinan was a disciple of Shishuang Chuyuan (986-1039), himself a sixth-generation successor in the Linji school. The Huanglong school was especially known for "lettered Chan" (WENZI CHAN), a style of Chan that valorized belle lettres, and especially poetry, in Chan practice. Many of the most influential monks in the Huanglong school exemplified a period when Chan entered the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life: their practice of Chan was framed and conceptualized in terms that drew from their wide learning and profound erudition, tendencies that helped make Chan writings particularly appealing to wider Chinese literati culture. JUEFAN HUIHONG (1071-1128), for example, decried the bibliophobic tendencies in Chan that were epitomized in the aphorism that Chan "does not establish words and letters" (BULI WENZI) and advocated that Chan insights were in fact made manifest in both Buddhist sutras and the uniquely Chan genres of discourse records (YULU), lineage histories (see CHUANDENG LU), and public-case anthologies (GONG'AN). Huanglong and YUNMEN ZONG masters made important contributions to the development of the Song Chan literary styles of songgu ([attaching] verses to ancient [cases]) and niangu (raising [and analyzing] ancient [cases]). Because of their pronounced literary tendencies, many Huanglong monks became close associates of such Song literati-officials as Su Shi (1036-1101), Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), and ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122). After the founder's death, discord appeared within the Huanglong lineage: the second-generation master Baofeng Kewen (1025-1102) and his disciple Juefan Huihong criticized the practices of another second-generation master Donglin Changzong (1025-1091) and his disciples as clinging to silence and simply waiting for enlightenment; this view may have influenced the subsequent criticism of the CAODONG ZONG by DAHUI ZONGGAO (1089-1163), who trained for a time with the Huanglong master Zhantang Wenjun (1061-1115). The Huanglong pai was the first school of Chan to be introduced to Japan: by MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215), who studied with the eighth-generation Huanglong teacher Xu'an Huaichang (d.u.). The Huanglong pai did not survive as a separate lineage in either country long after the twelfth century, as its rival YANGQI PAI came to prominence; it was eventually reabsorbed into the Yangqi lineage.
Huayan jing souxuan ji. (J. Kegongyo sogenki; K. Hwaom kyong suhyon ki 華嚴經搜玄). In Chinese, "Notes on Fathoming the Profundities of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA," a ten-roll exegesis of the AvataMsakasutra, written by the HUAYAN patriarch ZHIYAN. Using the Huayan school's idiosyncratic "Ten Profound Categories [of Dependent Origination]" (see SHI XUANMEN) to explain the intent of the sutra, this work became the blueprint that FAZANG would later follow in writing his influential HUAYAN JING TANXUAN JI.
Huayan jing tanxuan ji. (J. Kegongyo tangenki; K. Hwaom kyong t'amhyon ki 華嚴經探玄). In Chinese, "Notes Plumbing the Profundities of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA," FAZANG's twenty-roll commentary to BUDDHABHADRA's sixty-roll translation of the Huayan jing and one of the key texts that shaped the mature teachings of the HUAYAN ZONG. Fazang's commentary was especially beholden to ZHIYAN's HUAYAN JING SOUXUAN JI, which uses the idiosyncratic "Ten Profound Categories [of Dependent Origination]" (see SHI XUANMEN) of the Huayan school to explain the meanings of the sutra. Fazang's work was praised within the Huayan tradition as one of the two greatest commentaries to the AvataMsakasutra, along with CHENGGUAN's HUAYAN JING SHU and its accompanying autocommentary HUAYAN JING SUISHU YANYI CHAO.
Huayan sansheng. (J. Kegon no sansho; K. Hwaom samsong 華嚴三聖). In Chinese, "the Three Sages of HUAYAN," refer to the three primary deities of the lotus-womb world (lianhuazang shijie; cf. TAIZoKAI), the universe as described in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, which contains infinitely layered cosmoses and interpenetrating realms. (1) VAIROCANA Buddha is considered to be the dharma body (DHARMAKĀYA) itself, who pervades the entire universe and from whom all other buddhas arose; he symbolizes the utmost fruition of bodhisattva practice. (2) SAMANTABHADRA, an advanced BODHISATTVA depicted as standing to Vairocana's right, symbolizes the profound aspiration and all-embracing practices undertaken by the bodhisattvas. (3) MANJUsRĪ, another advanced bodhisattva depicted as standing to Vairocana's left, symbolizes the wisdom gleaned through mastering the bodhisattva path. The primary virtues represented by these two bodhisattvas are said to culminate in the perfection of the cosmic Vairocana. In the Huayan tradition, in particular, various other attributes and symbolisms are also attributed to the three deities.
Huayan shiyi. (J. Kegon no jui; K. Hwaom sibi 華嚴十異). In Chinese, "Ten Distinctions of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA," ten reasons why HUAYAN exegetes consider the AvataMsakasutra to be superior to all other scriptures and thus the supreme teaching of the Buddha. (1) The "time of its exposition" was unique (shiyi): the sutra was supposedly the first scripture preached after the Buddha's enlightenment and thus offers the most unadulterated enunciation of his experience. (2) The "location of its exposition" was unique (chuyi): it is said that the BODHI TREE under which the sutra was preached was the center of the "oceans of world systems of the lotus womb world" (S. padmagarbhalokadhātu; C. lianhuazang shijie; cf. TAIZoKAI). (3) The "preacher" was unique (zhuyi): The sutra was supposedly preached by VAIROCANA Buddha, as opposed to other "emanation buddhas." (4) The "audience" was unique (zhongyi): only advanced BODHISATTVAs-along with divinities and demigods who were in actuality emanations of the Buddha-were present for its preaching; thus, there was no division between MAHĀYĀNA and HĪNAYĀNA. (5) The "basis" of the sutra was unique (suoyiyi): its teaching was based on the one vehicle (EKAYĀNA), not the other provisional vehicles created later within the tradition. (6) The "exposition" of the sutra was unique (shuoyi): the AvataMsakasutra preached in this world system is consistent with the sutra as preached in all other world systems; this is unlike other sutras, which were provisional adaptations to the particular needs of this world system only. (7) The "status" of the vehicles in the sutra were unique (weiyi): no provisional categorization of the three vehicles of Buddhism (TRIYĀNA) was made in this sutra. This is because, according to the sutra's fundamental theme of "unimpeded interpenetration," any one vehicle subsumes all other vehicles and teachings. (8) Its "practice" was unique (xingyi): the stages (BHuMI) of the BODHISATTVA path are simultaneously perfected in this sutra's teachings, as opposed to having to be gradually perfected step-by-step. (9) The enumeration of "dharma gates," or list of dharmas, was unique (famenyi): whereas other sutras systematize doctrinal formulas using different numerical schemes (e.g., FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS, eightfold path, etc.), this sutra exclusively employs in all its lists the number "ten"-a mystical number that symbolizes the sutra's infinite scope and depth. (10) Its "instantiation" was unique (shiyi): even the most mundane phenomena described in the AvataMsakasutra (such as trees, water, mountains, etc.) are expressions of the deepest truth; this is unlike other sutras that resort primarily to abstract, philosophical concepts like "emptiness" (suNYATĀ) or "suchness" (TATHATĀ) in order to express their profoundest truths.
Huayan wujiao zhang. (J. Kegon gokyosho; K. Hwaom ogyo chang 華嚴五教章). In Chinese, "Essay on the Five [Categories of] Teachings According to Huayan" is one of the foundational treatises on the HUAYAN ZONG; composed by DUSHUN. The essay offers a systematic analysis and classification of all major Buddhist teachings according to their thematic differences, which were discussed in reference to such basic Huayan tenets as the ten profound meanings (see HUAYAN SHIYI) and the six aspects of phenomena (LIUXIANG). Dushun's influential work is the foundation of the Huayan doctrinal taxonomy, which divided the Buddhist scriptures into five levels based on the profundity of their respective teachings: HĪNAYĀNA (viz., the ĀGAMAs), elementary MAHĀYĀNA (viz., YOGĀCĀRA and MADHYAMAKA), advanced Mahāyāna (SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA), sudden teachings (typically CHAN), and perfect teachings (AVATAMSAKASuTRA). See also HUAYAN WUJIAO.
Huayan zong. (J. Kegonshu; K. Hwaom chong 華嚴宗). In Chinese, "Flower Garland School," an important exegetical tradition in East Asian Buddhism. Huayan takes its name from the Chinese translation of the title of its central scripture, the AVATAMSAKASuTRA (or perhaps BUDDHĀVATAMSAKASuTRA). The Huayan tradition is also sometimes referred to the Xianshou zong, after the sobriquet, Xianshou, of one of its greatest exegetes, FAZANG. A lineage of patriarchs, largely consisting of the tradition's great scholiasts, was retrospectively created by later followers. The putative first patriarch of the Huayan school is DUSHUN, who is followed by ZHIYAN, Fazang, CHENGGUAN, and GUIFENG ZONGMI. The work of these exegetes exerted much influence in Korea largely through the writings of ŬISANG (whose exegetical tradition is sometimes known as the Pusok chong) and WoNHYO. Hwaom teachings remained the foundation of Korean doctrinal exegesis from the Silla period onward, and continued to be influential in the synthesis that POJO CHINUL in the Koryo dynasty created between SoN (CHAN) and KYO (the teachings, viz., Hwaom). The Korean monk SIMSANG (J. Shinjo; d. 742), a disciple of Fazang, who transmitted the Huayan teachings to Japan in 740 at the instigation of RYoBEN (689-773), was instrumental in establishing the Kegon school in Japan. Subsequently, such teachers as MYoE KoBEN (1173-1232) and GYoNEN (1240-1321) continued Kegon exegesis into the Kamakura period. In China, other exegetical traditions such as the DI LUN ZONG, which focused on only one part of the AvataMsakasutra, were eventually absorbed into the Huayan tradition. The Huayan tradition was severely weakened in China after the depredations of the HUICHANG FANAN, and because of shifting interests within Chinese Buddhism away from sutra exegesis and toward Chan meditative practice and literature, and invoking the name of the buddha AMITĀBHA (see NIANFO). ¶ The Huayan school's worldview is derived from the central tenets of the imported Indian Buddhist tradition, but reworked in a distinctively East Asian fashion. Huayan is a systematization of the teachings of the AvataMsakasutra, which offered a vision of an infinite number of interconnected world systems, interfused in an all-encompassing realm of reality (DHARMADHĀTU). This profound interdependent and ecological vision of the universe led Huayan exegetes to engage in a creative reconsideration of the central Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA), which in their interpretation meant that all phenomena in the universe are mutually creating, and in turn are being mutually created by, all other phenomena. Precisely because in the traditional Buddhist view any individual phenomenon was devoid of a perduring self-nature of its own (ANĀTMAN), existence in the Huayan interpretation therefore meant to be in a constant state of multivalent interaction with all other things in the universe. The boundless interconnectedness that pertains between all things was termed "dependent origination of the dharmadhātu" (FAJIE YUANQI). Huayan also carefully examines the causal relationships between individual phenomena or events (SHI) and the fundamental principle or patterns (LI) that govern reality. These various relationships are systematized in Chengguan's teaching of the four realms of reality (dharmadhātu): the realm of principle (LI FAJIE), the realm of individual phenomena (SHI FAJIE), the realm of the unimpeded interpenetration between principle and phenomena (LISHI WU'AI FAJIE), and the realm of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). Even after Huayan's decline as an independent school, it continued to exert profound influence on both traditional East Asian philosophy and modern social movements, including engaged Buddhism and Buddhist environmentalism.
If the Supramental Power is allowed by man’s discerning assent . and vigilant surrender to act according to Us own profound and subtle insight and flexible potency, it will bring about slowly or swiftly a divine transformation of our fallen and imperfect nature.
illuminative ::: (vak) having the qualities of the third level of style, which gives "the pure untranslated language of intuitive vision" full of "a greater illumination in which the inner mind sees and feels object, emotion, idea not only clearly or richly or distinctly and powerfully, but in a flash or outbreak of transforming light which kindles the thought or image into a disclosure of new significances of a much more inner character, a more profoundly revealing vision, emotion, spiritual response".
Immortality ::: A term signifying continuous existence or being; but this understanding of the term is profoundlyillogical and contrary to nature, for there is nothing throughout nature's endless and multifarious realmsof being and existence which remains for two consecutive instants of time exactly the same.Consequently, immortality is a mere figment of the imagination, an illusory phantom of reality. When thestudent of the esoteric wisdom once realizes that continuous progress, i.e., continuous change inadvancement, is nature's fundamental procedure, he recognizes instantly that continuous remaining in anunchanging or immutable state of consciousness or being is not only impossible, but in the last analysis isthe last thing that is either desirable or comforting. Fancy continuing immortal in a state of imperfection such as we human beingsexemplify -- which is exactly what the usual acceptance of this term immortality means. The highest godin highest heaven, although seemingly immortal to us imperfect human beings, is nevertheless anevolving, growing, progressing entity in its own sublime realms or spheres, and therefore as the ages passleaves one condition or state to assume a succeeding condition or state of a nobler and higher type;precisely as the preceding condition or state had been the successor of another state before it.Continuous or unending immutability of any condition or state of an evolving entity is obviously animpossibility in nature; and when once pondered over it becomes clear that the ordinary acceptance ofimmortality involves an impossibility. All nature is an unending series of changes, which means all thehosts or multitudes of beings composing nature, for every individual unit of these hosts is growing,evolving, i.e., continuously changing, therefore never immortal. Immortality and evolution arecontradictions in terms. An evolving entity means a changing entity, signifying a continuous progresstowards better things; and evolution therefore is a succession of state of consciousness and being afteranother state of consciousness and being, and thus throughout duration. The Occidental idea of staticimmortality or even mutable immortality is thus seen to be both repellent and impossible.This doctrine is so difficult for the average Occidental easily to understand that it may be advisable onceand for all to point out without mincing of words that just as complete death, that is to say, entireannihilation of consciousness, is an impossibility in nature, just so is continuous and unchangingconsciousness in any one stage or phase of evolution likewise an impossibility, because progress ormovement or growth is continuous throughout eternity. There are, however, periods more or less long ofcontinuance in any stage or phase of consciousness that may be attained by an evolving entity; and thehigher the being is in evolution, the more its spiritual and intellectual faculties have been evolved orevoked, the longer do these periods of continuous individual, or perhaps personal, quasi-immortalitycontinue. There is, therefore, what may be called relative immortality, although this phrase is confessedlya misnomer.Master KH in The Mahatma Letters, on pages 128-30, uses the phrase ``panaeonic immortality" tosignify this same thing that I have just called relative immortality, an immortality -- falsely so called,however -- which lasts in the cases of certain highly evolved monadic egos for the entire period of amanvantara, but which of necessity ends with the succeeding pralaya of the solar system. Such a periodof time of continuous self-consciousness of so highly evolved a monadic entity is to us humans actually arelative immortality; but strictly and logically speaking it is no more immortality than is the ephemeralexistence of a butterfly. When the solar manvantara comes to an end and the solar pralaya begins, evensuch highly evolved monadic entities, full-blown gods, are swept out of manifested self-consciousexistence like the sere and dried leaves at the end of the autumn; and the divine entities thus passing outenter into still higher realms of superdivine activity, to reappear at the end of the pralaya and at the dawnof the next or succeeding solar manvantara.The entire matter is, therefore, a highly relative one. What seems immortal to us humans would seem tobe but as a wink of the eye to the vision of super-kosmic entities; while, on the other hand, the span ofthe average human life would seem to be immortal to a self-conscious entity inhabiting one of theelectrons of an atom of the human physical body.The thing to remember in this series of observations is the wondrous fact that consciousness frometernity to eternity is uninterrupted, although by the very nature of things undergoing continuous andunceasing change of phases in realization throughout endless duration. What men call unconsciousness ismerely a form of consciousness which is too subtle for our gross brain-minds to perceive or to sense or tograsp; and, secondly, strictly speaking, what men call death, whether of a universe or of their ownphysical bodies, is but the breaking up of worn-out vehicles and the transference of consciousness to ahigher plane. It is important to seize the spirit of this marvelous teaching, and not allow the imperfectbrain-mind to quibble over words, or to pause or hesitate at difficult terms.
“In ancient times in India, and in the homeland of the Aryans before they reached India by way of Central Asia, this very early Aryan speech was used not only by the Aryan populace, but in the sanctuaries of the Temples was taken in hand and developed or composed or builded to be a far finer vehicle for expressing abstract religious and philosophic conceptions and thoughts. This tongue thus composed or developed by initiates of the Aryan stock, because of this formative work upon it was finally given the name Sanskrita, signifying an original natural language which had become perfected by initiates for the purpose of expressing far more subtle and profound distinctions than ordinary people would ever find needful. So great was the admiration in which the Sanskrit language thus perfected was held, that it was commonly said of it that it was the work of the Gods, because it had thus become capable of expressing godlike thoughts: profound spiritual subtleties and philosophical distinctions. Thus it was that Sanskrit is really the mystery-language of the initiates of the Aryan race; as the Senzar of very similar history was the mystery-language of the later Atlanteans; and is still used as the noblest mystery-language by the Mahatmas.
In a still more profoundly mystical sense, the word by inversion has come to signify the utter fullness of cosmic reality, which is a seeming emptiness to our imperfect human vision, and yet is the only Real.
inconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action, but in a vast involved trance; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own abyss of infinity.” *The Life Divine
"All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite"s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit"s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being, — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” *The Life Divine
"Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience.” Letters on Yoga
*inconscience.
Indrajāla. (Indra's Net) (T. Dbang po'i dra ba; C. Yintuoluo wang/Di-Shi wang; J. Indaramo/Taishakumo; K. Indara mang/Che-Sok mang 因陀羅網/帝釋網). In Sanskrit, "Indra's net"; a metaphor used widely in the HUAYAN ZONG of East Asian Buddhism to describe the multivalent web of interconnections in which all beings are enmeshed. As depicted in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the central scripture of the Huayan school, above the palace of INDRA, the king of the gods, is spread an infinitely vast, bejeweled net. At each of the infinite numbers of knots in the net is tied a jewel that itself has an infinite number of facets. A person looking at any single one of the jewels on this net would thus see reflected in its infinite facets not only everything in the cosmos but also an infinite number of other jewels, themselves also reflecting everything in the cosmos; thus, every jewel in this vast net is simultaneously reflecting, and being reflected by, an infinite number of other jewels. This metaphor of infinite, mutually reflecting jewels is employed to help convey how all things in existence are defined by their interconnection with all other things, but without losing their own independent identity in the process. The metaphor of Indra's net thus offers a profound vision of the universe, in which all things are mutually interrelated to all other things, in simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality. The meditation on Indra's net (C. Diwang guan; J. Taimo kan; K. Chemang kwan) is the last of the six contemplations outlined by Fazang in his Xiu Huayan aozhi wangjin huanyuan guan ("Cultivation of the Inner Meaning of Huayan: The Contemplations That End Delusion and Return to the Source"), which helps the student to visualize the DHARMADHĀTU of the unimpeded interpretation between phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE).
innerness ::: more profound or obscure; less apparent; relating to the soul, mind, spirit, consciousness, etc.
Jagrat(Sanskrit) ::: The state of consciousness when awake, as opposed to svapna, the dreaming-sleeping state ofconsciousness, and different again from sushupti when the human consciousness is plunged intoprofound self-oblivion. The highest of all the states into which the consciousness may cast itself, or becast, is the turiya ("fourth"), which is the highest state of samadhi, and is almost a nirvanic condition.All these states or conditions of the consciousness are affections or phases of the constitution of man, andof beings constructed similarly to man. The waking state, or jagrat, is the state or condition ofconsciousness normal to the imbodied human being when not asleep. Svapna is the state ofconsciousness more or less freed from the sheath of the body and partially awake in the astral realms,higher or lower as the case may be. Sushupti is the state of self-oblivion into which the human being isplunged when the percipient consciousness enters into the purely manasic condition, which isself-oblivion for the relatively impotent brain-mind; whereas the turiya state, which is a practicalannihilation of the ordinary human consciousness, is an attainment of union with atma-buddhiovershadowing or working through the higher manas. Actually, therefore, it is becoming at one with themonadic essence.
'Jam mgon kong sprul Blo gros mtha' yas. (Jamgon Kongtrül Lodro Thaye) (1813-1899). A renowned Tibetan Buddhist master, prolific scholar, and proponent of the RIS MED or nonsectarian movement, of eastern Tibet. He is often known as 'Jam mgon kong sprul (Jamgon Kongrtul) or simply Kong sprul. Born to a BON family in the eastern Tibetan region of Rong rgyab (Rongyap), 'Jam mgon kong sprul studied Bon doctrine as a youth, eventually receiving Buddhist ordination first in the RNYING MA and then the BKA' BRGYUD sects of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a gifted pupil, studying under at least sixty different masters representing all the various sects and lineages of Tibet. Early experiences with the sectarianism and religious intolerance rampant in many Buddhist institutions of his time left him somewhat disaffected and were to have a profound impact on his later career. He resided at DPAL SPUNGS monastery near Derge, where his reputation as a brilliant scholar spread widely. When Kong sprul was in danger of being drafted into the provincial administrative offices, the ninth TAI SI TU, Padma nyin byed (Pema Nyinje, 1774-1853), abbot of Dpal spungs, recognized him as the reincarnation of the former Si tu's servant, thereby exempting him from government service. In his autobiography, Kong sprul himself appears to have looked upon this event with some dismay. Together with other luminaries of the period such as 'JAM DBYANG MKHYEN RTSE DBANG PO, MCHOG 'GYUR GLING PA, and MI PHAM RGYA MTSHO, Kong sprul strove to collect, compile, and transmit a multitude of teachings and instruction lineages that were in danger of being lost. The impartial (ris med) approach with which he undertook this project has led him to be credited with spearheading a "nonsectarian" or "eclectic" movement in eastern Tibet. He was a proponent of the "other emptiness" (GZHAN STONG) view, which gained new impetus when his associate Blo gsal bstan skyong was able to arrange for the printing of the woodblocks preserved at TĀRANĀTHA's former seat at DGA' LDAN PHUN TSHOGS GLING, works that had been banned since the time of the fifth DALAI LAMA. 'Jam mgon kong sprul was a prolific author whose writings fill more than ninety volumes. These works are divided into the so-called KONG SPRUL MDZOD LNGA (Five Treasuries of Kongtrul), which cover the breadth of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Since the death of Blo gros mtha' yas, a line of Kong sprul incarnations has been recognized and continues to play an important role within the KARMA BKA' BRGYUD sect. The lineage is:
jātismara. (P. jātissara; T. tshe rabs dran pa; C. suming; J. shukumyo; K. sungmyong 宿命). In Sanskrit, "memory of previous births," is synonymous with "recollection of past lives" (PuRVANIVĀSĀNUSMṚTI); a supernatural power often mentioned in the early Buddhist scriptures as accessible to religious virtuosi. This talent is listed as the first of three knowledges (TRIVIDYĀ), the fourth of five or six supranormal powers (ABHIJNĀ), and the eight of the ten powers (BALA) of a TATHĀGATA. In the context of the supranormal powers, this ability to remember one's past lives is considered to be a mundane (LAUKIKA) achievement that is gained through still more profound refinement of the fourth stage of meditative absorption (DHYĀNA). In other contexts, however, this power is accessible only to those who are ARHATs, buddhas, or otherwise in no further need of training (AsAIKsA). In later MAHĀYĀNA materials, however, bodhisattvas sometimes give even unenlightened ordinary beings (PṚTHAGJANA) this insight into their past lives as a way of inspiring them in their religious practice. In other Mahāyāna texts, such as the SUVARnAPRABHĀSOTTAMASuTRA ("Golden Light Sutra"), this talent is a by-product not of meditation but of specific types of ritual activity, a "blessing" (ANUsAMSA) that accrues, for example, from formulaic exaltations of the qualities of the buddhas, recitation of lists of their names, repetitions of mnemonic codes (DHĀRAnĪ), or copying of scriptures. The ability to remember one's past lives is said to extend back to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of one's previous births. On the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha remembered all of his previous births.
Jingying Huiyuan. (J. Joyo Eon; K. Chongyong Hyewon 浄影慧遠) (523-592). Chinese monk and putative DI LUN exegete during the Sui dynasty. Huiyuan was a native of DUNHUANG. At an early age, he entered the monastery of Guxiangusi in Zezhou (present-day Shanxi province) where he was ordained by the monk Sengsi (d.u.). Huiyuan later studied various scriptures under the VINAYA master Lizhan (d.u.) in Ye, the capital of the Eastern Wei dynasty. In his nineteenth year, Huiyuan received the full monastic precepts from Fashang (495-580), ecclesiastical head of the SAMGHA at the time, and became his disciple. Huiyuan also began his training in the DHARMAGUPTAKA "Four-Part Vinaya" (SIFEN LÜ) under the vinaya master Dayin (d.u.). After he completed his studies, Huiyuan moved back to Zezhou and began his residence at the monastery Qinghuasi. In 577, Emperor Wu (r. 560-578) of Northern Zhou began a systematic persecution of Buddhism, and in response, Huiyuan is said to have engaged the emperor in debate; a transcript of the debate, in which Huiyuan defends Buddhism against criticisms of its foreign origins and its neglect of filial piety, is still extant. As the persecution continued, Huiyuan retreated to Mt. Xi in Jijun (present-day Henan province). Shortly after the rise of the Sui dynasty, Huiyuan was summoned by Emperor Wen (r. 581-604) to serve as overseer of the saMgha (shamendu) in Luozhou (present-day Henan). He subsequently spent his time undoing the damage of the earlier persecution. Huiyuan was later asked by Emperor Wen to reside at the monastery of Daxingshansi in the capital. The emperor also built Huiyuan a new monastery named Jingyingsi, which is often used as his toponym to distinguish him from LUSHAN HUIYUAN. Jingying Huiyuan was a prolific writer who composed numerous commentaries on such texts as the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA, VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA, SHIDI JING LUN (VASUBANDHU's commentary on the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA), DASHENG QIXIN LUN, and others. Among his works, the DASHENG YI ZHANG ("Compendium of the Purport of Mahāyāna"), a comprehensive encyclopedia of Mahāyāna doctrine, is perhaps the most influential and is extensively cited by traditional exegetes throughout East Asia. Jingying Huiyuan also plays a crucial role in the development of early PURE LAND doctrine in East Asia. His commentary on the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, the earliest extant treatise on this major pure land scripture, is critical in raising the profile of the Guan jing in East Asian Buddhism. His commentary to this text profoundly influenced Korean commentaries on the pure land scriptures during the Silla dynasty, which in turn were crucial in the the evolution of Japanese pure land thought during the Nara and Heian periods. Jingying Huiyuan's concept of the "dependent origination of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA" (rulaizang yuanqi)-in which tathāgatagarbha is viewed as the "essence" (TI) of both NIRVĀnA and SAMSĀRA, which are its "functioning" (YONG)-is later adapted and popularized by the third HUAYAN patriarch, FAZANG, and is an important precursor of later Huayan reconceptualizations of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA; see FAJIE YUANQI).
jiupin. (J. kuhon; K. kup'um 九品). In Chinese, "nine grades." According to the PURE LAND school, beings who succeed in being reborn into a pure land are divided into "nine grades," e.g., "the uppermost in the top grade (shangshang)," "the intermediate in the top grade (shangzhong)," "the lowest in the top grade (shangxia)," "the uppermost in the intermediate grade (zhongshang),"..."the lowest in the bottom grade (xiaxia)." One's rebirth "grade" is determined by one's previous practice, the amount of meritorious actions one has performed, and the greatness of one's aspiration for enlightenment, among other factors. For example, according to the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING ("Sutra on the Visualization of the Buddha of Immeasurable Life"), the "uppermost in the top grade" is won by possessing the utmost sincerity (zhicheng xin), profound aspiration (shenxin), and a desire to direct one's highest aspiration to the purpose of being reborn in the pure land (huixiang fayuan xin) during a lifetime of practice. By contrast, the "lowest in the bottom grade" is secured by a penitent reprobate who is able to chant the name of AMITĀBHA up to ten times (shinian) right before his or her death. One's reborn "grade" will affect things such as the time one will take to reach buddhahood in the pure land (the higher the grade, the quicker one will the attainment). See also AMITUO JIUPIN YIN.
jNāna. (P. Nāna; T. ye shes; C. zhi; J. chi; K. chi 智). In Sanskrit, "gnosis," "knowledge," "awareness," or "understanding," numerous specific types of which are described in Buddhist literature. JNāna in the process of cognition implies specific understanding of the nature of an object and is necessarily preceded by SAMJNĀ ("perception"). JNāna is also related to PRAJNĀ ("wisdom"); where prajNā implies perfected spiritual understanding, jNāna refers to more general experiences common to a specific class of being, such as the knowledge of a sRĀVAKA, PRATYEKABUDDHA, or buddha. The YOGĀCĀRA school discusses four or five specific types of knowledge exclusive to the buddhas. The four knowledges are transformations of the eighth consciousnesses (VIJNĀNA): (1) Mirror-like knowledge, or great perfect mirror wisdom (ĀDARsAJNĀNA; mahādarsajNāna), a transformation of the eighth consciousness, the ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA, in which the perfect interfusion between all things is seen as if reflected in a great mirror. (2) The knowledge of equality, or impartial wisdom (SAMATĀJNĀNA), a transformation of the seventh KLIstAMANOVIJNĀNA, which transcends all dichotomies to see everything impartially without coloring by the ego. (3) The knowledge of specific knowledge or sublime contemplation (PRATYAVEKsANĀJNĀNA), a transformation of the sixth MANOVIJNĀNA, which recognizes the unique and common characteristics of all DHARMAs, thus giving profound intellectual understanding. (4) The knowledge that one has accomplished what was to be done (KṚTYĀNUstHĀNAJNĀNA), a transformation of the five sensory consciousnesses, wherein one perfects actions that benefit both oneself and others. The fifth of the five knowledges is the "knowledge of the nature of the DHARMADHĀTU" (DHARMADHĀTUSVABHĀVAJNĀNA). Each of these knowledges is then personified by one of the PANCATATHĀGATAs, sometimes given the names VAIROCANA, AKsOBHYA, RATNASAMBHAVA, AMITĀBHA, and AMOGHASIDDHI.
Juefan Huihong. (J. Kakuhan Eko; K. Kakpom Hyehong 覺範慧洪) (1071-1128). Chinese CHAN monk in the HUANGLONG PAI collateral line of the LINJI ZONG during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) and major proponent of "lettered Chan" (WENZI CHAN), which valorized belle lettres, and especially poetry, in the practice of Chan. Huihong entered the monastery after he was orphaned at fourteen, eventually passing the monastic examinations at age nineteen and receiving ordination at Tianwangsi in the eastern capital of Kaifeng. After studying the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi) for four years, he eventually began to study at LUSHAN with the Chan master Zhenjing Kewen (1025-1102), under whom he achieved enlightenment. Because of Huihong's close ties to the famous literati officials of his day, and especially with the statesman and Buddhist patron ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1122), his own career was subject to many of the same political repercussions as his associates; indeed, Huihong himself was imprisoned, defrocked, and exiled multiple times in his life when his literati colleagues were purged. Compounding his problems, Huihong also suffered along with many other monks during the severe Buddhist persecution (see FANAN) that occurred during the reign of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1125). Even amid these trying political times, however, Huihong managed to maintain both his monastic vocation and his productive literary career. Huihong is in fact emblematic of many Chan monks during the Song dynasty, when Chan enters the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life: his practice of Chan was framed and conceptualized in terms that drew from his wide learning and profound erudition, tendencies that helped make Chan writings particularly appealing to wider Chinese literati culture. Huihong decried the bibliophobic tendencies in Chan that were epitomized in the aphorism that Chan "does not establish words and letters" (BULI WENZI) and advocated that Chan insights were made manifest in both Buddhist sutras as well as in the uniquely Chan genres of discourse records (YULU), genealogical histories (see CHUANDENG LU), and public-case anthologies (GONG'AN). Given his literary penchant, it is no surprise that Huihong was a prolific author. His works associated with Chan lineages include the CHANLIN SENGBAO ZHUAN ("Chronicles of the SAMGHA Jewel in the Chan Grove"), a collection of biographies of about a hundred eminent Chan masters important in the development of lettered Chan; and the Linjian lu ("Anecdotes from the Groves [of Chan]"), completed in 1107 and offering a record of Huihong's own encounters with fellow monks and literati and his reflections on Buddhist practice. Huihong also wrote two studies of poetics and poetic criticism, the Lengzhai yehua ("Evening Discourses from Cold Studio") and Tianchu jinluan ("Forbidden Cutlets from the Imperial Kitchen"), and numerous commentaries to Buddhist scriptures, including the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), SHOULENGYAN JING, and YUANJUE JING.
Kali Yuga (Sanskrit) Kali Yuga Iron age or black age; the fourth and last of the four great yugas constituting a mahayuga (great age), the other three being the krita or satya yuga, treta yuga, and dvapara yuga. The kali yuga is the most material phase of a being’s or group’s evolutionary cycle. The fifth root-race is at present in its kali yuga, which is stated to have commenced at the moment of Krishna’s death, usually given as 3102 BC. The Hindus also assert that at the first moment of kali yuga there was a conjunction of all the planets. Although the kali yuga is our present profoundly materialistic age, in which only one fourth of truth prevails among humanity, making a period often called an age black with horrors, its swift momentum permits one to do more with his energies, good or bad, in a shorter time than in any other yuga. This period will be followed by the krita yuga of the next root-race.
Kalpa ::: A Sanskrit term used to qualify long periods of time within Hindu and Buddhist cosmological models. For example, a "Maha-Kalpa" or "Great Kalpa" refers to the largest period of time in Buddhist cosmology — estimated at trillions of years — and is the unit used to measure the most profound cyclical recyclings (apocalypses) experiential reality undergoes.
Kapimala. (C. Jiapimoluo; J. Kabimara; K. Kabimara 迦毘摩羅). Sanskrit name of an Indian monk who lived during the second century CE, who is listed as one of the successors in the Indian Buddhist lineage that traces itself back to the person of the Buddha himself. An Indian brāhmana who was a native of PĀtALIPUTRA (modern Patna), the capital of the kingdom of MAGADHA, he is said to have challenged the exegete AsVAGHOsA with his superpowers (ABHIJNĀ) but was defeated by Asvaghosa's profound learning and became his disciple, along with his three thousand adherents. He is typically listed as twelfth of twenty-three or thirteenth of twenty-four primary successors to sĀKYAMUNI Buddha.
Ketuvim, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are considered one book, as are the two books of Chronicles). The Bible is therefore known in Hebrew as the Tanach, the abbreviation formed by the first letters of the names of these three sections.All the books of the Bible are authored by G-d, though transmitted through prophecy via the souls of the various prophets, who are known as the &
Kim Iryop. (金一葉) (1896-1971). In Korean, Kim "single leaf," influential Korean Buddhist nun during the mid-twentieth century and part of the first generation of Korean women intellectuals, or "new women" (sin yosong), thanks to her preordination career as a leading feminist writer, essayist, and poet. Her secular name was Wonju, and her Buddhist names were Hayop and Paengnyon Toyop; Iryop is her pen name, which Yi Kwangsu (1892-1955?), a pioneer of modern Korean literature, gave her in memory of the influential Japanese feminist writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) (J. Ichiyo = K. Iryop). Kim's early years were influenced by Christianity and her father even became a Protestant minister. Her mother died when Kim was very young and her father also passed away while she was still in her teens. Kim was educated at the Ihwa Haktang, a women's academy (later Ewha University), and later studied abroad in Japan. She and other Ihwa graduates participated in the first female-published magazine in Korea, "New Women" (Sinyoja), which began and ended in 1920. Kim was a feminist intellectual who sought self-liberation and the elevation of women's status through her writing. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she continued to pursue her search for her "self" and was involved in much-publicized relationships with men such as Oda Seijo and Im Nowol, a writer of "art-for-art's sake." But Kim's ideal of female liberation based on individual self-identity appears to have undergone a profound transformation, thanks to her associations with Paek Songuk (1897-1981), a Buddhist intellectual who worked to revitalize Korean Buddhism during the Japanese colonial period and eventually became a monk himself in 1929. Through her encounter with Buddhism, Iryop's pursuit of self-liberation seems to have shifted from an emphasis on a self-centered identity based on feminism to the release from the self (ANĀTMAN). After Paek Songuk entered into the Diamond Mountains (KŬMGANGSAN) to become a monk, she again married, seemingly in an attempt both to keep her self-identity as a female and to realize the Buddhist release of self, by combining secular life with Buddhist practice. But a few years later, in 1933, she ultimately decided to become a nun under the tutelage of the Son master MAN'GONG WoLMYoN (1871-1946) and became a long-time resident of SUDoKSA. There, she became an outspoken critic of secularized Japanese-style Buddhism and particularly of its sanction of married monks and eating meat. But most notable were her writings on the pursuit of self-liberation, which she expressed as "becoming one body" (ilch'ehwa) with all people and everything in the universe. Iryop is credited for her contributions to popularizing Buddhism through her accessible writings in the Korean vernacular, as well as for elevating the position of nuns in Korean Buddhism.
ksānti. (P. khanti; T. bzod pa; C. renru; J. ninniku; K. inyok 忍辱). In Sanskrit, "patience," "steadfastness," or "endurance"; alt. "forbearance," "acceptance," or "receptivity." Ksānti is the third of the six (or ten) perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) mastered on the BODHISATTVA path; it also constitutes the third of the "aids to penetration" (NIRVEDHABHĀGĪYA), which are developed during the "path of preparation" (PRAYOGAMĀRGA) and mark the transition from the mundane sphere of cultivation (LAUKIKA-BHĀVANĀMĀRGA) to the supramundane vision (DARsANA) of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvāry āryasatyāni). The term has several discrete denotations in Buddhist literature. The term often refers to various aspects of the patience and endurance displayed by the bodhisattva in the course of his career: for example, his ability to bear all manner of abuse from sentient beings; to bear all manner of hardship over the course of the path to buddhahood without ever losing his commitment to liberate all beings from SAMSĀRA; and not to be overwhelmed by the profound nature of reality but instead to be receptive or acquiescent to it. This last denotation of ksānti is also found, for example, in the "receptivity to the fact of suffering" (duḥkhe dharmajNānaksānti; see DHARMAKsĀNTI), the first of the sixteen moments of realization of the four noble truths, in which the adept realizes the reality of impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and nonself and thus overcomes all doubts about the truth of suffering; this acceptance marks the inception of the DARsANAMĀRGA and the entrance into sanctity (ĀRYA). Ksānti as the third of the aids to penetration (nirvedhabhagīya) is distinguished from the fourth, highest worldly dharmas (LAUKIKĀGRADHARMA), only by the degree to which the validity of the four noble truths is understood: this understanding is still somewhat cursory at the stage of ksānti but is fully formed with laukikāgradharma.
Kukkutārāma. (T. Bya gag kun ra; C. Jiyuansi; J. Keionji; K. Kyewonsa 鶏園寺). Major Indian Buddhist monastery, located to the southeast of the Mauryan capital of PĀtALIPUTRA (P. Pātaliputta, present-day Patna); founded by King AsOKA in the third century BCE, with YAsAS serving as abbot. The Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG visited the site of the monastery in the seventh century, but only the foundations remained. Asoka is said to have often visited the monastery to make offerings, but Pusyamitra, who founded the sunga dynasty in 183 BCE, destroyed the monastery when he invaded Pātaliputra and murdered many of its monks. Next to the monastery was a large reliquary named the Āmalaka STuPA, which is said to have been named after half an āmalaka fruit that Asoka gave as his final offering to the SAMGHA before his death; thanks, however, to the merit that accrued from the profound sincerity with which the king made even such a meager offering, Asoka recovered from his illness, and the seeds of the fruit were preserved in this stupa in commemoration of the miracle. The KAUKKUtIKA school, one of the three main subgroups of the MAHĀSĀMGHIKA branch of the mainstream Buddhist tradition, is said to have derived its name from this monastery.
Leg bshad snying po. (Lekshe Nyingpo). In Tibetan, "The Essence of Eloquence," by TSONG KHA PA BLO BZANG GRAGS PA; its full title in Tibetan is Drang nges legs bshad snying po ("Essence of Eloquence on the Provisional and Definitive"). It is the most famous of the five texts that Tsong kha pa wrote on the view of emptiness (suNYATĀ). In it, he explores the categories of the provisional (NEYĀRTHA) and the definitive (NITĀRTHA) as they are presented in the YOGĀCĀRA (CITTAMĀTRA), *SVĀTANTRIKA, and *PRĀSAnGIKA schools. In 1402, at the age of forty-five, he completed LAM RIM CHEN MO, which concludes with a long and complex section on VIPAsYANĀ. Five years later, when he was fifty, he began writing a commentary on NĀGĀRJUNA's MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ, entitled Rigs pa'i rgya mtsho ("Ocean of Reasoning"), at a hermitage above what would become SE RA monastery on the northern outskirts of LHA SA. While writing his commentary on the first chapter, he foresaw interruptions if he remained there and so moved to another hermitage nearby, called Rwa kha brag ("Goat-face Crag"). At this time, a representative of the Chinese emperor arrived in Lha sa bearing an invitation from the Ming emperor to come to teach the dharma at his court. Tsong kha pa left his hermitage in order to meet with him. Citing his advancing age and the wish to remain in retreat, Tsong kha pa sent images of the Buddha in his stead. Returning to his hermitage, he set aside for the time being his commentary on Nāgārjuna and began writing Legs bshad snying po. After completing it in 1408, he returned to his commentary on Nāgārjuna's text. In 1415, he wrote his medium length LAM RIM text, known as Lam rim 'bring, which contains a substantial exposition of vipasyanā. At the age of sixty-one, one year before his death, he composed a commentary on CANDRAKĪRTI's MADHYAMAKĀVATĀRA. Among his works on Madhyamaka, Legs bshad snying po is considered the most daunting, called his iron bow and iron arrow. Just as it is hard to pull an iron bow to its full extent, but if one can, the arrow will travel far, in the same way, the words-not to mention the meaning-of this text are difficult to understand but, when understood, are said to yield great insight. It has been viewed by generations of Tibetan scholars as a work of genius, known for its often cryptic brevity, but yielding profound insight if pursued with analytical fortitude. (The metaphor of the iron bow may also be a polite allusion to the fact that the book is so abstruse and sometimes apparently self-contradictory that it takes considerable effort to attempt to construct a consistent account of Tsong kha pa's position.) Within the DGE LUGS sect, Legs bshad snying po is regarded as the foremost philosophical tome in the eighteen volumes of Tsong kha pa's collected works, presenting a particular challenge, both as an avenue to approach reality and as an elaborate exercise in constructing his thought.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: (1729-1781) German dramatist and critic. He is best known in the philosophic field for his treatise on the limitations of poetry and the plastic arts in the famous "Laokoon." In the drama, "Nathan the Wise," he has added to the world's literature a profound plea for religious toleration. -- L.E.D.
lethargy ::: n. --> Morbid drowsiness; continued or profound sleep, from which a person can scarcely be awaked.
A state of inaction or indifference. ::: v. t. --> To lethargize.
Like all other profound philosophic systems, the Svabhavika has been subjected to misinterpretation, in this case taking the form of a somewhat materialistic framework of thought. The inner essential teaching, however, is identic with the more spiritual outlook of Mahayana systems of Northern Asia.
Li Tongxuan. (J. Ri Tsugen; K. Yi T'onghyon 李通玄) (635-730; alt. 646-740). Tang-dynasty lay exegete of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA (Huayan jing) and renowned thaumaturge. Li's life is the stuff of legend. He is claimed to have been related to the Tang imperial house but is known only as an elusive and eccentric lay scholar of Buddhism, who hid away in hermits' cells and mountain grottoes so as to devote himself entirely to his writing. Li's hagiographer says that he was able to work late into the night just from the radiance that issued forth from his mouth; his scholarship and health were sustained by two mysterious maidens who brought him paper, brushes, and daily provisions. The magnum opus of this life of scholarship is a forty-roll commentary to sIKsĀNANDA's "new" 699 translation of the AvataMsakasutra; his commentary is entitled the Xin Huayan jing lun and was published posthumously in 774. In the mid-ninth century, Li's commentary was published together with the sutra as the HUAYAN JING HELUN, and this compilation is the recension of Li's exegesis that is most widely used. Li also wrote a shorter one-roll treatise known usually by its abbreviated title of Shiming lun ("The Ten Illuminations"; the full title is Shi Huayan jing shi'er yuansheng jiemi xianzhi chengbei shiming lun), which discusses the Huayan jing from ten different perspectives on the doctrine of conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA), and two other shorter works. Because Li Tongxuan was not associated with the mainstream of the Huayan lineage (HUAYAN ZONG), he was able to develop his own distinctive vision of the insights found in the AvataMsakasutra, a vision that often offered an explicit challenge to the interpretations of FAZANG and the mainstream tradition. Li stands outside the orthodox patriarchal lineage of the Huayan school by being a layperson, not a monk, and by being someone interested not just in the profound philosophical implications of the scripture but also its concrete, practical dimensions. In his commentary, Li focuses not on the description of the dimensions of the realm of reality (dharmadhātu; see SI FAJIE) as had Fazang, but instead on SUDHANA's personal quest for enlightenment in the final, and massive, GAndAVYuHA chapter of the sutra. Li moved forward the crucial point of soteriological progress from the activation of the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPĀDA), which he places at the first stage of the ten abidings (shizhu), up to the first level of the ten faiths (shixin), what had previously been considered a preliminary stage of the Huayan path (MĀRGA). Since faith alone was sufficient to generate the understanding that one's own body and mind are identical to the dharmadhātu and are fundamentally equivalent to buddhahood, buddhahood could therefore be experienced in this very life, rather than after three infinite eons (ASAMKHYEYAKALPA) of training. ¶ Although Li's writings seem to have been forgotten soon after his death, there was an efflorescence of interest in Li Tongxuan during the Song dynasty, when specialists in the Linji school of Chinese CHAN Buddhism (LINJI ZONG), such as JUEFAN HUIHONG (1071-1128) and DAHUI ZONGGAO (1089-1163), and their acquaintance, the scholar-official ZHANG SHANGYING (1043-1121), began to draw on Li's practical orientation toward the Huayan jing in order to clarify aspects of Chan practice. In particular, Li's advocacy of "nature origination" (XINGQI) in the Huayan jing (rather than conditioned origination of the dharmadhātu [FAJIE YUANQI]) seemed to offer an intriguing sutra parallel to Chan's emphasis on "seeing the nature" in order to "achieve buddhahood" (JIANXING CHENGFO). In Korea, POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) was strongly influenced by Li Tongxuan's portrayal of Huayan thought, using it to demonstrate his claim that the words of the Buddha in the scriptural teachings of KYO and the mind of the Buddha transmitted by SoN (C. Chan) were identical. Through Li, Chinul was able to justify his claim of an intrinsic harmony between Son and Kyo. Chinul also wrote two treatises on Li's Huayan thought, including a three-roll abridgement of Li's Xin Huayan jing lun, entitled the Hwaom non choryo. In Japan, MYoE KoBEN (1173-1232) drew on Li's accounts of the radiance emanating from the Buddha himself, in conjunction with his readings of esoteric Buddhism (MIKKYo) and his own prophetic dreams and visionary experiences, to create a distinctive meditative technique called the SAMĀDHI of the Buddha's radiance (Bukko zanmai). Thus, despite being outside the mainstream of the Huayan tradition, in many ways, Li Tongxuan proved to be its longest lasting, and most influential, exponent. PENG SHAOSHENG (1740-1796), in his JUSHI ZHUAN ("Biographies of [Eminent Laymen"), lists Li Tongxuan as one of the three great lay masters (SANGONG) of Chinese Buddhism, along with PANG YUN (740-803) and LIU CHENGZHI (354-410), praising Li for his mastery of scholastic doctrine (jiao).
Logos(Greek) ::: In old Greek philosophy the word logos was used in many ways, of which the Christians oftensadly misunderstood the profoundly mystical meaning. Logos is a word having several applications inthe esoteric philosophy, for there are different kinds or grades of logoi, some of them of divine, some ofthem of a spiritual character; some of them having a cosmic range, and others ranges much morerestricted. In fact, every individual entity, no matter what its evolutionary grade on the ladder of life, hasits own individual logos. The divine-spiritual entity behind the sun is the solar logos of our solar system.Small or great as every solar system may be, each has its own logos, the source or fountainhead of almostinnumerable logoi of less degree in that system. Every man has his own spiritual logos; every atom hasits own logos; every atom likewise has its own paramatman and mulaprakriti, for every entityeverywhere has its own highest. These things and the words which express them are obviously relative.One meaning of the Greek logos is "word" -- a phrase or symbol taken from the ancient Mysteriesmeaning the "lost word," the "lost" logos of man's heart and brain. The logos of our own planetary chain,so far as this fourth round is concerned, is the Wondrous Being or Silent Watcher.The term, therefore, is a relative and not an absolute one, and has many applications.
Mabinogion (Welsh) A plural form invented by Lady Charlotte Guest and applied to the Mabinogi and other medieval or earlier romances which she translated from Welsh to English. The Mabinogi proper has four branches: the stories of Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed (Pwyll prince of Dyfed); Manawyddan fab Llyr (Manawyddan son of Llyr); Branwen ferch Llyr (Branwen daughter of Llyr); and Math fab Mathonwy. The tales as they come down to us were written down in South Wales some time before the Conquest — in the last two centuries of Welsh independence — and are marked by great beauty of style and literary finish. Matthew Arnold compares them to “peasants’ huts built of the stones of Ephesus”: the substance of them comes from a profound antiquity which, with its wisdom, the latest tellers of them did not fully understand. As to that antiquity: when Bran the Blessed invaded Ireland, we are told, there was no sea between Wales and Ireland, but only two small rivers. These being unbridged, the question arose, how should the hosts of the Island of the Mighty cross them? A question Bran solved by laying down his body from bank to bank, saying: “He who is Chief, let him be the Bridge,” a saying that contains a great part of the secret wisdom of the Druids.
Mahānidānasutta. (C. Dayuan fangbian jing; J. Daien hobengyo; K. Taeyon pangp'yon kyong 大方便經). In Pāli, the "Great Discourse on Causality"; the fifteenth sutta of the DĪGHANIKĀYA (a separate DHARMAGUPTAKA recension appears as the thirteenth sutra in the Chinese translation of the DĪRGHĀGAMA); preached by the Buddha to ĀNANDA in the market town of Kammāsadhamma to dispel his wrong view that the doctrine of dependent origination (P. paticcasamuppāda; S. PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) only appears to be profound. He then gives an exposition of dependent origination as a tenfold causal chain (rather than the typical twelvefold chain, dropping the first two links), explaining that those who do not fathom this truth, even if they be masters of meditative absorption (P. JHĀNA; S. DHYĀNA), will still be addicted to the notion of a self (P. atta; S. ĀTMAN) and hence bound to the cycle of rebirth.
Mahasarasvati bhava (Mahasaraswati bhava) ::: the MahasarasvatiMahasarasvati aspect of devibhava; the temperament of Mahasarasvati, the personality of the sakti or devi who "is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things".Mah Mahasarasvati-Mahakali
Mahatma(Mahatman, Sanskrit) ::: "Great soul" or "great self" is the meaning of this compound word (maha, "great";atman, "self"). The mahatmas are perfected men, relatively speaking, known in theosophical literature asteachers, elder brothers, masters, sages, seers, and by other names. They are indeed the "elder brothers"of mankind. They are men, not spirits -- men who have evolved through self-devised efforts in individualevolution, always advancing forwards and upwards until they have now attained the lofty spiritual andintellectual human supremacy that now they hold. They were not so created by any extra-cosmic Deity,but they are men who have become what they are by means of inward spiritual striving, by spiritual andintellectual yearning, by aspiration to be greater and better, nobler and higher, just as every good man inhis own way so aspires. They are farther advanced along the path of evolution than the majority of menare. They possess knowledge of nature's secret processes, and of hid mysteries, which to the average manmay seem to be little short of the marvelous -- yet, after all, this mere fact is of relatively smallimportance in comparison with the far greater and more profoundly moving aspects of their nature andlifework.Especially are they called teachers because they are occupied in the noble duty of instructing mankind, ininspiring elevating thoughts, and in instilling impulses of forgetfulness of self into the hearts of men.Also are they sometimes called the guardians, because they are, in very truth, the guardians of the raceand of the records -- natural, racial, national -- of past ages, portions of which they give out from time totime as fragments of a now long-forgotten wisdom, when the world is ready to listen to them; and theydo this in order to advance the cause of truth and of genuine civilization founded on wisdom andbrotherhood.Never -- such is the teaching -- since the human race first attained self-consciousness has this order orassociation or society or brotherhood of exalted men been without its representatives on our earth.It was the mahatmas who founded the modern Theosophical Society through their envoy or messenger,H. P. Blavatsky, in New York in 1875.
manana. ::: deep contemplation; subtle enquiry; hearing and profound reflection; meditation on the eternal verities; second of the three stages of vedantic realisation
Materialism In the rigid philosophical sense, any theory which considers the facts of the universe to be sufficiently explained by the existence and nature of matter. A familiar form of this is what has been called the atomo-mechanical theory, which derives all phenomena from the movements of material atoms in space. The philosophical definition of materialism differs according to the meaning of the word matter; as for instance, when we limit matter by no physical attributes or implications alone, but see in it the sevenfold prakritis or pradhanas of Hindu philosophers and mystics, matter is then seen to be but a name for the veil or shadow of spirit — the other side of spirit as it were. This distinction makes materialism but a synonym for spiritualism — i.e., the profound philosophic theory that the universe is built throughout, from and of the substances and attributes of spirit, which become matter in its innumerable and manifold forms and phases on the lower cosmic planes. What physicists have been calling matter is a percept derived from the interaction of the physical senses with the physical plane of prakriti or nature.
Materialistic psychology calls this hidden part the Inconscient, although practically admitting that it is far greater, more power- ful and profound than the surface coasclous self, — very much as the Upanishads called the superconsclent in us the Sleep-self, although this Sleep-self is said to be an iniuiitely greater Intelli- gence, omniscient, omnipotent, Prajna, the Ishwara. Psychic science calls this hidden consciousness the subliminal self, and here loo it is seen that this subliminal self has more powers, more knowledge, a freer field of movement than the smaller self that is on the surface. But the truth is that all this that is behind, this sea of which our waking consciousness is only a wave or series of waves, cannot be described by any one term, for it is very complex. Part of it is subconscient, lower than our waking consciousness, part of it is on a level with it but behind and much larger than it ; part is above and superconscient to us.
Medicine was originally a divine science, providing for the well-being of the spiritual, mental, psychic, astral, and physical man. Archaic medicine included a profound knowledge of genuine astrology, of true alchemy, of occult physiology, of the finer forces vibrating as sound, color, form, thought, and feeling, and whatever related man to his home universe of natural law and order. This was the basis of the natural “magic” which tradition has linked with the medical art. This knowledge was dual in its power to work for life or death, for good or evil ends. Its full comprehension required not only a trained intellect, but the intuitive understanding of a pure spiritual nature. Nevertheless, the Atlanteans acquired enough knowledge of the use of dangerous powers that they became — albeit with numerous and noteworthy exceptions — a nation of sorcerers. Then, the white magicians established the Mystery schools in which to safeguard the sacred teachings from evildoers and to protect humanity from their influence. Thus, the deeper truths of the healing art have ever since been entrusted only to pledged disciples and initiates. Such fragments of it as have been rediscovered by intuitive physicians from time to time have usually been in keeping with the general cultural level of their civilization. The exceptions have been men who have frequently been too far ahead of their times to be understood. Such a man was Paracelsus in medieval Europe, persecuted for heretical teachings such as the psychoelectric and magnetic play of sidereal forces which linked man with the stars — the spiritus vitae in man came from the spiritus mundi.
Meditation The attempt to raise the self-conscious mind to the level of its spiritual counterpart, to unite manas with a ray from buddhi. It is a positive attitude of mind, a state of consciousness rather than a system or a time period of intensive thinking. It corresponds in its more perfect form to the ecstasy of Plotinus, which he defines as “the liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the Infinite.” It is silent prayer in one real sense, for the heart aspires upwards to become freed from all desire for personal benefit, and the mind frames no specific object, but both unite in the aspiration; not my will, but thine, be done. When engaged in at the outset of the day, or on retiring to sleep, it often takes the form of reflecting profoundly and impersonally on spiritual teachings, as well as self-examination, attuning of the mind and heart to calm and unselfish thought and feelings, as well as the endeavor to realize in consciousness one’s highest ideals of duty, purity, and truth, and inducing thereby a general harmonizing and one-pointed adjustment of the whole nature.
megalocyte ::: n. --> A large, flattened corpuscle, twice the diameter of the ordinary red corpuscle, found in considerable numbers in the blood in profound anaemia.
Mi la ras pa'i rnam thar. (Milarepe Namtar). In Tibetan, "Life of Milarepa"; an account of the celebrated eleventh-century Tibetan yogin MI LA RAS PA. While numerous early Tibetan versions of the life story exist, including several that may date from his lifetime, the best-known account was composed in 1488 by GTSANG SMYON HERUKA, the so-called mad YOGIN of Tsang, based upon numerous earlier works. Its narrative focuses on Mi la ras pa's early wrongdoings, his subsequent training and meditation, and eventual death. It is a companion to the MI LA'I MGUR 'BUM ("The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa"), also arranged and printed by Gtsang smyon Heruka, which records Milarepa's later teaching career through a compilation of his religious instruction and songs of realization. Gtsang smyon Heruka's version of the Mi la ras pa'i rnam thar is known and read throughout the Tibetan Buddhist cultural world and is widely accepted as a great literary achievement by Tibetans and Western scholars alike. The account of Milarepa's life profoundly affected the development of sacred biography in Tibet, a prominent genre in Tibetan Buddhist culture, and has influenced the way in which Tibet's Buddhism and culture have been understood in the West.
Milky Way, The ::: The Milky Way or galaxy is held to be our own especial home-universe. The nebulae are in many casestaken to be what are called island-universes, that is to say, vast aggregations of stars, many numbers ofthem with their respective planets around them, and all gathered together in these individualworld-clusters. Of course there are nebulae of other kinds, but to these reference is not here made. Of theisland-universes, there are doubtless hundreds of thousands of them; but as none of these has as yet[1933] been discovered to be as large in diameter, or as thick through, as is our own Milky Way system-- which system has somewhat the shape of a lens or of a thin watch -- the astronomers call our MilkyWay by the popular name of continent-universe; and such other nebular star-clusters which we see andwhich are in many cases really vast masses of millions or billions of suns, are called island-universes.Our own Milky Way, could it be seen from some vast kosmic distance, would doubtless appear as anebula or large star-cluster; and to certain percipient watchers our galaxy might even probably appear tobe a spiral nebula, or perhaps an annular nebula. Our own sun is one of the stars in the cluster of theMilky Way, and is said by astronomers to be situated some distance, kosmically speaking, from thecentral portion of our Milky Way system, and a trifle to the north of the plane passing through thefigure-center of the galaxy.The Milky Way is not only a vast star-cluster of suns in all-various degrees of evolutionary growth, but itis also the storehouse of celestial bodies-to-be. In this last respect, it is, as it were, the kosmic nurseryfrom which seeds of future suns go forth to begin their manvantaric evolutionary courses. There are vastand fascinating mysteries connected with the Milky Way even in matters that concern the destiny of ushuman beings, as well as of all other entities of our solar system. The profound teachings whichtheosophy hints at under the topics of circulations of the kosmos and peregrinations of the monads aredirectly connected with the doctrines just referred to. The whole matter, however, is of so recondite acharacter that it is impossible here to do more than point suggestively to it.
Mimansa (Sanskrit) Mīmāṃsā [from the verbal root man to think] Profound thought, profound consideration; one of the six Darsanas or Hindu schools of philosophy. There are two Mimansas, the older or Purva-mimansa, founded by Jaimini, and the younger or Uttara-mimansa founded by Vyasa. The older is commonly known as the Mimansa, and the younger as the Vedanta.
Morals, Morality ::: What is the basis of morals? This is the most important question that can be asked of any system ofthought. Is morality based on the dicta of man? Is morality based on the conviction in most men's heartsthat for human safety it is necessary to have certain abstract rules which it is merely convenient tofollow? Are we mere opportunists? Or is morality, ethics, based on truth, which it is not merelyexpedient for man to follow, but necessary? Surely upon the latter! Morals is right conduct based uponright views, right thinking.In the third fundamental postulate of The Secret Doctrine [1:17] we find the very elements, the veryfundamentals, of a system of morality greater than which, profounder than which, more persuasive thanwhich, perhaps, it would be impossible to imagine anything.On what, then, is morality based? And by morality is not meant merely the opinion which somepseudo-philosophers have, that morality is more or less that which is "good for the community," based onthe mere meaning of the Latin word mores, "good customs," as opposed to bad. No! Morality is thatinstinctive hunger of the human heart to do righteousness, to do good to every man because it is good andsatisfying and ennobling to do so.When man realizes that he is one with all that is, inwards and outwards, high and low; that he is one withall, not merely as members of a community are one, not merely as individuals of an army are one, butlike the molecules of our own flesh, like the atoms of the molecule, like the electrons of the atom,composing one unity -- not a mere union but a spiritual unity -- then he sees truth. (See also Ethics)
Mother, four of her leading Powers and Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this Universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play. One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness. Another embo&es her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force. A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact per- fection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, Perfection are their several attributes and it Is these powers that they bring with them into the world. To the four we give the four great names, Maheshvari, Mahakali, Mabalakshmi, Mahasarasvati.
mystery ::: a. --> A profound secret; something wholly unknown, or something kept cautiously concealed, and therefore exciting curiosity or wonder; something which has not been or can not be explained; hence, specifically, that which is beyond human comprehension.
A kind of secret religious celebration, to which none were admitted except those who had been initiated by certain preparatory ceremonies; -- usually plural; as, the Eleusinian mysteries.
The consecrated elements in the eucharist.
nānādhātujNānabala. (T. khams sna tshogs mkhyen pa'i stobs; C. zhongzhongjie zhili; J. shujukai chiriki; K. chongjonggye chiryok 種種界智力). In Sanskrit, "power of knowing diverse elements," one of the ten special powers (BALA) of a buddha (S. tathāgatabala). One of the keys to the Buddha's extraordinary pedagogical skill was his telepathic ability to understand the level of spiritual development or capacity of each member of his audience, whereby he was able to teach what was most appropriate for a given person at a given time (see TRĪNDRIYA). Thus, it is said that the Buddha taught the goal of rebirth as a divinity in heaven (SVARGA) to those who lacked the capacity to seek liberation from rebirth, and the doctrine of the absence of a perduring self (ANĀTMAN) to those who lacked the capacity to understand the more profound doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ). Whereas the NĀNĀDHIMUKTIJNĀNABALA reflects a buddha's ability to discern the predilections or personality of a disciple in a particular lifetime, the nānādhātujNānabala reflects a buddha's ability to discern the level of intelligence of a disciple in a particular lifetime. According to some conceptions of the Buddha, through his skillful methods (UPĀYAKAUsALYA), the Buddha was able to give a single discourse (sometimes said to consist only of the letter "A"), and each member of the audience would hear a different teaching appropriate for him or her.
Natural magic: The performance of supernatural acts through a more profound knowledge of natural phenomena.
Nididhyasana: Profound and deep meditation; third step in Vedantic Sadhana, after 'hearing' and 'reflection'.
Nirmanakaya(Sanskrit) ::: A compound of two words: nirmana, a participle meaning "forming," "creating"; kaya, a wordmeaning "body," "robe," "vehicle"; thus, nirmanakaya means "formed-body." A nirmanakaya, however,is really a state assumed by or entered into by a bodhisattva -- an individual man made semi-divine who,to use popular language, instead of choosing his reward in the nirvana of a less degree, remains on earthout of pity and compassion for inferior beings, clothing himself in a nirmanakayic vesture. When thatstate is ended the nirmanakaya ends.A nirmanakaya is a complete man possessing all the principles of his constitution except the linga-sariraand its accompanying physical body. He is one who lives on the plane of being next superior to thephysical plane, and his purpose in so doing is to save men from themselves by being with them, and bycontinuously instilling thoughts of self-sacrifice, of self-forgetfulness, of spiritual and moral beauty, ofmutual help, of compassion, and of pity.Nirmanakaya is the third or lowest, exoterically speaking, of what is called in Sanskrit trikaya or "threebodies." The highest is the dharmakaya, in which state are the nirvanis and full pratyeka buddhas, etc.;the second state is the sambhogakaya, intermediate between the former and, thirdly, the nirmanakaya.The nirmanakaya vesture or condition enables one entering it to live in touch and sympathy with theworld of men. The sambhogakaya enables one in that state to be conscious indeed to a certain extent ofthe world of men and its griefs and sorrows, but with little power or impulse to render aid. Thedharmakaya vesture is so pure and holy, and indeed so high, that the one possessing the dharmakaya orwho is in it, is virtually out of all touch with anything inferior to himself. It is, therefore, in thenirmanakaya vesture if not in physical form that live and work the Buddhas of Compassion, the greatestsages and seers, and all the superholy men who through striving through ages of evolution bring forthinto manifestation and power and function the divinity within. The doctrine of the nirmanakayas is one ofthe most suggestive, profound, and beautiful teachings of the esoteric philosophy. (See also Dharmakaya,Sambhogakaya)
Of the archaic history of medicine — as of the race — little is to be found. However, echoes of the primitive wisdom have survived, and every country having a literature of its ancient periods has some account of the healing art. The Hindu sacred scriptures — the oldest literature extant — have treatises upon medicine and surgery, showing a profound and intimate knowledge of the subject. This high standard was not maintained when the Vedic writings became misunderstood and mutilated by later commentators. The exclusive Brahmins’ assumption of the right to all knowledge also prevented original thought and research. What writings are available today are of little practical value without the lost key. Even our typically matter-of-fact interpretation of legendary and classical beliefs and customs, and of archaeological findings, overlooks that what is known of ancient medical practice is largely exoteric, symbolic of a deeper teaching than we possess.
Omoroka (Greek) [from Chaldean, cf Hebrew ‘amaq to be deep, profound; Hebrew ‘amar to heap together, overwhelm; and Arabic ‘amar to overwhelm with water] The deep, the ocean, whether physically or mystically; used in the Babylonian account of creation. One legend tells of Belus cutting Omoroka in two, from one part of which the heavens were formed, and from the other, the earth — showing that Omoroka signifies space.
Our own manifest vital being is also only a surface result of a larger and profounder vital being which has its proper seat on the life-plane and through which we are connected with the life-world.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 453
Paramita (Sanskrit) Pāramitā [from pāram beyond + ita gone from the verbal root i to go] Gone or crossed to the other shore; derivatively, virtue or perfection. The paramitas vary in number according to the Buddhist school: some quoting six, others seven or ten; but they are the glorious or transcendental virtues — the keys to the portals of jnana (wisdom). Blavatsky gives these seven keys as (VS 47-8): 1) dana “the key of charity and love immortal”; 2) sila (good character), “the key of Harmony in word and act, the key that counterbalances the cause and the effect, and leaves no further room for Karmic action”; 3) kshanti, “patience sweet, that nought can ruffle”; 4) viraga, “indifference to pleasure and to pain, illusion conquered, truth alone perceived”; 5) virya (strength, power), “the dauntless energy that fights its way to the supernal TRUTH, out of the mire of lies terrestrial”; 6) dhyana (profound spiritual-intellectual contemplation, with utter detachment from all objects of sense and of a lower mental character), human consciousness in the higher reaches of this state becomes purely buddhic, with the summit of the manas acting as vehicle for the retention of what the percipient consciousness experiences; once the golden gate of dhyana is opened, the pathway stretching thence leads towards the realm of “Sat eternal”; and 7) prajna (understanding, wisdom), that part of the mind that functions when active as the vehicle of the higher self; “the key to which makes of man a god, creating him a Bodhisattva, son of the Dhyanis.”
Patristic Philosophy: The advent of Christian revelation introduced a profound change in the history of philosophy. New facts about God, the world and man were juxtaposed to the conclusions of pagan philosophy, while reason was at once presented with the problem of reconciling these facts with the pagan position and the task of constructing them into a new science called theology.
Patthāna. [alt. Patthānappakarana]. In Pāli, lit. "Relations," or "Foundational Conditions"; the sixth of the seven books of the Pāli ABHIDHAMMAPItAKA (but also sometimes considered the last book of that canon). This highly abstract work concerns the twenty-four conditions (P. paccaya; S. PRATYAYA) that govern the interaction of factors (P. dhamma; S. DHARMA) in the causal matrix of dependent origination (P. paticcasamuppāda; S. PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). According to the Pāli ABHIDHAMMA, these relations, when applied to all possible combinations of phenomena, describe the entire range of conscious experience. The Patthāna is organized into four main divisions based on four distinct methods of conditionality, which it calls the positive, or "forward," method (anuloma); the negative, or "reverse," method (paccanīya); the positive-negative method (anuloma-paccanīya); and the negative-positive method (paccanīya-anuloma). Each of these four is further divided into six possible combinations of phenomena, e.g., in triplets (tika) and pairs (duka): for example, each condition is analyzed in terms of the triplet set of wholesome (P. kusala; S. KUsALA), unwholesome (P. akusala; S. AKUsALA), and neutral (P. avyākata; S. AVYĀKṚTA). The four main sections are each further subdivided into six sections, giving a total of twenty-four divisions, one for each possible mode of conditionality. The twenty-four modes are as follows: root condition (hetupaccaya), object condition (ārammanapaccaya), predominance condition (adhipatipaccaya), continuity condition (anantarapaccaya), immediate continuity condition (samanantarapaccaya), co-nascence condition (sahajātapaccaya), mutuality condition (aññamaññapaccaya), dependence condition (nissayapaccaya), reliance condition (upanissayapaccaya), antecedence condition (purejātapaccaya), consequence condition (pacchājātapaccaya), repetition condition (āsevanapaccaya), volitional action condition (kammapaccaya), fruition condition (vipākapaccaya), nutriment condition (āhārapaccaya), governing faculty condition (indriyapaccaya), absorption condition (jhānapaccaya), path condition (maggapaccaya), association condition (sampayuttapaccaya), disassociation condition (vippayuttapaccaya), presence condition (atthipaccaya), absence condition (natthipaccaya), disappearance condition (vigatapaccaya), and continuation condition (avigatapaccaya). The Patthāna is also known as the "Great Composition" (Mahāpakarana) because of its massive size: the Pāli edition in Burmese script is 2,500 pages in length, while the Thai edition spans 6,000 pages. An abbreviated translation of the Patthāna appears in the Pali Text Society's English translation series as Conditional Relations. ¶ In contemporary Myanmar (Burma), where the study of abhidhamma continues to be highly esteemed, the Patthāna is regularly recited in festivals that the Burmese call pathan pwe. Pathan pwe are marathon recitations that go on for days, conducted by invited ABHIDHAMMIKA monks who are particularly well versed in the Patthāna. The pathan pwe serves a similar function to PARITTA recitations, in that it is believed to ward off baleful influences, but its main designated purpose is to forestall the decline and disappearance of the Buddha's dispensation (P. sāsana; S. sĀSANA). The Theravāda tradition considers the Patthāna to be the Buddha's most profound exposition of ultimate truth (P. paramatthasacca; S. PARAMĀRTHASATYA) and, according to the Pāli commentaries, the Patthāna is the first constituent of the Buddha's sāsana that will disappear from the world as the religion faces its inevitable decline. The abhidhammikas' marathon recitations of the Patthāna, therefore, help to ward off the eventual demise of the Buddhist religion. See also ANULOMAPRATILOMA.
peak experience: proposed by Maslow, a temporary, profound and intense experience of enhanced awareness, frequently accompanied by feelings of feeling fully alive.
penetrate ::: v. t. --> To enter into; to make way into the interior of; to effect an entrance into; to pierce; as, light penetrates darkness.
To affect profoundly through the senses or feelings; to touch with feeling; to make sensible; to move deeply; as, to penetrate one&
Persephone (Greek) Proserpina (Latin) The daughter of Zeus and Demeter who became queen of the Underworld, after being carried off by Hades or Pluto, god of the Underworld. As Kore-Persephone, she becomes one of the great Eleusinian divinities, the Divine Maid. The role played by Persephone, Demeter, or Kore (“maiden,” a title applicable to both) is part of a profound allegory in which is found a great deal of occult truth. Persephone or Demeter has a cosmic significance, as well as one applicable to the human race, for in the cosmic meaning the legend involves what the Hindus refer to under the various manifestations of prakriti running throughout manifested nature as a veil or garment of the indwelling cosmic consciousness; and the various permutations under which Kore-Persephone or Demeter is presented, show the various allegorical stages or modifications which the cosmic prakritis undergo. In the application of the legend to man, Kore-Persephone stands for both the spiritual soul and its child, the human soul, which in one manner of envisioning the facts are two; and in another manner, are one. See also DEMETER; KORE-PERSEPHONE
Platonic Realism: See Realism. Platonism: The philosophy of Plato marks one of the high points in the development of Greek philosophical genius Platomsm is characterised by a partial contempt for sense knowledge and empirical studies, by a high regard for mathematics and its method, by a longing for another and better world, by a frankly spiritualistic view of life, by its use of a method of discussion involving an accumulation of ever more profound insights rather than the formal logic of Aristotle, and, above all, by an unswerving faith in the capacity of the human mind to attain absolute truth and to use this truth in the rational direction of human life and affairs.
poikilocyte ::: n. --> An irregular form of corpuscle found in the blood in cases of profound anaemia, probably a degenerated red blood corpuscle.
Polytheism The doctrine of and belief in a plurality of gods, cosmic spirits, or celestial entities under whatever name they may be described. The word came into use as a correlative of monotheism — the doctrine as of the Jews, Christians, and Moslems, of one and only one God. The unphilosophical nature of monotheism, which in the Occident is quite different from the significance of divine unity, is shown by the subterfuges resorted to in order to supply its deficiencies. As divinity cannot be successfully imagined as individually concerned with every operation in the universe, the general term nature is used to denote a kind of secondary god; while the progress of science has analyzed this into various laws and forces, which paradoxically enough perform somewhat the same functions as the gods of polytheism, except in their wrongly supposed lack of intelligence. Less sophisticated and more profound intellects have never ceased to believe in a whole range of cosmic hierarchies, running from divinity down to the so-called nature spirits, and traditional peoples have always looked upon these as powers which are often dreaded and can be propitiated. Even Christianity has its saints, and its theology speaks of Angels and Archangels, of Dominions and Thrones, etc. As soon as we depart from the simple primeval idea of a universe filled with intelligent beings — and indeed formed of these beings themselves — of numerous hierarchies, grades, and kinds, we land in a maze of abstractions and contradictions.
Pranidhana (Sanskrit) Praṇidhāna [from pra-ni-dhā to place in front] Persevering ceaseless devotion, profound religious meditation. It refers to the processes which the mind follows in meditation, because then placing in front of itself the mental figurations or pictures of lofty spiritual and intellectual themes to be meditated upon or brooded over.
pratibhāna. (P. patibhāna; T. spobs pa; C. biancai; J. benzai; K. pyonjae 辯才). In Sanskrit, "eloquence," or "ready speech," referring typically to the ability to inspire others through one's words. Pratibhāna is included among the four types of analytical knowledge (PRATISAMVID) that are mastered by BODHISATTVAs at the ninth BHuMI. In the East Asian tradition, a bodhisattva is said to have, or is exhorted to attain, eight qualities of true eloquence when delivering Buddhist teachings. He should display eloquence that is (1) free of hectoring and bellowing (since an accomplished bodhisattva inherently possesses such majestic charisma that he does not need to inveigle his audience to pay attention); (2) unconfused and organized in his delivery; (3) confident and unfazed; (4) unconceited; (5) meaningful, wholesome, and conducive to skillfulness; (6) profound, interesting, and informed; (7) free from harshness; (8) seasonable, adaptive, and responsive to the conditions at hand.
Preface ::: This supplement to the Lexicon of an Infinite Mind, A Dictionary of Words and Terms in Savitri, is a selection of answers to our numerous questions posed to disciples and devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is a rare treasure for generations to come for it provides a profound insight into the understanding of various terms and phrases in Savitri by those who knew Sri Aurobindo and had His darshan many times and a few others with a deep knowledge of specific terms in Savitri.
presence ::: 1. The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence. 2. A divine, spiritual, or supernatural spirit or influence felt or conceived as present. 3. The immediate proximity of someone or something.
Sri Aurobindo: "It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one"s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the ‘ineffable Presence" it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” Essays Divine and Human
"But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within.” *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
"If we need any personal and inner witness to this indivisible All-Consciousness behind the ignorance, — all Nature is its external proof, — we can get it with any completeness only in our deeper inner being or larger and higher spiritual state when we draw back behind the veil of our own surface ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result by the invisible Omniscience; we discover a greater working behind our ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure and universal Presence, meet the Lord of all being and all Nature.” *The Life Divine
"The presence of the Spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being.” *The Life Divine
"There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"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.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time He conceals Himself, and then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"They [the psychic being and the Divine Presence in the heart] are quite different things. The psychic being is one"s own individual soul-being. It is not the Divine, though it has come from the Divine and develops towards the Divine.” *Letters on Yoga
"For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” *Essays Divine and Human
The Mother: "For, in human beings, here is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not in the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings. And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of his Presence.” Words of the Mother, MCW, Vol. 15.
Profound Virtue and Mysterious Power, through the cultivation of one's original nature and the returning to the character of Tao. Thus one "becomes identified with the Beginning, attains emptiness and vastness, and enters into mystic union with the Universe." (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.) -- W.T.C
profundity ::: n. --> The quality or state of being profound; depth of place, knowledge, feeling, etc.
Program Design Language ::: Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which management forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing massive overhead of little or no benefit.See also flow chart. (1995-04-01)
Program Design Language Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management} forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing massive overhead of little or no benefit. See also {flow chart}. (1995-04-01)
prophecy ::: “If this higher buddhi {{understanding in the profoundest sense] could act pure of the interference of these lower members, it would give pure forms of the truth; observation would be dominated or replaced by a vision which could see without subservient dependence on the testimony of the sense-mind and senses; imagination would give place to the self-assured inspiration of the truth, reasoning to the spontaneous discernment of relations and conclusion from reasoning to an intuition containing in itself those relations and not building laboriously upon them, judgment to a thought-vision in whose light the truth would stand revealed without the mask which it now wears and which our intellectual judgment has to penetrate; while memory too would take upon itself that larger sense given to it in Greek thought and be no longer a paltry selection from the store gained by the individual in his present life, but rather the all-recording knowledge which secretly holds and constantly gives from itself everything that we now seem painfully to acquire but really in this sense remember, a knowledge which includes the future(1) no less than the past.
pudgalanairātmya. (T. gang zag gi bdag med; C. renwuwo; J. ninmuga; K. inmua 人無我). In Sanskrit, "selflessness of the person," one of two types of nonself or selflessness, along with DHARMANAIRĀTMYA, the nonself or selflessness of phenomena. The absence of self (ANĀTMAN) is often divided into these two categories by MAHĀYĀNA philosophical schools, with the selflessness of persons referring to the absence of self among the five aggregates (SKANDHA) that constitute the person, and the selflessness of phenomena referring to the absence of self (variously defined) in all other phenomena in the universe, specifically the factors (DHARMA) that were posited to be real by several of the abhidharma traditions of mainstream Buddhism, and especially the SARVĀSTIVĀDA. Numerous meditation practices are set forth that are designed to lead the realization of the selflessness of the person, many of which involve the close mental examination of the constituents of mind and body to determine which might constitute, individually or collectively, an independent and autonomous agent of actions and the experiencer of their effects, that is, the referent of the "I" and for whom possessions are "mine." The central claim of Buddhism is that there is no such self to be found among the constituents of the person; thus, the realization of this fact constitutes a liberating knowledge that brings an end to suffering and the prospect of further rebirth. The relation between the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena is discussed at length in Buddhist philosophical literature. In some Mahāyāna systems, the selflessness of persons is considered to be less profound than the selflessness of phenomena, since an adept is able to achieve liberation as an ARHAT through cognition of the selflessness of persons alone, while cognition of the selflessness of phenomena is required of the BODHISATTVA in order to achieve buddhahood.
Purva-mimansa (Sanskrit) Pūrva-mīmāṃsā [from pūrva prior + mīmāṃsā profound or striving thought or meditation from the verbal root man to think] Inquiry into the first portion of the Veda — the matra portion; the fifth of the six Darsanas or schools of Hindu philosophy. The school of philosophy in our days considered to be chiefly concerned with the correct interpretation of the Vedic texts; hence sometimes called the First Vedantic School. Jaimini is reputed to be its founder, as well as the author of the Mimansa-darsana, the sutras or aphorisms which constitute its chief doctrinal authority. This school is also sometimes termed Karma-mimansa because of the doctrine advocated that by its teaching one can be more or less freed from the making of new karma.
Quarrels ::: To think that your knowledge is the only true one, that your belief is the only true one and that others’ beliefs are not true, is to do precisely what is done by all sects and religions…. The contact which you have had with the truth of things, your personal contact – a contact which is more or less clear, profound, vast, pure – may have given you, as an individual, an interesting, perhaps even a decisive experience; but although this contact may have given you an experience of decisive importance, you must not imagine that it is a universal experience and that the same contact would give others the same experience. And if you understand this, that it is something purely personal, individual, subjective, that it is not at all an absolute and general law, then you can no longer despise the knowledge of others, nor seek to impose your own point of view and experience upon them. This understanding obviates all mental quarrels, which are always totally useless.The Mother
Rang 'byung rdo rje. (Rangjung Dorje) (1284-1339). A Tibetan Buddhist master recognized as the third KARMA PA, renowned for his erudition and his knowledge of practice traditions based on both new translation (GSAR MA) and old translation (RNYING MA) tantras. He was born either in the Skyid rong Valley or in the western Tibetan region of Ding ri and, according to traditional sources, as a child, was known for his exceptional perspicacity. The DEB THER SNGON PO ("Blue Annals") records that as a five-year-old boy, he met O RGYAN PA RIN CHEN DPAL, his principal guru, who recognized the young boy as the reincarnation of his teacher KARMA PAKSHI when the child climbed up on a high seat that had been prepared for O rgyan pa Rin chen dpal and declared himself to have been Karma Pakshi in his previous life (this was before the institution of incarnate lamas was established in Tibet). Rang 'byung rdo rje trained first at MTSHUR PHU monastery. He also studied with teachers from GSANG PHU and JO NANG. His collected works include explanations of the major YOGĀCĀRA and MADHYAMAKA treatises and commentaries and rituals based on the CAKRASAMVARA, HEVAJRA, GUHYASAMĀJA, and KĀLACAKRA tantras. According to his traditional biographies, while in retreat, he had a vision of VIMALAMITRA and PADMASAMBHAVA in which he received the complete transmission of the Rnying ma tantras. He received instructions on the RDZOGS CHEN doctrine from Rig 'dzin Gzhon nu rgyal po, and wrote short works on rdzogs chen. He also discovered a treasure text (GTER MA), known as the Karma snying thig. He was a renowned poet and wrote important works on GCOD practice. The third Karma pa was also a skilled physician and astrologer. He developed a new system of astrology known as Mtshur rtsi, or "Mtshur phu astrology," on the basis of which a new Tibetan calendar was formulated and promulgated at Mtshur phu monastery. In 1331, he was summoned to the court of the Yuan emperor Tugh Temür, but stopped enroute when he correctly interpreted portents that the emperor had died. He later traveled to the Mongol capital of Daidu (modern Beijing) during the reign of Togon Temür, for whom he procured an elixir of long life. After returning to Tibet, he was summoned once again to the Mongol capital, where he passed away while meditating in a three-dimensional CakrasaMvara MAndALA. Rang 'byung rdo rje's writings include the influential tantric work Zab mo nang don ("Profound Inner Meaning"). It is said that his image appeared in the full moon on the evening of his death, and illustrations of the third Karma pa often portray him seated amid a lunar disk.
rang stong gzhan stong. (rang dong shen dong). In Tibetan, lit. "self-emptiness, other-emptiness," an important and persistent philosophical debate in Tibetan Buddhism, dating to the fifteenth century. The opposing factions are the DGE LUGS sect on one side and the JO NANG sect on the other, with support from certain BKA' BRGYUD and RNYING MA authors. The debate concerns issues fundamental to their understanding of what constituted enlightenment and the path to its achievement. For the Dge lugs, the most profound of all Buddhist doctrines is that all phenomena in the universe are empty of an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA), that the constituents of experience are not naturally endowed with a defining characteristic. Emptiness (suNYATĀ) for the Dge lugs is the fact that phenomena do not exist in and of themselves; emptiness is instead the lack of intrinsic existence. The Dge lugs then, are proponents of "self-emptiness," and argue that the hypostatized factor that an object in reality lacks (i.e., is empty of) is wrongly believed by the unenlightened to be intrinsic to the object itself. Everything, from physical forms to the omniscient mind of the Buddha, is thus equally empty. This emptiness is described by the Dge lugs as a non-affirming or simple negation (PRASAJYAPRATIsEDHA), an absence with nothing else implied in its place. From this perspective, the Dge lugs judge the sutras of the second of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma as described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA), to contain the definitive expression of the Buddha's most profound intention. By contrast, the Jo nang look for inspiration to the third turning of the wheel, "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate" (PARAMĀRTHAVINIsCAYADHARMACAKRA; see also *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), especially to those statements that describe the nonduality of subject and object to be the consummate nature (PARINIsPANNA) and the understanding of that nonduality to be the highest wisdom. They describe this wisdom in substantialist terms, calling it eternal, self-arisen, and truly established. This wisdom consciousness exists autonomously and is thus not empty in the way that emptiness is understood by the Dge lugs. Instead, this wisdom consciousness is empty in the sense that it is devoid of all afflictions and conventional factors, which are extraneous to its true nature. Hence, the Jo nang speak of the "emptiness of the other," the absence of extrinsic and extraneous qualities. The Dge lugs cannot deny the presence of statements in the MAHĀYĀNA canon that speak of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA as permanent, pure, blissful, and endowed with self. But they argue that such statements are provisional, another example of the Buddha's expedient means of attracting to the faith those who find such a description appealing. The true tathāgatagarbha, they claim, is the emptiness of the mind; it is this factor, present in all sentient beings, that offers the possibility of transformation into an enlightened buddha. This is the view of CANDRAKĪRTI, they say, whom they regard as the supreme interpreter of the doctrine of emptiness. The Jo nang do not deny that this is Candrakīrti's view, but they deny Candrakīrti the rank of premier expositor of NĀGĀRJUNA's thought. For them, Candrakīrti teaches an emptiness which is a mere negation of true existence, which they equate with nihilism, or else a preliminary stage of negation that precedes an understanding of the highest wisdom. Nor do they deny that such an exposition is also to be found in Nāgārjuna's philosophical corpus (YUKTIKĀYA). But those texts, they claim, do not represent Nāgārjuna's final view, which is expressed instead in his devotional corpus (STAVAKĀYA), notably the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA ("Praise of the Sphere of Reality"), with its more positive exposition of the nature of reality. Those who would deny its ultimate existence, such as Candrakīrti, they classify as "one-sided Madhyamakas" (phyogs gcig pa'i dbu ma pa) as opposed to the "great Madhyamakas" (DBU MA PA CHEN PO), among whom they would include the Nāgārjuna of the four hymns and ĀRYADEVA, as well as thinkers whom the Dge lugs classify as YOGĀCĀRA or SVĀTANTRIKA-MADHYAMAKA: e.g., ASAnGA, VASUBANDHU, MAITREYANĀTHA, and sĀNTARAKsITA. The Dge lugs attempt to demonstrate that the nature of reality praised by Nāgārjuna in his hymns is the same emptiness that he describes in his philosophical writings.
Ravaisson-Mollien, Jean Gaspard Felix (1813-1900) French idealistic philosopher who studied under Schelling at Munich, became Professor of Philosophy at Rennes in 1838 and later inspector of Higher Education. Although he wrote little, he profoundly influenced French thought in the direction of the "dynamic spiritualism" of Maine de Biran. He explored the spiritual implications of individual personality especially in the domims of art and morals. See Morale et Metaphysique in Revue de Met. et de Mor. 1893. -- L.W.
recondite ::: a. --> Hidden from the mental or intellectual view; secret; abstruse; as, recondite causes of things.
Dealing in things abstruse; profound; searching; as, recondite studies.
Regarding the dualistic cosmic system of the Zoroastrians — good and evil — Blavatsky comments: “No more philosophically profound, no grander or more graphic and suggestive type exists among the allegories of the World-religions than that of the two Brother-Powers of the Mazdean religion, called Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu, better known in their modernized form of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Of these two emanations, ‘Sons of Boundless Time’ — Zeruana-Akarana — itself issued from the Supreme and Unknowable Principle, the one is the embodiment of ‘Good Thought’ (Vohu-Mano), the other of ‘Evil Thought’ (Ako-Mano). The ‘King of Light’ or Ahura-Mazda, emanates from Primordial Light and forms or creates by means of the ‘Word,’ Honover (Ahuna-Vairya), a pure and holy world. But Angra-Mainyu, though born as pure as his elder brother, becomes jealous of him, and mars everything in the Universe, as on the earth, creating Sin and Evil wherever he goes.
Relativity, theory of: A mathematical theory of space-time (q.v.), of profound epistemological as well as physical importance, comprising the special theory of relativity (Einstein, 1905) and the general theory of relativity (Einstein, 1914-16). The name arises from the fact that certain things which the classical theory regarded as absolute -- e.g. , the simultaneity of spatially distant events, the time elapsed between two events (unless coincident in space-time), the length of an extended solid body, the separation of four-dimensional space-time into a three-dimensional space and a one-dimensional time -- are regarded by the relativity theory as relative (q.v.) to the choice of a coordinate system in space-time, and thus relative to the observer. But on the other hand the relativity theory represents as absolute certain things which are relative in the classical theory -- e.g., the velocity of light in empty space. See Non-Euclidean geometry. -- A.C.
reverence ::: n. --> Profound respect and esteem mingled with fear and affection, as for a holy being or place; the disposition to revere; veneration.
The act of revering; a token of respect or veneration; an obeisance.
That which deserves or exacts manifestations of reverence; reverend character; dignity; state.
A person entitled to be revered; -- a title applied to
revere ::: v. t. --> To regard with reverence, or profound respect and affection, mingled with awe or fear; to venerate; to reverence; to honor in estimation.
RIGHT, CONCEPTION OF An individual&
rig pa. The standard Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit term VIDYĀ, or "knowledge." The Tibetan term, however, has a special meaning in the ATIYOGA and RDZOGS CHEN traditions of the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism, where it refers to the most profound form of consciousness. Some modern translators of Tibetan texts into European languages consider the term too profound to be rendered into a foreign language, while others translate it as "awareness," "pure awareness," or "mind." Unlike the "mind of clear light" (PRABHĀSVARACITTA; 'od gsal gyi sems) as described in other tantric systems, rig pa is not said to be accessible only in extraordinary states, such as death and sexual union; instead, it is fully present, although generally unrecognized, in each moment of sensory experience. Rig pa is described as the primordial basis, characterized with qualities such as presence, spontaneity, luminosity, original purity, unobstructed freedom, expanse, clarity, self-liberation, openness, effortlessness, and intrinsic awareness. It is not accessible through conceptual elaboration or logical analysis. Rather, rig pa is an eternally pure state free from the dualism of subject and object (cf. GRĀHYAGRĀHAKAVIKALPA), infinite and complete from the beginning. It is regarded as the ground or the basis of both SAMSĀRA and NIRVĀnA, with the phenomena of the world being its reflection; all thoughts and all objects of knowledge are said to arise from rig pa and dissolve into rig pa. The ordinary mind believes that its own creations are real, forgetting its true nature of original purity. For the mind willfully to seek to liberate itself is both inappropriate and futile because rig pa is already self-liberated. Rig pa therefore is also the path, and its exponents teach practices that instruct the student how to distinguish rig pa from ordinary mental states. These practices include a variety of techniques designed to eliminate karmic obstacles (KARMĀVARAnA), at which point the presence of rig pa in ordinary experience is introduced, allowing the mind to eliminate all thoughts and experiences itself, thereby recognizing its true nature. Rig pa is thus also the goal of the path, the fundamental state that is free from obscuration. Cf. LINGZHI.
Ring-Pass-Not ::: A profoundly mystical and suggestive term signifying the circle or bounds or frontiers within which iscontained the consciousness of those who are still under the sway of the delusion of separateness -- andthis applies whether the ring be large or small. It does not signify any one especial occasion or condition,but is a general term applicable to any state in which an entity, having reached a certain stage ofevolutionary growth of the unfolding of consciousness, finds itself unable to pass into a still higher statebecause of some delusion under which the consciousness is laboring, be that delusion mental or spiritual.There is consciously a ring-pass-not for every globe of the planetary chain, a ring-pass-not for theplanetary chain itself, a ring-pass-not for the solar system, and so forth. It is the entities who labor underthe delusion who therefore actually create their own rings-pass-not, for these are not actual entitativematerial frontiers, but boundaries of consciousness.A ring-pass-not furthermore may perhaps be said with great truth to be somewhat of the nature of aspiritual laya-center or point of transmission between plane and plane of consciousness.The rings-pass-not as above said, however, have to do with phases or states of consciousness only. Forinstance, the ring-pass-not for the beasts is self-consciousness, i.e., the beasts have not yet been enabledto develop forth their consciousness to the point of self-consciousness or reflective consciousness exceptin minor degree. A dog, for example, located in a room which it desires to leave, will run to a door out ofwhich it is accustomed to go and will sit there whining for the door to be opened. Its consciousnessrecognizes the point of egress, but it has not developed the self-conscious mental activity to open thedoor.A general ring-pass-not for humanity is their inability to self-consciously participate in spiritualself-consciousness.
sāgaramudrāsamādhi. (T. rgya mtsho'i phyag rgya ting nge 'dzin; C. haiyin sanmei; J. kaiin zanmai; K. haein sammae 海印三昧). In Sanskrit, "ocean-seal samādhi," or "oceanic reflection samādhi," a concentration (SAMĀDHI) often treated as emblematic of the HUAYAN ZONG's most profound vision of reality. "Ocean seal" is a metaphor for the pure and still mind that is able to reflect all phenomena while remaining perpetually unaffected by them, just as the calm surface of the ocean is said to be able to reflect all the phenomena in the universe. The AVATAMSAKASuTRA includes the sāgaramudrāsamādhi among several other types of samādhi that it mentions. In the "SAMANTABHADRA Bodhisattva Chapter" (Puxian pusa pin), the first of the ten samādhis taught by this bodhisattva is the sāgaramudrāsamādhi; through its power, a buddha is enabled to perform all types of works to rescue sentient beings, such as manifesting himself as a buddha and using numerous skillful means (UPĀYA) in order to guide them. The "Ten Bhumis Chapter" (Shidi pin) mentions sāgaramudrāsamādhi as one of a list of eleven samādhis that occur to bodhisattvas who reach the tenth stage (BHuMI) on the path. The "Manifestation of the Tathāgata Chapter" (Rulai chuxian pin) says that sāgaramudrāsamādhi is so named because it is like the ocean that reflects the images of all sentient beings. In the Huayan scholastic tradition, sāgaramudrāsamādhi is raised to pride of place within its doctrinal system. Sāgaramudrāsamādhi is considered to be the generic samādhi (zongding) that the Buddha enters prior to beginning the elucidation of the various assemblies recounted in the AvataMsakasutra itself; the seven subsequent samādhis that the Buddha enters as he preaches the teaching of the AvataMsakasutra at each of the eight assemblies (hui) (there is no samādhi prior to the second assembly) are regarded instead as specific types of samādhis (bieding). ZHIYAN (602-668), the second Huayan patriarch, associated sāgaramudrāsamādhi with the teaching of one vehicle (EKAYĀNA) in his KONGMU ZHANG, where he says that the common and distinctive teachings of the one vehicle (yisheng tongbie) are revealed through the "ocean-seal" samādhi, while the teachings of the three vehicles (TRIYĀNA) are revealed through the subsequently obtained wisdom (C. houde zhi; S. PṚstHALABDHAJNĀNA). FAZANG (643-712), the third Huayan patriarch, following his teacher Zhiyan's view, declares at the beginning of his HUAYAN WUJIAO ZHANG that his work was written to reveal the teaching of the one vehicle that the Buddha attained through the "ocean-seal" samādhi. It is Fazang who formalized the place of the sāgaramudrāsamādhi in the Huayan doctrinal system. In his XIU HUAYAN AOZHI WANGJIN HUANYUAN GUAN, Fazang noted that the "ocean-seal" samādhi and the Huayan samādhi (C. Huayan sanmei), both mentioned among the ten samādhis in the Xianshou pusa pin of the AvataMsakasutra, correspond to the "two functions" (er YONG): respectively, to the "function of the eternal abiding of all things reflected on the ocean" (haiyin senluo changzhu yong) and the "function of the autonomy of the perfect luminosity of the DHARMADHĀTU" (fajie yuanming zizai yong). Both of these types of functions were subordinated to the highest category of the "one essence" (yi TI), viz., the "essence of the pure and perfect luminosity of the self-nature" (zixing qingjing yuanming ti). The first type of function, which was associated with the sāgaramudrāsamādhi, was the perfect reflection of all things in the pure mind; like the unsullied ocean that reflected all phenomena, it also was freed from any type of delusion or falsity. For Fazang, "ocean seal" (haiyin) was interpreted to mean the "original enlightenment of true thusness" (ZHENRU BENJUE) by correlating this function with the "ocean of the thusness of the dharma nature" (faxing zhenru hai) as mentioned in the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna"). In Fazang's Huayan youxin fajie ji, the "ocean-seal" samādhi was classified as a cause and the Huayan samādhi as a fruition. Elsewhere, in his HUAYAN JING TANXUAN JI, Fazang additionally differentiates the ocean-seal samādhi itself into two phases of cause and fruition: the stage of the cause is attained by the bodhisattva SAMANTABHADRA at the tenth of the ten stages of faith, while the fruition stage corresponds to the samādhi of a tathāgata. In addition to its importance in the AvataMsakasutra and the Huayan school, there are several other sutras that also mention the sāgaramudrāsamādhi. For example, the MAHĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA says that the sāgaramudrāsamādhi incorporates all other samādhis. The RATNAKutASuTRA states that one should abide in sāgaramudrāsamādhi in order to obtain complete, perfect enlightenment (ANUTTARASAMYAKSAMBODHI). Finally, the MAHĀSAMNIPĀTASuTRA says that one can see all sentient beings' mental functions and gain the knowledge of all teaching devices (DHARMAPARYĀYA) through the sāgaramudrāsamādhi.
sage ::: n. 1. A man who is venerated for his profound wisdom. sage"s, sages, king-sages. adj. 2. Having or exhibiting profound wisdom and calm judgement.
Samadhana (Sanskrit) Samādhāna [from sam-ā-dhā to put together, restore] The collection of all the principles of a person’s constitution into a single unity, thus restoring the person as an entitative being to the wholeness of the atmic reality. “That state in which a Yogi can no longer diverge from the path of spiritual progress; when everything terrestrial, except the visible body, has ceased to exist for him” (TG 286). It is true religious meditation, and profound intellectual absorption into and contemplation of pure spirit.
sam-ādhi ::: connection, alliance; completion; joining, putting together, union with; bringing into harmony; contemplation, profound meditation, intense absorption.
Samadhi(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word formed of sam, meaning "with" or "together"; a, meaning "towards"; andthe verbal root dha, signifying "to place," or "to bring"; hence samadhi, meaning "to direct towards,"generally signifies to combine the faculties of the mind with a direction towards an object. Hence, intensecontemplation or profound meditation, with the consciousness directed to the spiritual. It is the highestform of self-possession, in the sense of collecting all the faculties of the constitution towards reachingunion or quasi-union, long or short in time as the case may be, with the divine-spiritual. One whopossesses and is accustomed to use this power has complete, absolute control over all his faculties, andis, therefore, said to be "completely self- possessed." It is the highest state of yoga or "union."Samadhi, therefore, is a word of exceedingly mystical and profound significance implying the completeabstraction of the percipient consciousness from all worldly or exterior or even mental concerns orattributes, and its absorption into or, perhaps better, its becoming the pure unadulterate, undilutesuperconsciousness of the god within. In other words, samadhi is self-conscious union with the spiritualmonad of the human constitution. Samadhi is the eighth or final stage of genuine occult yoga, and can beattained at any time by the initiate without conscious recourse to the other phases or practices of yogaenumerated in Oriental works, and which other and inferior practices are often misleading, in some casesdistinctly injurious, and at the best mere props or aids in the attaining of complete mental abstractionfrom worldly concerns.The eight stages of yoga usually enumerated are the following: (1) yama, signifying "restraint" or"forbearance"; (2) niyama, religious observances of various kinds, such as watchings or fastings,prayings, penances, etc.; (3) asana (q.v.), postures of various kinds; (4) pranayama, various methods ofregulating the breath; (5) pratyahara, a word signifying "withdrawal," but technically and esoterically the"withdrawal" of the consciousness from sensual or sensuous concerns, or from external objects; (6)dharana (q.v.), firmness or steadiness or resolution in holding the mind set or concentrated on a topic orobject of thought, mental concentration; (7) dhyana (q.v.), abstract contemplation or meditation whenfreed from exterior distractions; and finally, (8) samadhi, complete collection of the consciousness and ofits faculties into oneness or union with the monadic essence.It may be observed, and should be carefully taken note of by the student, that when the initiate hasattained samadhi he becomes practically omniscient for the solar universe in which he dwells, becausehis consciousness is functioning at the time in the spiritual-causal worlds. All knowledge is then to himlike an open page because he is self-consciously conscious, to use a rather awkward phrase, of nature'sinner and spiritual realms, the reason being that his consciousness has become kosmic in its reaches.
Samadhi: Sanskrit for putting together. Profound meditation, absorption in the spirit. The final stage in the practice of Yoga, in which the individual becomes one with the object of meditation, thus attaining a condition of superconsciousness and unqualified blissfulness, which is called moksha.
Samadhi (Sanskrit) Samādhi [from sam with, together + ā towards + the verbal root dhā to place, bring] To direct towards; to combine the mental faculties towards an object. Self-consciousness union with the spiritual monad by intense and profound spiritual contemplation or meditation. It implies “the complete abstraction of the percipient consciousness from all worldly, or exterior, or even mental concerns or attributes, and its . . . becoming the pure unadulterate, undilute super-consciousness of the god within. . . . Samadhi is the eighth or final stage of genuine occult Yoga, and can be attained at any time by the initiate without conscious recourse to the other phases or practices of Yoga enumerated in Oriental works, and which other and inferior practices are often misleading, in some cases distinctly injurious, and at the best mere props or aids in the attaining of complete mental abstraction from worldly concerns” (OG 150-1). The seeker on attaining samadhi becomes practically omniscient for his solar universe because his consciousness is functioning in the cosmic spiritual and causal worlds.
samadhi (sushupta samadhi) ::: the state of profound samadhi . upta samadhi that is compared to dreamless sleep. It is not an unconscious state, but "the Yogic sleep of the mind with wakefulness of the vijnana", which "is the gate of union with the supreme state of Sachchidananda". sus susupta-svapna
samādhi. (T. ting nge 'dzin; C. sanmei; J. sanmai; K. sammae 三昧). In Sanskrit, "concentration"; a foundational term in Buddhist meditation theory and practice, which is related to the ability to establish and maintain one-pointedness of mind (CITTAIKĀGRATĀ) on a specific object of concentration. The SARVĀSTIVĀDA school of ABHIDHARMA and the YOGĀCĀRA school list samādhi as one of a group of five determinative (VINIYATA) mental concomitants (CAITTA), whose function is to aid the mind in ascertaining or determining its object. The five are: aspiration or desire-to-act (CHANDA), determination or resolve (ADHIMOKsA), mindfulness or memory (SMṚTI), concentration (SAMĀDHI), and wisdom or cognition (PRAJNĀ). According to ASAnGA, these five determinative factors accompany wholesome (KUsALA) states of mind, so that if one is present, all are present. In Pāli ABHIDHAMMA materials, concentration is one of the seven mental factors (P. cetasika) that are invariably associated with all moments of consciousness (CITTA, MANAS, or VIJNĀNA). Concentration occurs in many other important lists, including as the second of the three trainings (TRIsIKsĀ), and the last stage of the eightfold path (ĀRYĀstĀnGAMĀRGA). Concentration is distinguished according to the quality of consciousness with which it is associated. "Right concentration" (SAMYAKSAMĀDHI, P. sammāsamādhi) is concentration associated with wholesome (KUsALA) states of mind; it is listed not only as one element of the eightfold noble path, but as one of seven factors of enlightenment (BODHYAnGA, P. bojjhanga), and, in an incipient state, as one of five powers (BALA) and the other categories that together make up the BODHIPĀKsIKADHARMA (thirty-seven factors associated with awakening). High degrees of concentration can be developed through the practice of meditation (BHĀVANĀ). Concentration of such intensity receives the designation "one-pointedness of mind" (cittaikāgratā). When developed to its greatest degree, mental concentration leads to the attainment of DHYĀNA (P. JHĀNA), "meditative absorption." It is also the main mental factor defining the four magical powers (ṚDDHIPĀDA, P. iddhipāda). The cultivation of concentration for the purposes of attaining meditative absorption is called tranquillity meditation (sAMATHA). In the Pāli abhidhamma, three levels of concentration are distinguished in the practice of tranquility meditation: (1) preparatory concentration (PARIKAMMASAMĀDHI) is the degree of concentration established at the beginning of a meditation session. (2) Access or neighborhood concentration (UPACĀRASAMĀDHI) arises just as the practitioner approaches but does not enter the first level of meditative absorption; it is marked by the appearance in the mind of a representational image (PAtIBHĀGANIMITTA) of the object of meditation. (3) "Attainment" or "full" concentration (APPANĀSAMĀDHI) is the level of concentration that arises upon entering and abiding in any of the meditative absorptions. In the MAHĀYĀNA sutras, a wide variety of profound meditative experiences are described as samādhis and are mentioned as attainments of the bodhisattva as he ascends through the ten BHuMIs. The MAHĀVYUTPATTI lists 118 different samādhis that are specified by name in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ sutras, such as candravimala (stainless moon), sarvadharmodgata (surpassing all dharmas), siMhavikrīdita (lion's play), anantaprabha (limitless light), and acala (immovable). See also YATHĀBHuTAJNĀNADARsANA.
Samothrace An island in the north Aegean celebrated for a school of the Mysteries, more profound than the Mysteries of Eleusis, “perhaps the oldest [Mysteries] ever established in our present race” (TG 287). The island is of volcanic formation and connected with traditions of a deluge. Its Mysteries were related to the worship of the kabiri, the holy fires of the most occult powers of nature, which legend says formed on the seven localities of the island the kabir born of the Holy Lemnos sacred to Vulcan. It was colonized by Phoenicians and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, which indicates its connection with the ancient Mysteries of India. Here was enacted every seven years the Mysteries — what the Shemitic peoples of Asia Minor called the Sod. The sacred fire preserved at Samothrace was communicated to the candidates of initiation, who thus began a new life — the real meaning of baptism by fire and the spirit.
sandhyābhāsā. [alt. saMdhyābhāsyā] (T. dgongs bshad/dgongs skad). In Sanskrit, "intentional language," often mistranslated as "twilight language"; a kind of secret or coded speech, used especially, but not exclusively, in TANTRA. The term is used in a broader hermeneutical sense to explain how a difficult or otherwise problematic text requires commentary in order to bring out its doctrinally consistent meaning. The term is also used in an exclusively tantric sense to refer to a secret linguistic code that is understood and used by initiates of a particular tantric circle: e.g., "frankincense" means "blood" and "camphor" means "semen." The Pradīpoddyotana commentary by the tāntrika Candrakīrti on the Guhyasamājamulatantra explains sandhyābhāsā with a scheme of six alternatives (satkoti) in a series of four modes going from less to more profound. The six alternatives are provisional (NEYĀRTHA) and definitive (NĪTĀRTHA); requiring interpretation (ābhiprāyika) and not requiring interpretation (anābhiprāyika); and ayathāruta (when one cannot take words literally) and yathāruta (when one can take words literally). Complicated or obscure language (called VAJRA expression) that can be taken literally (yathāruta), or that can be taken at face value to convey meaning, provides a provisional meaning, i.e., a meaning that requires interpretation (neyārtha); this leads to what the statement does not say literally (ayathāruta), which is its definitive meaning (nītārtha). A passage about a topic not addressed in statements about lower stages of the tantric path, and therefore couched in words that are coded and apparently contradictory to other statements, in the sense that other passages about practices at lower stages of the tantric path contradict what it says, are ābhiprāyika, while straightforward statements about a topic that is not addressed at lower stages of the tantric path are anābhiprāyika; for example, direct statements about clear light (PRABHĀSVARA) and illusory bodies (māyākāya), the culminating attainments in the Guhyasamāja system. Finally, a statement couched in ordinary language about a topic that is relevant to both earlier and later stages of the tantric path is yathāruta (can be taken literally); statements using a specialized argot, using unusual words that are ordinarily meaningless, like some words in MANTRAs, are ayathāruta. See also ABHIPRĀYA; ABHISAMDHI.
San lun xuanyi. (J. Sanron gengi; K. Sam non hyonŭi 三論玄義). In Chinese, "Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises," composed by the monk JIZANG sometime around 597. Although the title mentions the so-called "three treatises" (see SAN LUN ZONG), the San lun xuanyi is actually a commentary on four influential texts, namely the Zhong lun (cf. S. MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ), BAI LUN (S. *sATAsĀSTRA), SHI'ERMEN LUN (S. *Dvādasamukhasāstra), and DAZHIDU LUN (*MahāprajNāpāramitāsastra). The San lun xuanyi systematically presents the teachings of NĀGĀRJUNA and provides a succinct explanation of the notion of emptiness (suNYATĀ). Jizang's treatise consists of two main sections, which he terms the destruction of heresies and the elucidation of truth. His first section discusses the non-Buddhist teachings of India and the traditions of Zhuangzi, Laozi, and the Zhouyi in China. He also condemns ABHIDHARMA as HĪNAYĀNA teachings, the *TATTVASIDDHI as provisional MAHĀYĀNA, and the teachings of the five periods (see WUSHI BAJIAO) as a misleading attachment to MAHĀYĀNA. In the second section, Jizang explains the appearance of Nāgārjuna and the teachings of the Zhong lun, Bai lun, Shi'ermen lun, and Dazhidu lun. Jizang's explanations rely heavily upon the notion of the two truths (SATYADVAYA).
sāriputra. (P. Sāriputta; T. Shā ri bu; C. Shelifu; J. Sharihotsu; K. Saribul 舍利弗). In Sanskrit, "Son of sārī"; the first of two chief disciples of the Buddha, along with MAHĀMAUDGALYĀYANA. sāriputra's father was a wealthy brāhmana named Tisya (and sāriputra is sometimes called Upatisya, after his father) and his mother was named sārī or sārikā, because she had eyes like a sārika bird. sārī was the most intelligent woman in MAGADHA; she is also known as sāradvatī, so sāriputra is sometimes referred to as sāradvatīputra. sāriputra was born in Nālaka near RĀJAGṚHA. He had three younger brothers and three sisters, all of whom would eventually join the SAMGHA and become ARHATs. sāriputra and Mahāmaudgalyāyana were friends from childhood. Once, while attending a performance, both became overwhelmed with a sense of the vanity of all impermanent things and resolved to renounce the world together. They first became disciples of the agnostic SANJAYA VAIRĀtĪPUTRA, although they later took their leave of him and wandered through India in search of the truth. Finding no solution, they parted company, promising one another that whichever one should succeed in finding the truth would inform the other. It was then that sāriputra met the Buddha's disciple, AsVAJIT, one of the Buddha's first five disciples (PANCAVARGIKA) and already an arhat. sāriputra was impressed with Asvajit's countenance and demeanor and asked whether he was a master or a disciple. When he replied that he was a disciple, sāriputra asked him what his teacher taught. Asvajit said that he was new to the teachings and could only provide a summary, but then uttered one of the most famous statements in the history of Buddhism, "Of those phenomena produced through causes, the TATHĀGATA has proclaimed their causes (HETU) and also their cessation (NIRODHA). Thus has spoken the great renunciant." (See YE DHARMĀ s.v.). Hearing these words, sāriputra immediately became a stream-enterer (SROTAĀPANNA) and asked where he could find this teacher. In keeping with their earlier compact, he repeated the stanza to his friend Mahāmaudgalyāyana, who also immediately became a streamenterer. The two friends resolved to take ordination as disciples of the Buddha and, together with five hundred disciples of their former teacher SaNjaya, proceeded to the VEnUVANAVIHĀRA, where the Buddha was in residence. The Buddha ordained the entire group with the EHIBHIKsUKĀ ("Come, monks") formula, whereupon all except sāriputra and Mahāmaudgalyāyana became arhats. Mahāmaudgalyāyana was to attain arhatship seven days after his ordination, while sāriputra reached the goal after a fortnight upon hearing the Buddha preach the Vedanāpariggahasutta (the Sanskrit recension is entitled the Dīrghanakhaparivrājakaparipṛcchā). The Buddha declared sāriputra and Mahāmaudgalyāyana his chief disciples the day they were ordained, giving as his reason the fact that both had exerted themselves in religious practice for countless previous lives. sāriputra was declared chief among the Buddha's disciples in wisdom, while Mahāmaudgalyāyana was chief in mastery of supranormal powers (ṚDDHI). sāriputra was recognized as second only to the Buddha in his knowledge of the dharma. The Buddha praised sāriputra as an able teacher, calling him his dharmasenāpati, "dharma general" and often assigned topics for him to preach. Two of his most famous discourses were the DASUTTARASUTTA and the SAnGĪTISUTTA, which the Buddha asked him to preach on his behalf. Sāriputra was meticulous in his observance of the VINAYA, and was quick both to admonish monks in need of guidance and to praise them for their accomplishments. He was sought out by others to explicate points of doctrine and it was he who is said to have revealed the ABHIDHARMA to the human world after the Buddha taught it to his mother, who had been reborn in the TRĀYASTRIMsA heaven; when the Buddha returned to earth each day to collect alms, he would repeat to sāriputra what he had taught to the divinities in heaven. sāriputra died several months before the Buddha. Realizing that he had only seven days to live, he resolved to return to his native village and convert his mother; with this accomplished, he passed away. His body was cremated and his relics were eventually enshrined in a STuPA at NĀLANDĀ. sāriputra appears in many JĀTAKA stories as a companion of the Buddha, sometimes in human form, sometimes in animal form, and sometimes with one of them a human and the other an animal. sāriputra also plays a major role in the MAHĀYĀNA sutras, where he is a common interlocutor of the Buddha and of the chief BODHISATTVAs. Sometimes he is portrayed as a dignified arhat, elsewhere he is made the fool, as in the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA when a goddess turns him into a woman, much to his dismay. In either case, the point is that the wisest of the Buddha's arhat disciples, the master of the abhidharma, does not know the sublime teachings of the Mahāyāna and must have them explained to him. The implication is that the teachings of the Mahāyāna sutras are therefore more profound than anything found in the canons of the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS. In the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYA ("Heart Sutra"), it is sāriputra who asks AVALOKITEsVARA how to practice the perfection of wisdom, and even then he must be empowered to ask the question by the Buddha. In the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, it is sāriputra's question that prompts the Buddha to set forth the parable of the burning house. The Buddha predicts that in the future, sāriputra will become the buddha Padmaprabha.
Satyadvayavibhanga. (T. Bden pa gnyis rnam par 'byed pa). In Sanskrit, "Distinction Between the Two Truths," a work by the eighth-century MADHYAMAKA master JNĀNAGARBHA. According to Tibetan classification, the work belongs to the SVĀTANTRIKA-MADHYAMAKA, and within that, the SAUTRĀNTIKA-SVĀTANTRIKA-MADHYAMAKA. This work, together with the MADHYAMAKĀLAMKĀRA by sĀNTARAKsITA and the MADHYAMAKĀLOKA of KAMALAsĪLA are known in Tibet as the "three works of the eastern *SVĀTANTRIKAs" (rang rgyud shar gsum) because the three authors were from Bengal. The Satyadvayavibhanga is composed in verses (kārikā) and includes a prose autocommentary (vṛtti) by the author. There is also a commentary (paNjikā) by sāntaraksita, who is said to have been a student of JNānagarbha. The text presumably takes its title from Nāgārjuna's statement in his MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ: "Those who do not comprehend the distinction between these two truths do not know the nature of the profound doctrine of the Buddha." The ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA) is nondeceptive; its nature accords not with appearance, but with valid knowledge gained through reasoning (nyāya). It is also free from discursive thought (NIRVIKALPA). The conventional truth (SAMVṚTISATYA) includes ordinary appearances, or as the text says, "whatever appears even to cowherds and women." Within the category of the conventional, there are true and false conventions, which are distinguished based on their ability to perform a function (ARTHAKRIYĀ) in accordance with their appearance; thus water is a true convention and a mirage is a false convention. The work ends with a discussion of the three bodies (TRIKĀYA) of a buddha.
Savasana ::: Transliterated as "Corpse Pose". An asana (especially in Hatha Yoga) of relaxation in which the practitioner lies down on their back, arms and legs loosely spread, and attempts to let go and experience themselves fully and profoundly.
science ::: n. --> Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws; knowledge classified and made available in work, life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or philosophical knowledge.
Especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical
seer ::: 1. A person gifted with profound spiritual insight or knowledge; a wise person or sage who possesses intuitive powers or one to whom divine revelations are made in visions. 2. One who sees; an observer. **Seer, seers, seer-evenings, seer-summit, seer-vision"s.
Self-Actualization ::: The process through which one becomes the self they feel called toward becoming. Realizing our path is one matter, but actively moving there and stabilizing awareness there is another altogether. These movements can be subtle or profound: distinct leaps in stages of awareness or simply incremental steps evolving perspective.
Sethianites Also Sethiotai, Sethians, Sethites. A branch of the Gnostics Ophites, who regarded Seth, the son of Adam, as the first spiritual man, and maintained that Seth reappeared as Christ. The teachings of the Ophites in their different branches were extremely profound and highly philosophic, but the Christians neither could nor would understand the inner meanings of the Ophite doctrines, but took their allegories; and in the process of grossly distorting them, and misquoting them for the purpose of ridicule, succeeded in confusing later centuries as to just what the Ophites did teach.
shaken ::: 1. Profoundly disturbed; agitated (literally or in feeling). 2. Of things normally stable or still: Caused to vibrate irregularly, tremble, as the result of impact or disturbance of equilibrium.
shallow ::: superl. --> Not deep; having little depth; shoal.
Not deep in tone.
Not intellectually deep; not profound; not penetrating deeply; simple; not wise or knowing; ignorant; superficial; as, a shallow mind; shallow learning. ::: n.
Shandao. (J. Zendo; K. Sondo 善導) (613-681). In Chinese, "Guide to Virtue"; putative third patriarch of the Chinese PURE LAND tradition; also known as Great Master Zhongnan. At an early age, Shandao became a monk under a certain DHARMA master Mingsheng (d.u.), with whom he studied the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA and the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA; he later devoted himself to the study of the GUAN WULIANGSHOU JING, which became one of his major inspirations. In 641, Shandao visited the monk DAOCHUO (562-645) at the monastery of Xuanzhongsi, where he is said to have cultivated vaipulya repentance (fangdeng canfa). Shandao also continued to train himself there in the visualization practices prescribed in the Guan Wuliangshou jing, which led to a profound vision of the buddha AMITĀBHA's PURE LAND (JINGTU) of SUKHĀVATĪ. Shandao subsequently eschewed philosophical exegesis and instead devoted himself to continued recitation of the Buddha's name (NIANFO) and visualization of the pure land as detailed in the Guan jing. After Daochuo's death, he remained in the Zongnan mountains before eventually moving to the Chinese capital of Chang'an, where he had great success in propagating the pure land teachings at the monastery of Guangmingsi. Shandao is also known to have painted numerous images of the pure land that appeared in his vision and presented them to his devotees. He was also famous for his continuous chanting of the AMITĀBHASuTRA. Shandao's influential commentary on the Guan Wuliangshou jing was favored by the Japanese monk HoNEN, whose teachings were the basis of the Japanese pure land tradition of JoDOSHu.
Shasekishu. (沙石集). In Japanese, "Sand and Pebbles Collection"; an anthology of edifying folkloric tales from the Kamakura period (1185-1333). The collection was compiled by a RINZAISHu monk named MUJu ICHIEN (1227-1312) between 1279 and 1283 and contains 150 stories in a total of ten rolls. After finishing his initial compilation, Muju continued to add the stories to the collection, so there are different editions of varying length. The preface to the collection explains the title: "Those who search for gold extract it from sand; those who treasure jewels gather pebbles that they then polish." The collection, therefore, seeks to explain profound Buddhist truths as they are found in mundane affairs. Muju demonstrates throughout the collection his belief in "crazy words and embellished phrases" (kyogen kigo) as an expedient means of articulating ultimate religious goals. He even argues that the traditional waka style of Japanese poetry is in fact DHĀRAnĪ, a mystic code that encapsulates the essence of Buddhist teachings. Most of the stories in the collection offer edifying lessons in such basic Buddhist beliefs as nonattachment and karmic retribution and in such ethical values as loyalty, filial piety, and fidelity. The idea of expedient means (UPĀYA) is also applied to the various Buddhist schools and to Japanese traditional religion: all the various teachings of Buddhism are depicted as expedient means of conveying the religion's beliefs, and Muju denounces Buddhist practitioners who exclusively promote the teachings of only their own sects. The collection also introduced the idea of the "unity of SHINTo and Buddhism" (SHINBUTSU SHuGo) by describing Japanese indigenous spirits, or KAMI, as various manifestations of the Buddha. The humorous tone of the collection attracted many readers during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), when it was reprinted several times.
shi. (J. ji; K. sa 事). In Chinese, "phenomenon," "event," "object"; the specific elements of the empirical world as they are experienced conventionally. In East Asian Buddhism, shi is typically used in distinction to "principle" (LI): li refers to the fundamental pattern or principle that underlies all phenomena, thus representing the true nature of reality; shi by contrast refers to all the particular expressions of this li in the phenomenal world. This interrelationship thus implies the inherent presence of li within shi. Teachers within the TIANTAI ZONG were among the first to employ the two terms in their systematic analysis of Buddhist thought. TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597), the systematizer of the Tiantai zong, applied the terms to refer not only to doctrinal but also to the practical dimensions of Buddhism. In the contexts of Buddhist practice, shi refers to such specific ritual and meditative activities as repentance, circumambulation, reciting the sutras, and sitting meditation, which could lead to the realization of the principle of emptiness or the truth of the median (see SANDI). The term shi is especially crucial in HUAYAN doctrinal analysis, where it is deployed in the taxonomy of the four realms of reality (DHARMADHĀTU), four successively more profound levels of experience (see SI FAJIE). According to Huayan doctrine, because each and every individual phenomenon (shi) is pervaded by principle (li), all the various discrete phenomena pervade, and are in turn pervaded by, each and every other discrete phenomenon in the experience of what Huayan terms the "dharma-realm of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomenon and phenomena" (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). As the individual products of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA), shi thus represents the organic totality of reality, in which every phenomenon is in multivalent interaction with everything else in the universe, mutually creating, and being created by, all other things.
Shingonshu. (眞言宗). In Japanese, lit. "True Word School." Shingon is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term ZHENYAN (true word), which in turn is a translation of the Sanskrit term MANTRA. In Japan, Shingon has also come to serve as the name for the various esoteric (MIKKYo) traditions that traced their teachings back to the eminent Japanese monk KuKAI. In his voluminous oeuvre, such as the HIMITSU MANDARA JuJuSHINRON, HIZo HoYAKU, Sokushin jobutsugi, and Shoji jissogi, Kukai laid the foundations of a new esoteric discourse that allowed the Buddhist institutions of the Heian period to replace Confucian principles as the ruling ideology of Japan. Kukai was able to effect this change by presenting the court and the Buddhist establishment with an alternative conception of Buddhist power, ritual efficacy, and the power of speech acts. Through Kukai's newly imported ritual systems, monks and other initiated individuals were said to be able to gain access to the power of the cosmic buddha Mahāvairocana, understood to be the DHARMAKĀYA, leading to all manner of feats, from bringing rain and warding off disease and famine, to achieving buddhahood in this very body (SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU). Kukai taught the choreographed ritual engagement with MAndALA, the recitation of MANTRAs and DHĀRAnĪ, and the performance of MUDRĀ and other ritual postures that were said to transform the body, speech, and mind of the practitioner into the body, speech, and mind of a particular buddha. Kukai's ritual teachings grew in importance to the point that he was appointed to the highest administrative post in the Buddhist establishment (sogo). From this position, Kukai was able to establish ordination platforms at the major monasteries in Nara and the capital in Kyoto. Later, the emperor gave Kukai both ToJI in Kyoto and KoYASAN, which subsequently came to serve as important centers of esoteric Buddhism. Kukai's Shingon mikkyo lineages also flourished at the monasteries of Ninnaji and DAIGOJI under imperial support. Later, Toji rose as an important institutional center for the study of Kukai's esoteric Buddhist lineages under the leadership of the monk Kangen (853-925), who was appointed head (zasu) of Toji, Kongobuji, and Daigoji. The Mt. Koya institution also grew with the rise of KAKUBAN, who established the monasteries of Daidenboin and Mitsugonin on the mountain. Conflict brewed between the monks of Kongobuji and Daidenboin when Kakuban was appointed the head of both institutions, a conflict that eventually resulted in the relocation of Daidenboin to nearby Mt. Negoro in Wakayama. The Daidenboin lineage came to be known as the Shingi branch of Shingon esoteric Buddhism. Attempts to unify the esoteric Buddhist traditions that claimed descent from Kukai were later made by Yukai (1345-1416), who eradicated the teachings of the "heretical" TACHIKAWARYu from Mt. Koya, and worked to establish a Kukai-centered Shingonshu orthodoxy. By the late medieval period, the major monastic landholding institutions in Kyoto, Nara, and Mt. Koya, many of which were profoundly influenced by the teachings of Kukai, suffered economic hardship with the initiation of the Warring States period (1467-1573) and the growing popularity of the so-called "Kamakura Schools" (e.g., JoDOSHu, JoDO SHINSHu, ZENSHu, and NICHIRENSHu). In particular, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) had crushed the major Buddhist centers on HIEIZAN. However, Mt. Koya, which was still a thriving center for the study of Kukai's Shingon esoteric Buddhism, was spared the same fate because the monks resident at the mountain successfully convinced Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) not to burn down their center. Thanks to the political stability of the Tokugawa regime, studies of esoteric Buddhism thrived until the harsh persecution of Buddhism by the Meiji government (see HAIBUTSU KISHAKU). As an effort to recover from the Meiji persecution, the disparate traditions of esoteric Buddhism came together under the banner of the Shingonshu, but after World War II, the various sub-lineages reasserted their independence.
shi rushi. (J. junyoze; K. sip yosi 十如是). In Chinese, the "ten suchnesses" (also known as the shiru); ten "suchlike" aspects of reality, as outlined in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA: all dharmas are of suchlike characteristics (xiang), nature (xing), essence (TI), efficacy (li), function (YONG), causes (yin), conditions (yuan), fruitions (guo), retributions (bao), and suchlike "equivalency ultimately from beginning and end" (benmuo jiujing deng; referring to all the nine previous "suchnesses"). The doctrinal significance of these "ten suchnesses" was interpreted and promoted by the TIANTAI ZONG. TIANTAI ZHIYI argued that by reading this passage with different emphases, it corresponds respectively to each of the three independent modes of contemplation in the "threefold contemplation" system (see SANGUAN). By emphasizing the term "suchness"-i.e., the characteristics of all dharmas are such (shixiang ru), the nature of all dharmas is such (shixing ru), etc.-this passage illuminates the "contemplation of emptiness," because emptiness (suNYATĀ) is the unifying principle for all ten aspects of reality and the term "empty" is synonymous with "suchness." By emphasizing the suchlike characteristics (rushi xiang), suchlike nature (rushi xing), etc., this same passage could instead illuminate the "contemplation of conventional existence," since existence is characterized by myriad distinct aspects that can be differentiated by such conventional categories as "characteristics," "nature," and "essence." Finally, by emphasizing "the suchness of characteristics" (xiang rushi), the "suchness of nature" (xing rushi), etc., the passage points out how this profound "suchness" contains and simultaneously affirms the aspects of both "emptiness" and "conventional existence," therefore corresponding to the "contemplation of the middle" in the "threefold contemplation" scheme. See also TATHATĀ.
shi xuanmen. (J. jugenmon; K. sip hyonmun 十玄門). In Chinese, "the ten mysteries"; the systematic elaboration of the implications of causality (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) and existence in the doctrinal system of the HUAYAN ZONG. ZHIYAN (602-668), the second patriarch of the Huayan lineage, first elaborated the ten profound mysteries in order to outline ten specific perspectives on the "dependent origination of the DHARMADHĀTU" (FAJIE YUANQI), viz., the perspectives of: (1) the interrelationship between all things, (2) simile (i.e., of Indra's Net, INDRAJĀLA), (3) conditionality, (4) characteristics, (5) time, (6) practice, (7) principle, (8) function, (9) mind, and (10) wisdom. This original listing was elaborated by FAZANG (643-712), the third patriarch of the school, to explain instead the dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration between all phenomena (see SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE): viz., all dharmas simultaneously have a distinct, independent existence, and yet are still thoroughly pervaded by one other; they thus mutually define, yet do not impede the distinctiveness of, each other. Fazang's revised listing of the "ten mysteries" comes to be definitive within the school:
si fajie. (J. shihokai/shihokkai; K. sa popkye 四法界). In Chinese, "four DHARMADHĀTUS"; four successively more profound levels of reality as outlined in the HUAYAN ZONG: (1) the dharmadhātu of phenomena (SHI FAJIE); (2) the dharmadhātu of principle (LI FAJIE); (3) the dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomena and principle (LISHI WU'AI FAJIE); (4) the dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). This understanding of four successive levels of reality is widely used in Huayan classificatory schemata (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI; HUAYAN WIJIAO) of Buddhist doctrines and is also employed as a justification for the different soteriological techniques prescribed by the various Buddhist schools. See also DHARMADHĀTU.
snying thig. (nyingtik). In Tibetan, "heart drop" or "heart essence" (an abbreviation of snying gi thig le), a term used to describe an important genre of texts of the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The master sRĪSIMHA is said to have divided the "instruction class" (MAN NGAG SDE) of the great completion (RDZOGS CHEN) teachings into four cycles: the outer, inner, secret, and the most secret unexcelled cycle (yang gsang bla na med pa). In Tibet, VIMALAMITRA organized the teachings of this fourth cycle into an explanatory lineage with scriptures and an aural lineage without scriptures and then concealed these teachings, which were later revealed as the BI MA'I SNYING THIG ("Heart Essence of Vimalamitra"). During his stay in Tibet, PADMASAMBHAVA concealed teachings on the most secret unexcelled cycle, called "heart essence of the dĀKINĪ" (MKHA' 'GRO SNYING THIG). In the fourteenth century, these and other teachings were compiled and elaborated upon by KLONG CHEN RAB 'BYAMS into what are known as the "four heart essences" (SNYING THIG YA BZHI): (1) the "heart essence of VIMALAMITRA" (Bi ma'i snying thig), (2) the "ultimate essence of the lama" (bla ma yang thig), (3) the "heart essence of the dākinī" (mkha' 'gro snying thig), and (4) two sections composed by Klong chen pa, the "ultimate essence of the dākinī" (mkha' 'gro yang thig) and the "ultimate essence of the profound" (zab mo yang thig). Although tracing its roots back to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century, the snying thig texts and their practices likely derive from Tibetan reformulations of great completion teachings beginning in the eleventh century, when new translations of Indian tantras were being made in Tibet. A wide range of new meditative systems were added into the rdzogs chen corpus, which would prove to be essential to Tibetan Buddhist practice, especially in the RNYING MA and BKA' BRGYUD sects in subsequent centuries.
Soma (Sanskrit) Soma In Hinduism, the moon astronomically; mystically, a sacred beverage of initiates, “made from a rare mountain plant by initiated Brahmans” (TG 304). As the moon, Soma is an occult mystery, for the moon as a symbol stands for both good and evil, yet more often a symbol of evil than of good. Astrologically, Soma is the regent of the invisible or occult moon, while Indu represents the physical moon. “Soma is the mystery god and presides over the mystic and occult nature in man and the Universe” (SD 2:45). Soma or lunar worship was once purely occult and its rites were based upon a minute and profound knowledge of nature.
sopor ::: n. --> Profound sleep from which a person can be roused only with difficulty.
Sphere ::: Refers to both the planets as well as the Sephiroth. This also refers to the geometric shape of the same name: one of primordial and profound beauty and function within the Universe.
srāvaka. (P. sāvaka; T. nyan thos; C. shengwen; J. shomon; K. songmun 聲聞). In Sanskrit, lit. "listener"; viz., a direct "disciple" of the Buddha who "listened" to his teachings (and sometimes seen translated over-literally from the Chinese as "sound-hearer"). In the MAHĀYĀNA, the term was used to describe those who (along with PRATYEKABUDDHAs) sought their own liberation from suffering as an ARHAT by following the HĪNAYĀNA path (see ER SHENG), and was contrasted (negatively) to the BODHISATTVAs who seeks buddhahood for the sake of all beings. There is an issue in the Mahāyāna concerning whether srāvakas will eventually enter the bodhisattva path and become buddhas, or whether arhatship is a final state where no further progress along the path (MĀRGA) will be possible (see sRĀVAKAGOTRA). The SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, for example, declares that they will, and in the sutra the Buddha makes prophecies about the future buddhahood of several famous srāvakas. In many Mahāyāna sutras, srāvakas are often described as being in the audience of the Buddha's teaching, and certain srāvakas, such as sĀRIPUTRA, play important roles as interlocutors. In the third chapter of the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, a series of srāvakas explain why they are reluctant to visit the bodhisattva VIMALAKĪRTI, because of the insurmountable challenge his profound understanding of the dharma will present to them.
Sri Aurobindo: "History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.” *The Human Cycle etc.
Sri Aurobindo: "If this higher buddhi {{understanding in the profoundest sense] could act pure of the interference of these lower members, it would give pure forms of the truth; observation would be dominated or replaced by a vision which could see without subservient dependence on the testimony of the sense-mind and senses; imagination would give place to the self-assured inspiration of the truth, reasoning to the spontaneous discernment of relations and conclusion from reasoning to an intuition containing in itself those relations and not building laboriously upon them, judgment to a thought-vision in whose light the truth would stand revealed without the mask which it now wears and which our intellectual judgment has to penetrate; while memory too would take upon itself that larger sense given to it in Greek thought and be no longer a paltry selection from the store gained by the individual in his present life, but rather the all-recording knowledge which secretly holds and constantly gives from itself everything that we now seem painfully to acquire but really in this sense remember, a knowledge which includes the future(1) no less than the past. ::: Footnote: In this sense the power of prophecy has been aptly called a memory of the future.]” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Srong btsan sgam po. (Songtsen Gampo) (r. c. 605-650). The thirty-third Tibetan religious king (chos kyi rgyal po) who reigned during the period of the Yar klungs dynasty; credited with establishing Buddhism as the predominant religion in Tibet. He is considered the first of three great religious kings, along with KHRI SRONG LDE BTSAN and RAL PA CAN. Although the historical facts of his life are somewhat murky, stories of Srong btsan sgam po's activities pervade Tibetan culture. His rule forged a cohesive national center and brought Tibet to the zenith of it military expansion, shaping an empire that rivaled any in Asia. During Srong btsan sgam po's reign, Tibet was surrounded by Buddhist currents to the south and west, which appear to have had a particularly profound effect on Tibetan civilization. According to traditional sources, the king and his two wives, the Nepalese BHṚKUTI and the Chinese WENCHENG, were instrumental in the early promulgation of Buddhist practice in his kingdom. An important Tibetan text, the MAnI BKA' 'BUM ("One Hundred Thousand Instructions on the Mani"), describes the monarch as an earthly manifestation of AVALOKITEsVARA, the BODHISATTVA of compassion, and his wives as forms of the female bodhisattva TĀRĀ. These accounts are at the heart of Tibet's Buddhist myth of origin and play a central role in how most Tibetans understand the history of their country and religion. After ascending the throne, Srong btsan sgam po moved his capital from the heartland of the Yar klungs Valley in the south to its modern location in LHA SA. With the support of their monarch, each queen established an important Buddhist temple to house a statue she had carried to Tibet: Bhṛkuti founding the JO KHANG temple for an image of sĀKYAMUNI called JO BO MI BSKYOD RDO RJE, Wencheng founding what is now the RA MO CHE temple for her statue of sākyamuni called JO BO SHĀKYAMUNI or Jo bo rin po che. These images were later switched, and today the Jo bo sākyamuni statue sits in the Jo khang, where it is venerated as Tibet's holiest Buddhist relic. According to legend, the Tang princess Wencheng also imported Chinese systems of geomancy and divination through which the Tibetan landscape was viewed as a supine demoness requiring subjugation in order for Buddhism to take root and flourish. Srong btsan sgam po purportedly constructed a series of "taming temples" that acted as nails pinning down the limbs of the demoness (T. srin mo), rendering her powerless. The Jo khang was constructed over the position of the demoness' heart. In addition to the Jo khang, traditional sources count twelve main taming (T. 'dul) temples spread across the Himalayan landscape, each pinning down a point on the demoness's body. These structures appear to be in concentric circles radiating out from her heart at Lha sa. Out from the heart are the "edge-pinning temples" (MTHA' 'DUL GTSUG LAG KHANG) of KHRA 'BRUG, 'GRUM, BKA' TSHAL, and GRUM PA RGYANG, said to pin down her right and left shoulders and right and left hips, respectively; and beyond that four "extra-pinning temples" (YANG 'DUL GTSUG LAG KHANG) BU CHU, MKHO MTHING, DGE GYES, and PRA DUM RTSE that pin down her right and left elbows and right and left knees, respectively. In 637, Srong btsan sgam po established an eleven-storied palace on the hill of northeast Lha sa called Mar po ri. While this structure was later destroyed by fire, it served as the foundation for the PO TA LA palace constructed in the seventeenth century under the direction of the fifth DALAI LAMA NGAG DBANG BLO BZANG RGYA MTSHO. The king is also said to have commissioned his minister Thon mi SaMbhota to create a new script (what is now known as Tibetan) in order to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit. He also established what is known as the "great legal code" (gtsug lag bka' khrims chen po). While contemporary scholars now question the portrait of Srong btsan sgam po as a pious convert to Buddhism (it is known, for example, that he maintained close ties to the early BON religion), many of Tibet's most important Buddhist institutions were established during his time.
srutamayīprajNā. (P. sutamayāpaNNā; T. thos pa las byung ba'i shes rab; C. wenhui; J. mon'e; K. munhye 聞慧). In Sanskrit, "wisdom derived from hearing [viz., learning]," the first of the three types of wisdoms, which refers to understanding derived from listening to (and, by extension, reading and studying about) the dharma. This type of wisdom provides a grounding for the development of mental attention and concentration, which is crucial for meditative calmness (sAMATHA). It is not as profound as the second type of wisdom, which arises as a result of thinking about or reflecting on what one has learned (CINTĀMAYĪPRAJNĀ); or the third type of wisdom, which is generated through meditation (BHĀVANĀMAYĪPRAJNĀ) at the level of VIPAsYANĀ.
Subba Row in “Brahmanism on the Sevenfold Principles in Man” (Theosophist 3:93) says: “The Vedas were perhaps compiled mainly for the use of the priests assisting at public ceremonies, but the grandest conclusions of our real secret doctrine are therein mentioned. I am informed by persons competent to judge of the matter, that the Vedas have a distinct dual meaning — one expressed by the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the swara (intonation), which are, as it were, the life of the Vedas . . . the mysterious connection between swara and light is one of its most profound secrets.”
sushupti. ::: "deep dreamless sleep"; the state in which a person is wrapped in profound self-oblivion and both the mind and body are dormant
Sushupti (Sanskrit) Suṣupti [from su well, good, fine + supti sleep] Fast asleep, deep sleep; the deep sleeping state when human consciousness is plunged into profound self-oblivion, “when the percipient consciousness enters into the purely manasic condition . . .” (OG 72). Sushupti is the third of the four states of consciousness mentioned in yoga philosophy, the others being jagrat, svapna, and turiya.
Svabhava(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word derived from the verb-root bhu, meaning "to become" -- not so much "tobe" in the passive sense, but rather "to become," to "grow into" something. The quasi-pronominal prefixsva, means "self"; hence the noun means "self-becoming," "self-generation," "self-growing" intosomething. Yet the essential or fundamental or integral Self, although following continuously its ownlofty line of evolution, cannot be said to suffer the changes or phases that its vehicles undergo. Like themonads, like the One, thus the Self fundamental -- which, after all, is virtually the same as the onemonadic essence -- sends down a ray from itself into every organic entity, much as the sun sends a rayfrom itself into the surrounding "darkness" of the solar universe.Svabhava has two general philosophical meanings: first, self-begetting, self-generation, self-becoming,the general idea being that there is no merely mechanical or soulless activity of nature in bringing us intobeing, for we brought ourselves forth, in and through and by nature, of which we are a part of theconscious forces, and therefore are our own children. The second meaning is that each and every entitythat exists is the result of what he actually is spiritually in his own higher nature: he brings forth thatwhich he is in himself interiorly, nothing else. A particular race, for instance, remains and is that race aslong as the particular race-svabhava remains in the racial seed and manifests thus. Likewise is the casethe same with a man, a tree, a star, a god -- what not!What makes a rose bring forth a rose always and not thistles or daisies or pansies? The answer is verysimple; very profound, however. It is because of its svabhava, the essential nature in and of the seed. Itssvabhava can bring forth only that which itself is, its essential characteristic, its own inner nature.Svabhava, in short, may be called the essential individuality of any monad, expressing its owncharacteristics, qualities, and type, by self-urged evolution.The seed can produce nothing but what it itself is, what is in it; and this is the heart and essence of thedoctrine of svabhava. The philosophical, scientific, and religious reach of this doctrine is simplyimmense; and it is of the first importance. Consequently, each individual svabhava brings forth andexpresses as its own particular vehicles its various svarupas, signifying characteristic bodies or images orforms. The svabhava of a dog, for instance, brings forth the dog body. The svabhava of a rose bringsforth the rose flower; the svabhava of a man brings forth man's shape or image; and the svabhava of adivinity or god brings forth its own svarupa or characteristic vehicle.
Svara (Sanskrit) Svara [from the verbal root svṛ to utter sound] Sound, tone, voice, noise; tone in recitation, a note of the musical scale (seven tones being enumerated: nishada, rishabha, gandhara, shadja, madhyama, dhaivata, panchama). “I am informed by persons competent to judge of the matter, that the Vedas have a distinct dual meaning — one expressed by the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the swara (intonation), which are, as it were, the life of the Vedas. . . . Learned Pundits and philologists of course deny that swara has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric doctrines; but the mysterious connection between swara and light is one of its most profound secrets” (Subba Row, Five Years of Theosophy 154).
svarga. (P. sagga; T. mtho ris; C. tianshang; J. tenjo; K. ch'onsang 天上). In Sanskrit, "heaven," the realm of the divinities within the cycle of rebirth (SAMSĀRA). The terms encompasses the six heavens of the sensuous realm (KĀMADHĀTU) as well as the heavens of the subtle-materiality realm (RuPADHĀTU) and the immaterial realm (ĀRuPYADHĀTU). Although sublime states, none of these are permanent abodes; the beings reborn there eventually die and are reborn elsewhere when the causes that led to their celestial births are exhausted. However, the Buddha repeatedly teaches the virtues that result in rebirth in heaven, and such rebirth has been one of the primary goals of Buddhist practice, especially among the laity, throughout the history of Buddhism. Rebirth as a divinity (DEVA) is presumed to be the reward of wholesome acts (KUsALA-KARMAN) performed in previous lives and is thus considered a salutary, if provisional, religious goal. For example, in his typical "graduated discourse" (P. ANUPUBBIKATHĀ) the Buddha uses the prospect of heavenly rebirth, and its attendant pleasures, as one means of attracting laypersons to the religious life. Despite the many appealing attributes of these heavenly beings, such as their physical beauty, comfortable lives, and long life spans, even heavenly existence is ultimately unsatisfactory because it does not offer permanent release from the continued cycle of birth and death (SAMSĀRA). Since devas are merely enjoying the rewards of their previous good deeds rather than performing new wholesome actions, they are considered to be spiritually stagnant, such that when the karmic effect of the deed that led to rebirth in heaven is exhausted, they are inevitably reborn in a lower realm of existence (GATI), perhaps even in one of the baleful destinies (DURGATI). For these reasons, Buddhist soteriological literature sometimes condemns religious practice performed solely for the goal of achieving rebirth in the heavens. It is only in certain higher level of the heavens, such as the those belonging to the five pure abodes (sUDDHĀVĀSA), that beings are not subject to further rebirth, because they have already eliminated all the fetters (SAMYOJANA) associated with that realm and are destined to achieve ARHATship. ¶ In traditional Indian cosmology, the heavens of the sensuous realm are thought to rest on and extend far above the peak of Mt. SUMERU, the axis mundi of the universe. They are ranked according to their elevation, so the higher the heaven, the greater the enjoyments of their inhabitants. The lowest of these heavens is the heaven of the four heavenly kings (CĀTURMAHĀRĀJAKĀYIKA), who are protectors of the dharma (DHARMAPĀLA). The highest is the heaven of the divinities who have power over the creations of others, or the divinities who partake of the pleasures created in other heavens (PARANIRMITAVAsAVARTIN), which is said to be the heaven where MĀRA resides. TUsITA, the heaven into which sĀKYAMUNI was born as the divinity sVETAKETU in his penultimate life, is the fourth of the kāmadhātu heavens, in ascending order. ¶ The heavens of the subtle-materiality realm are grouped into four categories that correspond to the four stratified levels of DHYĀNA-states of profound meditative concentration. Thus, rebirth into any one of these heavens is dependent on the attainment of the dhyāna to which it corresponds in the immediately preceding lifetime. Each of the four dhyāna has various heavens. The lowest of these heavens is the heaven of brahmā's retainers (BRAHMAKĀYIKA), which corresponds to the first subtle-materiality absorption (RuPĀVACARADHYĀNA), and the highest is the highest heaven (AKANIstHA), which is also classified as one of the "pure abodes," or sUDDHĀVĀSA. ¶ The heavens of the immaterial realm similarly correspond to the four immaterial dhyānas (ĀRuPYĀVACARADHYĀNA), beginning with the sphere of infinite space (ĀKĀsĀNANTYĀYATANA) and so on up to the sphere of neither perception nor nonperception (NAIVASAMJNĀNĀSAMJNĀYATANA). As noted, despite their many enjoyments, none of these realms is eternal and all are thus understood to fall within the realm of saMsāra. For a full account of all the heavens, see DEVA.
svasaMvedana. (T. rang rig; C. zizheng/zijue; J. jisho/jikaku; K. chajŭng/chagak 自證/自覺). In Sanskrit, lit. "self-knowledge" or "self-awareness," also seen written as svasaMveda, svasaMvit, svasaMvitti. In Buddhist epistemology, svasaMvedana is that part of consciousness which, during a conscious act of seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on, apprehends not the external sensory object but the knowing consciousness itself. For example, when a visual consciousness (CAKsURVIJNĀNA) apprehends a blue color, there is a simultaneous svasaMvedana that apprehends the caksurvijNāna; it is directed at the consciousness, and explains not only how a person knows that he knows, but also how a person can later remember what he saw or heard, and so on. There is disagreement as to whether such a form of consciousness exists, with proponents (usually YOGĀCĀRA) arguing that there must be this consciousness of consciousness in order for there to be memory of past cognitions, and opponents (MADHYAMAKA) propounding a radical form of nonessentialism that explains memory as a mere manipulation of objects with no more than a language-based reality. Beside the basic use of the term svasaMvedana to explain the nature of consciousness and the mechanism of memory, the issue of the necessary existence of svasaMvedana was pressed by the Yogācāra school because of how they understood enlightenment (BODHI). They argued that the liberating vision taught by the Buddha consisted of a self-reflexive act that was utterly free of subject-object distortion (GRĀHYAGRĀHAKAVIKALPA). In ordinary persons, they argued, all conscious acts take place within a bifurcation of subject and object, with a sense of distance between the two, because of the residual impressions or latencies (VĀSANĀ) left by ignorance. Infinite numbers of earlier conscious acts have been informed by that particular deeply ingrained ignorance. These impressions are carried at the foundational level of consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA). When they are finally removed by the process of BHĀVANĀ, knowledge (JNĀNA) purified of distortion emerges in a fundamental transformation (ĀsRAYAPARĀVṚTTI), thus knowing itself in a nondual vision. Such a vision presupposes self-knowledge. In tantric literature, svasaMvedana has a less technical sense of a profound and innate knowledge or awareness. See also RIG PA.
T’ai hsuan: Chinese for the Supremely Profound Principle, “extending to and covering the myriad things without assuming any physical form, which created the universe by drawing its support from the Void, embraces the divinities, and determines the course of events.” (Yang Hsiung, first century B.C.).
T'ai Hsuan: The Supremely Profound Principle, "extending to and covering the myriad things without assuming any physical form, which created the universe by drawing its support from the Void, embraces the divinities, and determines the course of events." (Yang Hsiung, d. 18 B.C.). -- W.T.C.
Tantra(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word literally meaning a "loom" or the warp or threads in a loom, and, by extension ofmeaning, signifying a rule or ritual for ceremonial rites. The Hindu Tantras are numerous works orreligious treatises teaching mystical and magical formulae or formularies for the attainment of magical orquasi-magical powers, and for the worship of the gods. They are mostly composed in the form of dialogsbetween Siva and his divine consort Durga, these two divinities being the peculiar objects of theadoration of the Tantrins.In many parts of India the authority of the Tantras seems almost to have superseded the clean andpoetical hymns of the Vedas.Most tantric works are supposed to contain five different subjects: (1) the manifestation or evolution ofthe universe; (2) its destruction; (3) the worship or adoration of the divinities; (4) the achievement orattainment of desired objects and especially of six superhuman faculties; (5) modes or methods of union,usually enumerated as four, with the supreme divinity of the kosmos by means of contemplativemeditation.Unfortunately, while there is much of interest in the tantric works, their tendency for long ages has beendistinctly towards what in occultism is known as sorcery or black magic. Some of the rites or ceremoniespracticed have to do with revolting details connected with sex.Durga, the consort of Siva, his sakti or energy, is worshiped by the Tantrins as a distinct personifiedfemale power.The origin of the Tantras unquestionably goes back to a very remote antiquity, and there seems to belittle doubt that these works, or their originals, were heirlooms handed down from originally debased ordegenerate Atlantean racial offshoots. There is, of course, a certain amount of profoundly philosophicaland mystical thought running through the more important tantric works, but the tantric worship in manycases is highly licentious and immoral.
Taparloka (Sanskrit) Tapar-loka [from tapas devotion + loka world, place] Also tapoloka. Devotion world, contemplation world, because of the intellectual entities popularly considered to be sunken profoundly in contemplative devotion; the second, counting downward, of the seven lokas, the corresponding tala being vitala. Taparloka is often called in Hindu literature the mansion of the blest because considered the abode of vairaja-deities, agnishvattas, Sons of Brahma, the highest classes of manasaputras and kumaras who are often spoken of as spiritual nirmanakayas because connected with the hosts of beings who descended and informed man when the manvantaric period to do so arrived. These kumaric nirmanakayas are connected with but not identical with those highly evolved human beings also called nirmanakayas.
Ta shun: Chinese for complete harmony, as a result of the Profound Virtue or mysterious power.
Ta shun: Complete harmony, as a result of the Profound Virtue or Mysterious Power. See hsuan te. -- W.T.C.
The cataleptic phenomena are sometimes induced in a profound hypnotic state, where the operator’s will manifests through the intermediate nature of his subject. This explains the public hypnotic exhibitions of an unconscious person, rigidly stretched out, with only head and feet supported, while the body sustains excessive weight placed upon it. It is also possible, at times, for a person who is naturally psychic, or who has dabbled in attempts to cultivate psychic phenomena, to become dissociated from his normal physical status and, in a trance-like condition, to manifest the cataleptic state of beclouded consciousness and the wax-like rigidity of body. In such cases there is always danger that the lower quaternary including the unconscious body may be invaded by some astral entity which thus becomes an insidious and injurious link with kama-loka and its denizens.
The idea of the three essential modes of Nature is a creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious, because it was the result of long psychological experiment and profound internal experience. Th
refore without a long inner experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive perception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately or firmly utilise. Still certain broad indications may help the seeker on the Way of Works to understand, analyse and control by his assent or
refusal the combinations of his own nature. These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities, gunas, and are given the names sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattwa is the force of equilibrium and translates in quality as good and harmony and happiness and light; rajas is the force of kinesis and translates in quality as struggle and effort, passion and action; tamas is the force of inconscience and inertia and translates in quality as obscurity and incapacity and inaction. Ordinarily used for psychological self-analysis, these distinctions are valid also in physical Nature. Each thing and every existence in the lower Prakriti contains them and its process and dynamic form are the result of the interaction of these qualitative powers.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 232-233
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 Mysteries were divided into the Greater and Less, inner and outer, esoteric and partly exoteric; and, as the former were guarded by well-observed secrecy the sources of ordinary information are mostly based on the latter. The more recondite Mysteries could not, from their very nature, be publicly divulged; they were revelations, appreciable only by an awakened spiritual perception and incommunicable to anyone not thus awakened. The Greater Mysteries were successive initiations for prepared candidates. The Less consisted of symbolic and dramatic representations for the public, in which, among other things, the profound symbology of the Greek mythology was employed.
the opposites of its own truths of being ::: an abyss of non-existence,24 a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence [saccidananda] can manifest themselves"; (same as asat brahma)"something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe", not a mere negation but "a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions".
“ . . . the Puranic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other spheres, events perceived by the ‘Siva eye’ of the ancient Seers, (the ‘third eye’ of our Stanzas and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for Sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy” (SD 2:253, 284).
The Qabbalah here uses “He” to describe one of the mostl profound and mystical — because purely impersonal — conceptions in cosmogony; because the first Sephirah is Kether the Crown and hence the first of the cosmic rays emanating from the abysmal cosmic deep. From this Crown, called Ancient of the Ancient, flowed forth in emanational procession all the other developments of the cosmic Tree of Life or cosmic hierarchy.
There are profound, highly mystical differences which distinguish the Maharajas from the lipikas. The Maharajas, who are both the protectors of mankind on earth and the agents of karma, are those highly evolved spiritual powers or individualized cosmic beings who belong to the light-side of universal nature, to the hierarchies of compassion representing beings of unfolded evolutionary development who by the very nature of their essence become almost the automatic guardians of light and cosmic order which the semi-intelligent and so-called unintelligent forces and energies of nature automatically obey.
There are many types of karma, such as human, racial, national, family, individual, etc. A chain of causation, stretched out in time, will be intersected by any given present moment; so that in speaking of a person, we may say he sums up in himself both his past and his future, he is his own karma. Since the whole universe and all the beings which compose it are linked and blended together, it follows that no person can have exclusive interests and that the karma of all beings is linked and, in a profound sense, identical. Karma in its moral aspect is cosmic justice. It should not interfere in any way with helping others, nor does it render futile the exercise of compassion, for we incur as much responsibility by refraining from action as by acting. “Sow kindly acts and thou shalt reap their fruition. Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin” (VS 31).
"There is always the personal and the impersonal side of the Divine and the Truth and it is a mistake to think the impersonal alone to be true or important, for that leads to a void incompleteness in part of the being, while only one side is given satisfaction. Impersonality belongs to the intellectual mind and the static self, personality to the soul and heart and dynamic being. Those who disregard the personal Divine ignore something which is profound and essential.” Letters on Yoga ::: Impersonal"s.
“There is always the personal and the impersonal side of the Divine and the Truth and it is a mistake to think the impersonal alone to be true or important, for that leads to a void incompleteness in part of the being, while only one side is given satisfaction. Impersonality belongs to the intellectual mind and the static self, personality to the soul and heart and dynamic being. Those who disregard the personal Divine ignore something which is profound and essential.” Letters on Yoga
There is a mystic science attached to the caduceus, the classical emblem of medicine. To the priest-physicians in the temples, this symbol was sacred not only to the god of wisdom and healing, but stood for profound cosmic truths, knowledge of which was held in common by all initiates. It symbolized the tree of life and being. Cosmically this symbol stood for the concealed root or origin of universal duality which manifests as positive and negative, good and evil, subjective and objective, light and darkness, male and female, health and sickness, life and death.
The Sanskrit word for medicine in general is aushadha (consisting of herbs), and the ancient Hindu materia medica was the source from which subsequent systems of practice in many other countries drew their remedies, when a broad conception of the sacred art of healing marked their highest periods of national attainment. Originally the medical practitioners were as familiar with the mystical and occult properties of plants and minerals as magicians themselves were. Both understood the analogy and interrelations between the principles of the composite human being and all the various elements throughout the realm of nature. That some plants are attracted by the sun and others by the moon, etc., was explained by a profound knowledge of astronomy and of the occult influences of solar, lunar, and planetary time periods and sidereal forces. This gave the key for the best time, place, and conditions for gathering the herbs, and for the special pharmacy required for bringing out the vital remedial action which, by working with nature, left no unfavorable aftereffects. There is no record of medical laboratory work producing artificial synthetic products which, even when duplicating nature’s substances chemically, are not different vitally. Nor was organotherapy resorted to when and where the healing art held a worthy place in high civilizations.
These four distinct states of consciousness into which the human egoic self can enter, are the manifestations during imbodiment of what takes place on a more profound and radical scale at death. Sleep is a small death, and death may be called a larger sleep: in both, the ego, liberated successively form various bonds, travels inwards and upwards through different grades of consciousness and reaches the experiences proper to those planes.
The tendency of these works for long ages has been towards black magic. “The origin of the Tantras unquestionably goes back to a very remote antiquity, and there seems to be little doubt that these works, or their originals, were heirlooms handed down from originally debased or degenerate Atlantean racial offshoots. There is, of course, a certain amount of profoundly philosophical and mystical thought running through the more important tantrika works, but the tantrika worship in many cases is highly licentious and immoral” (OG 17;1).
The trailokya are all, in each case, nonphysical spheres, and pertain to the postmortem states of entities. These three worlds are wholly exoteric groupings — not meaning false, but not sufficiently explained in the exoteric literature to develop the real significances. In theosophy there are seven or ten groupings of the postmortem realms or states. These states cannot be grouped under the Brahmanical three worlds, but under the three Buddhist dhatus or lokas. Rupa-dhatu and arupa-dhatu may be called dhyanas (contemplation), thus designating the deeply contemplative character of the excarnate egos sunken in the profound deeps of consciousness. See also TRIBHUVANA
The vesica piscis is an instance of a large class of highly involved and entangled mystical emblems, where the phallic aspect seems to dog the footsteps of attempts to depict highly spiritual, deeply profound facts. The human mind, so desirous of making graphic emblems of purely abstract realities, sooner or later loses sight of the abstract truth, so that only the picture itself remains. See also ICHTHYS
This profound system of philosophy traces all things back to an original cosmic fountain or identical source, as seeds from the world tree, out of which has grown the theosophical concept of universal brotherhood.
This contrast is an exoteric rather than an esoteric one. It is a recognition of the fact that the religion of Gautama Buddha has separated into two general paths of action; but both the Hinayana and the Mahayana are recognized because known to possess each one its own particular value in training. The combination of the two is what one might call the esoteric path. The Hinayana is that portion of the esoteric path in which the mystic traveler takes the lower passional and elemental sides of himself into strict discipline and self-control, the while following certain simple rules of day-to-day procedure; whereas the Mahayana aspect includes rather the training of the spiritual, intellectual, and higher psychic parts of the human constitution, such as is brought about by a profound study of philosophy, of the truths of nature, the mystical side of religion, and the higher parts of kosmic philosophy — all these collected together around the heart of the Mahayana which is mystical study and aspiration.
Though the distinction of sex is biologically regarded as a profound and nearly universal attribute of organized beings, yet knowledge of composite human nature shows that it does not reach into the roots of the human constitution. Its causes go no deeper than the lower part of the human ego or soul, the psychophysiological nature. It is an evolutionary condition or cycle of the reincarnating ego’s development in this present stage of materiality. Therefore, it is a transitory event in its bipolar earthly experience. As sex has been nature’s plan for the race for some 18 million years, it will continue to be the natural plan for some ages to come. Some ages hence, sex differentiation will have given way to the activities of impersonal, spiritual creative energies.
Throughout Roman history Etruria and the Etruscans were looked upon by virtually all classes of peoples under the sway of Rome as being the seat and the exponents of magic, profound mystical thought, and esoteric philosophy; and as the Romans knew much more about those so close to their own time than modern scholarship does, this manner of viewing the ancient Etruscans cannot be set aside lightly.
Tiantong Rujing. (J. Tendo Nyojo; K. Ch'ondong Yojong 天童如浄) (1162-1227). Chinese CHAN master in the CAODONG ZONG, also known as Jingchang (Pure Chang) and Changweng (Old Man Chang); he received his toponym Tiantong after the mountain where he once dwelled. Rujing was a native of Shaoxing in Yuezhou (present-day Zhejiang province) and was ordained at a local monastery named Tianyisi. Rujing later went to the monastery of Zishengsi on Mt. Xuedou to study under Zu'an Zhijian (1105-1192) and eventually became his dharma heir. Rujing spent the next few decades moving from one monastery to the next. In 1220, he found himself at Qingliangsi in Jiankang (Jiangsu province) and then at Rui'ansi in Taizhou and Jingcisi in Linan. In 1224, Rujing was appointed by imperial decree to the abbotship of the famous monastery of Jingdesi on Mt. Tiantong, where the Chan master HONGZHI ZHENGJUE had once resided. Rujing's teachings can be found in his recorded sayings (YULU), which were preserved in Japan. Although Rujing was a relatively minor figure in the history of Chinese Chan, he was profoundly influential in Japanese ZEN, due to the fact that the Japanese SoToSHu founder DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253) considered himself to be Rujing's successor. Dogen attributes many of the distinctive features of his own approach to practice, such as "just sitting" (SHIKAN TAZA) and "body and mind sloughed off" (SHINJIN DATSURAKU) to this man whom he regarded as the preeminent Chan master of his era. Little of this distinctively Soto terminology and approach actually appears in the records of Rujing's own lectures, however. Instead, he appears in his discourse record as a fairly typical Song-dynasty Chan master, whose only practical meditative instruction involves the contemplation of ZHAOZHOU's "no" (see WU GONG'AN). This difference may reflect the differing editorial priorities of Rujing's Chinese disciples. It might also derive from the fact that Dogen misunderstood Rujing or received simplified private instructions from him because of Dogen's difficulty in following Rujing's formal oral presentations in vernacular Chinese.
Torpor in psychopathology is usually taken to mean profound inactivity not caused by reduction in consciousness.
Trance ::: A state of consciousness characterized by lethargy and suggestibility but also which allows for profound relaxation and deeper access into the mind. Generally there are trance inducement techniques and these can be used for activities like pathworking and shamanic journeying.
Twelve Perhaps the most esoteric of all numerals; so profound was the reverence with which the ancients regarded it that the records concerning it are almost innumerable, found in virtually all branches of human thought and activity. Thus we find it in the twelve hours of the day and of the night; the twelve months of the year; the twelve great gods of ancient pantheons; the twelve apostles in the New Testament and the twelve tribes in the Old Testament; the twelve nidanas in Buddhism; and pointing directly to cosmogonical matters, the twelve signs of the zodiac.
Universal Brotherhood ::: Universal brotherhood as understood in the esoteric philosophy, and which is a sublime natural fact ofuniversal nature, does not signify merely sentimental unity, or a simple political or social cooperation. Itsmeaning is incomparably wider and profounder than this. The sense inherent in the words in their widesttenor or purport is the spiritual brotherhood of all beings; particularly, the doctrine implies that allhuman beings are inseparably linked together, not merely by the bonds of emotional thought or feeling,but by the very fabric of the universe itself, all men -- as well as all beings, both high and low andintermediate -- springing forth from the inner and spiritual sun of the universe as its hosts of spiritualrays. We all come from this one source, that spiritual sun, and are all builded of the same life-atoms onall the various planes.It is this interior unity of being and of consciousness, as well as the exterior union of us all, whichenables us to grasp intellectually and spiritually the mysteries of the universe; because not merelyourselves and our own fellow human beings, but also all other beings and things that are, are children ofthe same kosmic parent, great Mother Nature, in all her seven (and ten) planes or worlds of being. We areall rooted in the same kosmic essence, whence we all proceeded in the beginning of the primordialperiods of world evolution, and towards which we are all journeying back. This interlocking andinterblending of the numberless hierarchies of beings forming the universe itself extends everywhere, inthe invisible worlds as well as in the worlds which are visible.Finally, it is upon this fact of the spiritual unity of all beings and things that reposes the basis andfoundation of human ethics when these last are properly understood. In the esoteric philosophy ethics areno mere human convention or rules of action convenient and suitable for the amelioration of theasperities of human intercourse, but are fundamental in the very structure and inextricably coordinatedoperations of the universe itself.
Upanishad(Sanskrit) ::: A compound, composed of upa "according to," "together with," ni "down," and the verbal rootsad, "to sit," which becomes shad by Sanskrit grammar when preceded by the particle ni: the entirecompound thus signifying "following upon or according to the teachings which were received when wewere sitting down." The figure here is that of pupils sitting in the Oriental style at the feet of the teacher,who taught them the secret wisdom or rahasya, in private and in forms and manners of expression thatlater were written and promulgated according to those teachings and after that style.The Upanishads are examples of literary works in which the rahasya -- a Sanskrit word meaning"esoteric doctrine" or "mystery" -- is imbodied. The Upanishads belong to the Vedic cycle and areregarded by orthodox Brahmans as a portion of the sruti or "revelation." It was from these wonderfulquasi-esoteric and very mystical works that was later developed the highly philosophical and profoundsystem called the Vedanta. The Upanishads are usually reckoned today as one hundred and fifty innumber, though probably only a score are now complete without evident marks of literary change oradulteration in the way of excision or interpolation.The topics treated of in the Upanishads are highly transcendental, recondite, and abstruse, and in orderproperly to understand the Upanishadic teaching one should have constantly in mind the master-keys thattheosophy puts into the hand of the student. The origin of the universe, the nature of the divinities, therelations between soul and ego, the connections of spiritual and material beings, the liberation of theevolving entity from the chains of maya, and kosmological questions, are all dealt with, mostly in asuccinct and cryptic form. The Upanishads, finally, may be called the exoteric theosophical works ofHindustan, but contain a vast amount of genuine esoteric information.
Upanishad (Sanskrit) Upaniṣad [from upa according to + ni down + the verbal root sad to sit] Following or according to the teachings which were received when sitting down; esoteric doctrine. “Literary works in which the rahasya — a Sanskrit word meaning esoteric doctrine or mystery — is imbodied. The Upanishads belong to the Vedic cycle and are regarded by orthodox Brahmans as a portion of the Sruti or ‘Revelation.’ It was from these wonderful quasi-esoteric and very mystical works that was later developed the highly philosophical and profound system called the Vedanta” (OG 179).
upāyakausalya. (P. upāyakosalla; T. thabs mkhas; C. fangbian shanqiao; J. hobenzengyo; K. pangpy'on son'gyo 方便善巧). In Sanskrit, "skillful means," "skill-in-means," or "expedient means," a term used to refer to the extraordinary pedagogical skills of the buddhas and advanced BODHISATTVAs; indeed, upāyakausalya is listed as one of the ten perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) mastered on the bodhisattva path. (The rare Pāli form refers specifically to the Buddha's teaching proficiency.) The notion of skillful means is adumbrated in the famous "simile of the raft" from the ALAGADDuPAMASUTTA, where the Buddha compares his teachings to a makeshift raft that will help one get across a raging river to the opposite shore: after one has made it across that river of birth and death to the "other shore" of NIRVĀnA, the teachings have served their purpose and may be abandoned; in one sense, therefore, all his teachings are merely an expedient. The notion of skill-in-means also suggests that the Buddha intentionally fashions different versions of his teachings to fit the predelictions and aptitudes of his audience. Because of a buddha's direct understanding of his disciples' abilities, he is able to teach what is most appropriate for each of them, like a doctor prescribing a treatment for a specific malady. Skillful means may also be used to justify why certain acts perceived as immoral by beings of lesser capacity become virtues when performed by a bodhisattva, who has their best interests at heart (see UPĀYAKAUsALYASuTRA). ¶ The Buddha's skill-in-means is often used to reconcile apparent contradictions in his teaching, since those teachings ultimately are provisional expressions of his realization. The notion of skillful means has also been put to polemical use, especially in the MAHĀYĀNA (and most famously in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA), when previous teachings of the Buddha, such as the three vehicles (TRIYĀNA), are declared by him to have been merely expedients that he employed to instruct disciples who were unable to comprehend the more profound teaching of the one vehicle (EKAYĀNA) of buddhahood. The concept of skillful means may thus also be deployed as a hermeneutical or polemical device to critique earlier, and implicitly inferior, formulations of Buddhist doctrine as expedient teachings given to those who are temporarily incapable of understanding and benefitting from the Buddha's more advanced teachings (as variously identified by different Buddhist schools).
Uttara-Mimansa (Sanskrit) Uttara-mīmāṃsā [from mīmāṃsā profound thought, profound consideration, striving after truth by means of philosophic reflection from the verbal root man to think + uttara latter, later, inquiry into the latter portion of the Veda — the Upanishads] The last of the six Darsanas or schools of Hindu philosophy, and called the Vedanta. See also VEDANTA
Vitalis Vitalia (Latin) Life of life; Gerald Massey gives it as a translation of the Greek inscription zotiko zotike (“the (feminine) living being in the (masculine) living being”) — the feminine or passive aspect of life inherent in the masculine, active, or manifested form of life (SD 2:586). The correct Latin translation is vitali vitalis (the alive within the living). This highly mystical and profound phrase has both a cosmic and human significance: thus we have mahabuddhi in the universal and buddhi in the human constitution, as being the feminine aspect of the precedaneous atman, and likewise as containing the inherent life of the offspring of such feminine aspect which is the cosmic mahat or the human manas. In iconographical mysticism this can be represented by the cross, whether in the ordinary Latin form, or the more mystical svastika. Here also is an indication of the mystical significance of a Christos crucified.
When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we arc so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in uniwrsal Nature. The self-abnega- tion of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment ; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 59-60
While the Romans were fighting the Celts, writers, beginning with Caesar, repeat more or less what has been said before about the wisdom of the Druids but, following Caesar, have much to say about their atrocities. When the Romans were no longer at war with the Druidic Celts, however, the references to the Druids are similar to the early ones, with no mention of atrocities. Blavatsky stated that Druidism was the one branch of the sacred Mysteries of antiquity in the Western world which had not degenerated; and that during the campaigns of Caesar and his forces in Gaul, three million Gauls were killed and Druidism virtually wiped out there. It is Caesar who is responsible for the current notion that the Gauls and Britons were crude savages and the Druids barbarous and cruel. He stated first that the Druids of Gaul, who were judges as well as priests, inflicted excommunication as their severest sentence, passed even on the worst criminals. Excommunication was their capital punishment. Later on in his book he describes the famous wicker cages filled with criminals (with just men added when there were not criminals enough) who were then burnt. The two statements are contradictory. The later statement is entirely unsupported; the former is not only compatible with the Druids’ reputation for profound wisdom and great humanity, but is supported indirectly by practically every classical reference which mentions the Druids at all.
wiki "web" Any collaborative {website} that users can easily modify via the web, often without restriction. A wiki allows anyone, using a {web browser}, to create, edit or delete content that has been placed on the site, including the work of other authors. Text is entered using some simple {mark-up language} which is then rendered as {HTML}. A feature common to many of the different implementations is that any word in mixed case LikeThis (a "wikiword") is rendered as a link to a page of that name, which may or may not exist. Wikis work surprisingly well. The most famous example, {Wikipedia} (referred to as "wiki" by some), is one of the most visited sites on the web. Contributors tend to be more numerous and more persistent than vandals, and old versions of pages are always available. Like many simple concepts, open editing has profound effects on usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page encourages democratic use of the web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users. In contrast, a {web log}, typically authored by an individual, does not allow visitors to change the original posted material, only add comments. Wiki wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian. The first wiki was created by {Ward Cunningham} in 1995. {wiki.org (http://wiki.org/)}. (2014-10-12)
WOMBAT Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Problems which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as "wrestling with a wombat". See also {crawling horror}, {SMOP}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-03-10)
Wondon songbul non. (圓頓成佛論). In Korean, "The Perfect and Sudden Attainment of Buddhahood"; posthumous publication on the convergence of HWAoM (C. HUAYAN) and SoN (C. CHAN) thought and practice by the mid-Koryo reformer POJO CHINUL (1158-1210). The Wondon songbul non is said to have been found in a wooden box belonging to Chinul after his death and published posthumously by his disciple CHIN'GAK HYESIM. The text provides Chinul's most sustained presentation of his views on Hwaom thought and practice, which were profoundly influenced by LI TONGXUAN's (635-730) idiosyncratic commentary on the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the HUAYAN JING HELUN. Chinul seeks to demonstrate that the sudden understanding-awakening (K. haeo; C. JIEWU; viz., knowing that one is a buddha) is attained at the first level of the ten stages of faith (sipsin), which were usually thought to be a preliminary stage of training, rather than at the first arousing of the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPĀDA), which occurred at the first of the ten stages of abiding (sipchu). Chinul supports this argument by drawing on the Hwaom concept of "nature origination" (XINGQI), which he finds superior to the alternative Hwaom theory of the conditioned origination of the dharmadhātu (FAJIE YUANQI). This Hwaom understanding at the very inception of practice that one is endowed with the fundamental nature of buddhahood is compared to the CHAN and SoN notion of "seeing one's nature and attaining buddhahood" (JIANXING CHENGFO). But because Chan/Son does not sanction the prolix conceptual descriptions of this experience that are found in the Hwaom school, it is the true "perfect and sudden" school. See also YUANDUN JIAO.
World Serpent or Snake Ideas connected with the world snake are not those associated with the legend of a hero slaying a serpent but with a more profound concept. In the Hindu system, there is Ananta-Sesha, the serpent of infinity; in the ancient Scandinavian cosmogony, the world serpent Nidhogg, is represented as encircling the globe with its tail in its mouth. The same representation is found in the Egyptian teachings:
wretch ::: v. t. --> A miserable person; one profoundly unhappy.
One sunk in vice or degradation; a base, despicable person; a vile knave; as, a profligate wretch.
wuchong xuanyi. (J. gojugengi; K. ojung hyonŭi 五重玄義). In Chinese, "five layers of profound meaning" according to the TIANTAI school. See FAHUA WUCHONG XUANYI.
wuzhong xuanyi. (J. goshu no gengi; K. ojong hyonŭi 五種玄義). In Chinese, "five categories of profound meaning"; a list of five general hermeneutical issues that should be addressed prior to undertaking an in-depth exegesis of any SuTRA, attributed to TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597) and emblematic of scriptural exegesis in the TIANTAI SCHOOL. These five are (1) explicating the meaning of the text's title (shiming), (2) analyzing the fundamental intent of the sutra (bianben), (3) clarifying its principal themes or doctrines (mingzong), (4) expounding the sutra's "function" or impact on its audience (lunyong), and (5) classifying the sutra (PANJIAO), viz., delineating its place within the entire corpus of sutras expounded by the Buddha. These five issues typically would be addressed by the commentator prior to beginning the exegesis of the sutra proper. See also SANFEN KEJING; JIAOXIANG PANSHI.
Xuanxue. (J. Gengaku; K. Hyonhak 玄學). In Chinese, "Dark Learning," or "Profound Learning"; a Chinese philosophical movement of the third through sixth centuries CE, which provided a fertile intellectual ground for the emergence of early Chinese forms of Buddhism. It is sometimes known as "Neo-Daoism," although the target audience of Xuanxue literati was fellow elite rather than adherents of the new schools of religious Daoism that were then developing in China. The social and political upheaval that accompanied the fall of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) prompted many Chinese intellectuals to question the traditional foundations of Chinese thought and society and opened them to alternative worldviews. Buddhism, which was just then beginning to filter into Chinese territories, found a receptive audience among these groups of thinkers. Xuanxue scholars critiqued and reinterpreted the normative Chinese teachings of Confucianism by drawing on the so-called "three dark [treatises]" (sanxuan), i.e., the Yijing ("Book of Changes"), Daode jing ("The Way and Its Power"), and the Zhuangzi. Xuanxue designates a broad intellectual trend that sought a new way of understanding the "way" (DAO). Xuanxue philosophers explored the ontological grounding of the changing and diverse world of "being" (C. you) on a permanent and indivisible substratum called "nothingness" or "non-being" (C. WU). Xuanxue thinkers such as Wang Bi (226-249), who is regarded as the founder of the movement, and Guo Xiang (d. 312), who is often considered to represent its apex, explored how this ontological stratum of nothingness still was able to produce the world of being in all its diversity. This process was clarified by adopting the mainstream Chinese philosophical bifurcations between (1) the ineffable "substance" or "essence" (TI) of things and the ways in which that substance "functions" (YONG) in the phenomenal world; and (2) the "patterns" or "principles" (LI) that underlie all things and their phenomenal manifestations (SHI). These distinctions between ti/yong and li/shi proved to be extremely influential in subsequent Chinese Buddhist exegesis. Also according to Xuanxue interpretation, the sage (shengren) is one who understands this association between being and nothingness but realizes that their relationship is fundamentally inexpressible; nevertheless, in order to make it intelligible to others, he feels "compelled" to describe it verbally. This emphasis on the inadequacy of language resonated with Buddhist treatments of the ineffability of spiritual experience and the necessity to deploy verbal stratagems (UPĀYA) in order to make that experience intelligible to others. The sage was able to manifest his understanding in the phenomenal world not by conscious intent but as an automatic "response" (ying) to "stimuli" (gan); early Chinese Buddhist thinkers deploy the compound "stimulus and response" (GANYING) to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and of grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Xuanxue thinkers also began to explore parallels between their ideas of "nonbeing" (wu) and the notion of emptiness (suNYATĀ) in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ corpus, which was just then being translated into Chinese. Xuanxue exegesis has often been described in the scholarly literature as a "matching concepts" (GEYI) style of interpretation, where Buddhist concepts were elucidated by drawing on indigenous Chinese philosophical terminology, though this interpretation of geyi has recently been called into question. Although Xuanxue vanished as a philosophical movement by the early sixth century, its influence was profound on several pioneering Chinese Buddhist thinkers, including ZHI DUN (314-366) and SENGZHAO (374-414), and on such early philosophical schools of Chinese Buddhism as the SAN LUN ZONG and DI LUN ZONG, and eventually on the TIANTAI ZONG and HUAYAN ZONG of the mature Chinese tradition.
KEYS (10k)
13 Sri Aurobindo
2 Ramakrishna
2 Pico de la Mirandola
2 ken-wilber
2 Carlyle
2 The Mother
2 Sri Ramakrishna
2 Saint Augustine of Hippo
1 Tsu-tse
1 Thomas Moore
1 Thomas Keating
1 The Urantia Papers
1 that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 P D Ouspensky
1 Pali Canonymous
1 Our Lady to Fr. Stefano Gobbi
1 Nikola Tesla
1 Michel Henry
1 Marcus Aurelius
1 Manly P Hall
1 Magghima Nikaya
1 Lao-tse
1 King Solomon
1 J R R Tolkien
1 Jordan Peterson
1 Jiddu Krishnamurti
1 H P Lovecraft
1 H P Blavatsky
1 Howard Gardner
1 Heraclitus
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king
1 Eric S Raymond
1 Eknath Easwaran
1 Edmund Husserl
1 Eckhart Tolle
1 Carl Sagan
1 Boethius
1 Auguttara Nikaya
1 Angelius Silesius I. 299
1 Alan Watts.
1 Saint Thomas Aquinas
1 Jetsun Milarepa
1 Hafiz
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Adyashanti
1 ?
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
21 Friedrich Nietzsche
14 Victor Hugo
10 F Scott Fitzgerald
10 Anonymous
8 Lao Tzu
8 Dean Koontz
8 Albert Schweitzer
7 Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 Laozi
7 Charles Dickens
6 William J Clinton
6 Carl Sagan
5 Tony Judt
5 Paulo Coelho
5 Niels Bohr
5 Malcolm Gladwell
5 John Green
5 Jean Paul Sartre
5 Frederick Lenz
5 Bryant McGill
1:In the profound quiet, the immaculate comes into view; God disrobes. ~ Hafiz, #KEYS
2:Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
3:love, so that a new, profound and universal reconciliation may be thus achieved between God and humanity." ~ Our Lady to Fr. Stefano Gobbi, #KEYS
4:Until man in his heart is ready, a profound change of the world conditions cannot come. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Internationalism, #KEYS
5:Sincerity, a profound, grand, ingenuous sincerity is the first characteristic of all men who are in any way heroic. ~ Carlyle, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
6:Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. ~ ken-wilber, #KEYS
7:And through the opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity. ~ ken-wilber, #KEYS
8:Try, but thou shalt not find the frontiers of the soul even if thou scourest all its ways; so profound is the extension of its reasoning being. ~ Heraclitus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
9:Esoteric more generally means simply a continuing knowledge of reality which is rejected. That it is esoteric not because it cannot be known but because we refuse to recognize it. Therefore it remains a profound secret.
~ Manly P Hall,#KEYS
10:Whosoever can cry to the All-Powerful with sincerity and an intense passion of the soul has no need of a Master. But so profound an aspiration is very rare; hence the necessity of a Master. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
11:Lisp is worth learning for ... the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. ~ Eric S Raymond, #KEYS
12:Whosoever can cry to the All-Powerful with sincerity and an intense passion of the soul has no need of a Master. But so profound an aspiration is very rare; hence the necessity of a Master. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
13:To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844 - 1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history, Wikipedia., #KEYS
14:Whoever applies himself intelligently to profound meditation, soon finds joy in what is good; he becomes conscious that beauty and riches are transient things and wisdom the fairest ornament. ~ Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
15:Invents creation's paradox profound;
Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter's forms,
Unseen it throws out a dumb energy
And works a miracle by a machine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal,#KEYS
16:Everything proceeding from the profound nature of things shows the influence of the law of number... From this are derived the four elements, the succession of the seasons, the movement of the stars, and the course of the heavens. ~ Boethius, De arithmeticae artis libri duo, #KEYS
17:I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril. ~ J R R Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, #KEYS
18:Discovering himself everywhere and in all things, the disciple embraces the entire world in a sentiment of peace, of compassion, of love-large, profound and without limits, delivered from all wrath and all hatred. ~ Magghima Nikaya, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
19:His faculties are so ample, so vast, so profound that it is as if an immense source from which everything issues in its time. They are as vast and extended as the heavens; the hidden source from which they issue is deep as the abyss. ~ Tsu-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
20:The man who has plunged deep into a pure knowledge of the profound secrets of the spirit, is neither a terrestrial nor a celestial being. He is the most high spirit robed in the perishable body, the sublime and very Divinity. ~ Pico de la Mirandola, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
21:But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine #KEYS
22:Magic is but a science, a profound knowledge of the Occult forces in Nature, and of the laws governing the visible or the invisible world. Spiritualism in the hands of an adept becomes Magic, for he is learned in the art of blending together the laws of the Universe, without breaking any of them and thereby violating Nature. ~ H P Blavatsky, #KEYS
23:Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given: it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.
~ The Mother, 11 May 1963,#KEYS
24:Something beyond our power of discrimination existed before Heaven and Earth. How profound is its calm! How absolute its immateriality! It alone exists and does not change; It penetrates all and It does not perish. It may be regarded as the mother of the universe. For myself I know not Its name, but to give it a name I call It Tao. ~ Lao-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
25:UB 1:4.1. The infinity of the perfection of God is such that it eternally constitutes him mystery. And the greatest of all the unfathomable mysteries of God is the phenomenon of the divine indwelling of mortal minds. The manner in which the Universal Father sojourns with the creatures of time is the most profound of all universe mysteries; the divine presence in the mind of man is the mystery of mysteries. ~ The Urantia Papers, #KEYS
26:During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It's a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. The dark night is more than a learning experience; it's a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for. ~ Thomas Moore, #KEYS
27:The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 129,#KEYS
28:In the Confucian tradition is a simple formula that appeals to me deeply: 'If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.' I urge everyone to reflect deeply on these words, as simple as they are profound. ~ Eknath Easwaran, #KEYS
29:If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
30:What is the path that leads to the Eternal? When a disciple pours over the whole world the light of a heart overflowing with love, in all directions, on high, below, to the four quarters, with a thought of love, large, profound, boundless, void of wrath and hate, and when thereafter he pours over the whole world the light of a thought of profound serenity, then the disciple is on the path that leads to the Eternal. ~ Auguttara Nikaya, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
31:MAGIC is the Highest, most Absolute, and most Divine Knowledge of Natural Philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true Agents 2 being applied to proper Patients, 3 strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced. Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into Nature; they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effort, 4 the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.
~ King Solomon, Lesser Key Of The Goetia,#KEYS
32:There are some true and ardent aspirants who travel from place to place in search of this pass-word from a divine and perfect instructor which will open for them the doors of the eternal beatitude, and if in their earnest search one of them is so favoured as to meet such a master and receive from him the word so ardently desired which is capable of breaking all chains, he withdraws immediately from society to enter into the profound retreat of his own heart and dwells there till he has succeeded in conquering eternal peace. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
33:There are some true and ardent aspirants who travel from place to place in search of this pass-word from a divine and perfect instructor which will open for them the doors of the eternal beatitude, and if in their earnest search one of them is so favoured as to meet such a master and receive from him the word so ardently desired which is capable of breaking all chains, he withdraws immediately from society to enter into the profound retreat of his own heart and dwells there till he has succeeded in conquering eternal peace. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
34:But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being suffiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence, suffiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
35:The Kingdom is most powerful where we least expect to find it. God does not take away our problems and trials but rather joins us in them. Such is the profound meaning of the incarnation: God becoming a human being. The Kingdom will manifest itself, not because of our efforts to keep trying, even when all effort seems hopeless, but because God loves us so much that God won't be able to stand seeing us struggle and always failing. God will do the impossible. He will give us a new attitude toward suffering. Such is the heart of the Christian ascesis, or self-discipline, and the mystery of transformation. It is the meaning of the Gospel as Therese perceived it. ~ Thomas Keating, St. Therese of Lisieux: A Transformation in Christ, #KEYS
36:so you distill these stories great authors distill stories and we have soties that are very very very old they are usually religious stories they could be fairy tales because some people ahve traced fairy tales back 10 000 years ... a story that has been told for 10000 years is a funny kind of story its like people have remembered it and obviously modified it, like a game of telephone that has gone on for generations and all that is left is what people remember and maybe they remember whats important, because you tend to remember what's important and its not necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means ... and you dont genereally know what a book that you read means not if its profound it means more than you can understand because otherwise why read it? ~ Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning 2017 - 1, #KEYS
37:Thou must teach us the path to be followed and Thou must give us the power to follow it to the very end. . . .
O Thou source of all love and all light, Thou whom we cannot know in Thyself but can manifest ever more completely and perfectly, Thou whom we cannot conceive but can approach in profound silence, to complete Thy incommensurable boons Thou must come to our help until we have gained Thy victory. . . .
Let that true love be born which soothes all suffering; establish that immutable peace wherein resides true power; give us the sovereign knowledge which dispels all darkness. . . .
From the infinite depths to this most external body, in its smallest elements, Thou dost move and live and vibrate and set all in motion, and the whole being is now only a single block, infinitely multiple yet absolutely coherent, animated by one tremendous vibration: Thou.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
38:A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
39:Maheshwari can appear too calm and great and distant for the littleness of earthly nature to approach or contain her, Mahakali too swift and formidable for its weakness to bear; but all turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi.
For she throws the spell of the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make the existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow from her like the light from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall of the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss.
Magnetic is the touch of her hands and their occult and delicate influence refines the mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother,#KEYS
40:Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
41:Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
It was as though even in this Nought's profound,
Even in this ultimate dissolution's core,
There lurked an unremembering entity,
Survivor of a slain and buried past
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate world.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,#KEYS
42:For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of ensuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole. ~ Nikola Tesla, #KEYS
43:[invocation] Let us describe the magical method of identification. The symbolic form of the god is first studied with as much care as an artist would bestow upon his model, so that a perfectly clear and unshakeable mental picture of the god is presented to the mind. Similarly, the attributes of the god are enshrined in speech, and such speeches are committed perfectly to memory. The invocation will then begin with a prayer to the god, commemorating his physical attributes, always with profound understanding of their real meaning. In the second part of the invocation, the voice of the god is heard, and His characteristic utterance is recited. In the third portion of the invocation the Magician asserts the identity of himself with the god. In the fourth portion the god is again invoked, but as if by Himself, as if it were the utterance of the will of the god that He should manifest in the Magician. At the conclusion of this, the original object of the invocation is stated.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formuale of the Elemental Weapons [149] [T4],#KEYS
44:Four Powers Of The Mother
In talking about the four powers of the Mother, it helps to know that in India, traditionally, the evolutionary principle of creation is approached, and adored, as the great Mother. Sri Aurobindo distinguishes four main powers and personalities through which this evolutionary force manifests.
Maheshwari - One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness.
Mahakali - Another embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force.
Mahalakshmi - A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace.
Mahasaraswati - The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things.
~ ?, https://www.auroville.com/silver-ring-mother-s-symbol.html,#KEYS
45:The Profound Definitive Meaning :::
For the mind that masters view the emptiness dawns
In the content seen not even an atom exists
A seer and seen refined until they're gone
This way of realizing view, it works quite well
When meditation is clear light river flow
There is no need to confine it to sessions and breaks
Meditator and object refined until they're gone
This heart bone of meditation, it beats quite well
When you're sure that conducts work is luminous light
And you're sure that interdependence is emptiness
A doer and deed refined until they're gone
This way of working with conduct, it works quite well
When biased thinking has vanished into space
No phony facades, eight dharmas, nor hopes and fears,
A keeper and kept refined until they're gone
This way of keeping samaya, it works quite well
When you've finally discovered your mind is dharmakaya
And you're really doing yourself and others good
A winner and won refined until they're gone
This way of winning results, it works quite well. ~ Jetsun Milarepa,#KEYS
46:But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 302,#KEYS
47:Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his self-revelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralists seeking for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine, a liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion, 572,#KEYS
48:Part 1 - Departure
1. The Call to Adventure ::: This first stage of the mythological journey-which we have designated the "call to adventure"-signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of grav ity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infinitum, from every corner of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,#KEYS
49:AHA!"
There are seven keys to the great gate,
Being eight in one and one in eight.
First, let the body of thee be still,
Bound by the cerements of will,
Corpse-rigid; thus thou mayst abort
The fidget-babes that tense the thought.
Next, let the breath-rhythm be low,
Easy, regular, and slow;
So that thy being be in tune
With the great sea's Pacific swoon.
Third, let thy life be pure and calm
Swayed softly as a windless palm.
Fourth, let the will-to-live be bound
To the one love of the Profound.
Fifth, let the thought, divinely free
From sense, observe its entity.
Watch every thought that springs; enhance
Hour after hour thy vigilance!
Intense and keen, turned inward, miss
No atom of analysis!
Sixth, on one thought securely pinned
Still every whisper of the wind!
So like a flame straight and unstirred
Burn up thy being in one word!
Next, still that ecstasy, prolong
Thy meditation steep and strong,
Slaying even God, should He distract
Thy attention from the chosen act!
Last, all these things in one o'erpowered,
Time that the midnight blossom flowered!
The oneness is. Yet even in this,
My son, thou shalt not do amiss
If thou restrain the expression, shoot
Thy glance to rapture's darkling root,
Discarding name, form, sight, and stress
Even of this high consciousness;
Pierce to the heart! I leave thee here:
Thou art the Master. I revere
Thy radiance that rolls afar,
O Brother of the Silver Star! ~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
50:A creative illness succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for a certain truth. It is a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, neurosis, psychosomatic ailments, or even psychosis. Whatever the symptoms, they are felt as painful, if not agonizing, by the subject, with alternating periods of alleviation and worsening. Throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation. It is often compatible with normal, professional activity and family life. But even if he keeps to his social activities, he is almost entirely absorbed with himself. He suffers from feelings of utter isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal (like the shaman apprentice with his master). The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration. The subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and the conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world.
Many of the nineteenth and twentieth century figures recognized unquestionably as "great" - Nietzsche, Darwin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung, Piaget - were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty. Their "psychopathology" - a term ridiculous in this context - was generated as a consequence of the revolutionary nature of their personal experience (their action, fantasy and thought). It is no great leap of comparative psychology to see their role in our society as analogous to that of the archaic religious leader and healer. ~ Henri Ellenberger,#KEYS
51:The Nirmanakaya manifestation of Amitabha, I,
the Indian Scholar, the Lotus Born,
From the self-blossoming center of a lotus,
Came to this realm of existence through miraculous powers
To be the prince of the king of Oddiyana.
Then, I sustained the kingdom in accordance with Dharma.
Wandering throughout all directions of India,
I severed all spiritual doubts without exception.
Engaging in fearless activity in the eight burial grounds,
I achieved all supreme and common siddhis.
Then, according to the wishes of King Trisong Detsen
And by the power of previous prayers, I journeyed to Tibet.
By subduing the cruel gods, nagas, yakshas, rakshas,
and all spirits who harm beings,
The light of the teachings of secret mantra has been illuminated.
Then, when the time came to depart for the continent of Lanka,
I did so to provide refuge from the fear of rakshas
For all the inhabitants of this world, including Tibet.
I blessed Nirmanakaya emanations to be representatives of my body.
I made sacred treasures as representatives of my holy speech.
I poured enlightened wisdom into the hearts of those with fortunate karma.
Until samsara is emptied, for the benefit of sentient beings,
I will manifest unceasingly in whatever ways are necessary.
Through profound kindness, I have brought great benefit for all.
If you who are fortunate have the mind of aspiration,
May you pray so that blessings will be received.
All followers, believe in me with determination.
Samaya. ~ The Wrathful Compassion of Guru Dorje Drollo, Vajra Master Dudjom Yeshe Dorje, translated by Dungse Thinley Norbu Rinpoche,#KEYS
52:Hence, it's obvious to see why in AA the community is so important; we are powerless over ourselves. Since we don't have immediate awareness of the Higher Power and how it works, we need to be constantly reminded of our commitment to freedom and liberation. The old patterns are so seductive that as they go off, they set off the association of ideas and the desire to give in to our addiction with an enormous force that we can't handle. The renewal of defeat often leads to despair. At the same time, it's a source of hope for those who have a spiritual view of the process. Because it reminds us that we have to renew once again our total dependence on the Higher Power. This is not just a notional acknowledgment of our need. We feel it from the very depths of our being. Something in us causes our whole being to cry out, "Help!" That's when the steps begin to work. And that, I might add, is when the spiritual journey begins to work. A lot of activities that people in that category regard as spiritual are not communicating to them experientially their profound dependence on the grace of God to go anywhere with their spiritual practices or observances. That's why religious practice can be so ineffective. The real spiritual journey depends on our acknowledging the unmanageability of our lives. The love of God or the Higher Power is what heals us. Nobody becomes a full human being without love. It brings to life people who are most damaged. The steps are really an engagement in an ever-deepening relationship with God. Divine love picks us up when we sincerely believe nobody else will. We then begin to experience freedom, peace, calm, equanimity, and liberation from cravings for what we have come to know are damaging-cravings that cannot bring happiness, but at best only momentary relief that makes the real problem worse. ~ Thomas Keating, Divine Therapy and Addiction, #KEYS
53:And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart-perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example-but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you.
Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don't want to upset others because you don't want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.
Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must.
And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn't matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery-either way-and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can. ~ Ken Wilber, One Taste,#KEYS
54:But usually the representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received written Shastra, - some Word from the past which embodies the experience of former Yogins, - it may be practised either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal.
For the sadhaka of the integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, - if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written Truth, - sabdabrahmativartate - beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, - srotavyasya srutasya ca. For he is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#KEYS
55:Self-Abuse by Drugs
Not a drop of alcohol is to be brought into this temple.
Master Bassui (1327-1387)1
(His dying instructions: first rule)
In swinging between liberal tolerance one moment and outraged repression the next,
modern societies seem chronically incapable of reaching consistent attitudes about
drugs.
Stephen Batchelor2
Drugs won't show you the truth. Drugs will only show you what it's like to be on drugs.
Brad Warner3
Implicit in the authentic Buddhist Path is sila. It is the time-honored practice
of exercising sensible restraints [Z:73-74]. Sila's ethical guidelines provide the
bedrock foundation for one's personal behavior in daily life. At the core of every
religion are some self-disciplined renunciations corresponding to sila. Yet, a profound irony has been reshaping the human condition in most cultures during the
last half century. It dates from the years when psychoactive drugs became readily
available. During this era, many naturally curious persons could try psychedelic
short-cuts and experience the way their consciousness might seem to ''expand.'' A
fortunate few of these experimenters would become motivated to follow the nondrug meditative route when they pursued various spiritual paths.
One fact is often overlooked. Meditation itself has many mind-expanding, psychedelic properties [Z:418-426]. These meditative experiences can also stimulate a
drug-free spiritual quest.
Meanwhile, we live in a drug culture. It is increasingly a drugged culture, for which overprescribing physicians must shoulder part of the blame. Do
drugs have any place along the spiritual path? This issue will always be hotly
debated.4
In Zen, the central issue is not whether each spiritual aspirant has the ''right''
to exercise their own curiosity, or the ''right'' to experiment on their own brains in
the name of freedom of religion. It is a free country. Drugs are out there. The real
questions are:
Can you exercise the requisite self-discipline to follow the Zen Buddhist Path?
Do you already have enough common sense to ask that seemingly naive question,
''What would Buddha do?'' (WWBD).
~ James Austin, Zen-Brain_Reflections,_Reviewing_Recent_Developments_in_Meditation_and_States_of_Consciousness,#KEYS
56:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.
But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.
But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...
This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,#KEYS
57:The majority of Buddhists and Buddhist teachers in the West are green postmodern pluralists, and thus Buddhism is largely interpreted in terms of the green altitude and the pluralistic value set, whereas the greatest Buddhist texts are all 2nd tier, teal (Holistic) or higher (for example, Lankavatara Sutra, Kalachakra Tantra, Longchenpa's Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka treatises, and so forth).
This makes teal (Holistic), or Integral 2nd tier in general, the lowest deeply adequate level with which to interpret Buddhism, ultimate Reality, and Suchness itself. Thus, interpreting Suchness in pluralistic terms (or lower) would have to be viewed ultimately as a dysfunction, certainly a case of arrested development, and one requiring urgent attention in any Fourth Turning.
These are some of the problems with interpreting states (in this case, Suchness states) with a too-low structure (in short, a severe misinterpretation and thus misunderstanding of the Ultimate). As for interpreting them with dysfunctional structures (of any altitude), the problem more or less speaks for itself. Whether the structure in itself is high enough or not, any malformation of the structure will be included in the interpretation of any state (or any other experience), and hence will deform the interpretation itself, usually in the same basic ways as the structure itself is deformed. Thus, for example, if there is a major Fulcrum-3 (red altitude) repression of various bodily states (sex, aggression, power, feelings), those repressions will be interpreted as part of the higher state itself, and so the state will thus be viewed as devoid of (whereas this is actually a repression of) any sex, aggression, power, feelings, or whatever it is that is dis-owned and pushed into the repressed submergent unconscious. If there is an orange altitude problem with self-esteem (Fulcrum-5), that problem will be magnified by the state experience, and the more intense the state experience, the greater the magnification. Too little self-esteem, and even profound spiritual experiences can be interpreted as "I'm not worthy, so this state-which seems to love me unconditionally-must be confused." If too much self-esteem, higher experiences are misinterpreted, not as a transcendence of the self, but as a reward for being the amazing self I am-"the wonder of being me." ~ Ken Wilber, The Religion Of Tomorrow,#KEYS
58:Satya Sattva - "Sri Yukteswar's intuition was penetrating; heedless of remarks, he often replied to one's unexpressed thoughts. The words a person uses, and the actual thoughts behind them, may be poles apart. 'By calmness,' my guru said, 'try to feel the thoughts behind the confusion of men's verbiage.' [...]
Many teachers talked of miracles but could manifest nothing. Sri Yukteswar seldom mentioned the subtle laws but secretly operated them at will. 'A man of realization doesn't perform any miracle until he receives an inward sanction', master explained. 'God does not wish the secrets of His creation revealed promiscuously. Also, every individual in the world has an inalienable right to his free will. A saint will not encroach on that independence.'
The silence habitual to Sri Yukteswar was caused by his deep perceptions of the Infinite. [...] Because of my guru's unspectacular guise, only a few of his contemporaries recognized him as a superman. The adage: 'He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom,' could never be applied to my profound and quiet master. Though born a mortal like all others, Sri Yukteswar achieved identity with the Ruler of time and space. Master found no insuperable obstacles to the mergence of human and Divine. No such barrier exists, I came to understand. [...]
Though my guru's undissembling speech prevented a large following during his years on Earth, nevertheless, through an ever-growing number of sincere students of his teachings, his spirit lives on in the world today. [...]
The disclosures of the Divine insight are often painful to worldly ears. Master was not popular with superficial students. The wise, always few in number, deeply revered him. I daresay Sri Yukteswar would have been the most sought-after guru in India had his speech not been so candid and so censorious. [...]
He added, 'You will go to foreign lands, where blunt assaults on the ego are not appreciated. A teacher could not spread India's message in the West without an ample fund of accommodative patience and forbearance.' [...]
I am immeasurably grateful for the humbling blows he dealt my vanity. I sometimes felt that, metaphorically, he was discovering and uprooting every diseased tooth in my jaw. The hard core of egotism is difficult to dislodge except rudely. With its departure, the Divine finds at last un unobstructed channel. In vain It seeks to percolate through flinty hearts of selfishness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi,#KEYS
59:Apotheosis ::: One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.
Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings are without self."
The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them-and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.
The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." - Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Apotheosis,#KEYS
60:On that spring day in the park I saw a young woman who attracted me. She was tall and slender, elegantly dressed, and had an intelligent and boyish face. I liked her at once. She was my type and began to fill my imagination. She probably was not much older than I but seemed far more mature, well-defined, a full-grown woman, but with a touch of exuberance and boyishness in her face, and this was what I liked above all .
I had never managed to approach a girl with whom I had fallen in love, nor did I manage in this case. But the impression she made on me was deeper than any previous one had been and the infatuation had a profound influence on my life.
Suddenly a new image had risen up before me, a lofty and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as fervent within me as the craving to worship and admire. I gave her the name Beatrice, for, even though I had not read Dante, I knew about Beatrice from an English painting of which I owned a reproduction. It showed a young pre-Raphaelite woman, long-limbed and slender, with long head and etherealized hands and features. My beautiful young woman did not quite resemble her, even though she, too, revealed that slender and boyish figure which I loved, and something of the ethereal, soulful quality of her face.
Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She raised her image before me, she gave me access to a holy shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple.
From one day to the next I stayed clear of all bars and nocturnal exploits. I could be alone with myself again and enjoyed reading and going for long walks.
My sudden conversion drew a good deal of mockery in its wake. But now I had something I loved and venerated, I had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery and a feeling of dawn that made me immune to all taunts. I had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and servant of a cherished image.
I find it difficult to think back to that time without a certain fondness. Once more I was trying most strenuously to construct an intimate "world of light" for myself out of the shambles of a period of devastation; once more I sacrificed everything within me to the aim of banishing darkness and evil from myself. And, furthermore, this present "world of light" was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer an escape, no crawling back to -nether and the safety of irresponsibility; it was a new duty, one I had invented and desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control. My sexuality, a torment from which I was in constant flight, was to be transfigured nto spirituality and devotion by this holy fire. Everything :brk and hateful was to be banished, there were to be no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious picures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors, no lust. In place of all this I raised my altar to the image of Beatrice, :.. and by consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods, sacrificing that part of life which I withdrew from the forces of darkness to those of light. My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and spirituality.
This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life.
~ Hermann Hesse, Demian,#KEYS
61:HOW CAN I READ SAVITRI?
An open reply by Dr Alok Pandey to a fellow devotee
A GIFT OF LOVE TO THE WORLD
Most of all enjoy Savitri. It is Sri Aurobindo's gift of Love to the world. Read it from the heart with love and gratitude as companions and drown in its fiery bliss. That is the true understanding rather than one that comes by a constant churning of words in the head.
WHEN
Best would be to fix a time that works for you. One can always take out some time for the reading, even if it be late at night when one is done with all the daily works. Of course, a certain receptivity is needed. If one is too tired or the reading becomes too mechanical as a ritual routine to be somehow finished it tends to be less effective, as with anything else. Hence the advice is to read in a quiet receptive state.
THE PACE
As to the pace of reading it is best to slowly build up and keep it steady. To read a page or a passage daily is better than reading many pages one day and then few lines or none for days. This brings a certain discipline in the consciousness which makes one receptive. What it means is that one should fix up that one would read a few passages or a page or two daily, and then if an odd day one is enjoying and spontaneously wants to read more then one can go by the flow.
COMPLETE OR SELECTIONS?
It is best to read at least once from cover to cover. But if one is not feeling inclined for that do read some of the beautiful cantos and passages whose reference one can find in various places. This helps us familiarise with the epic and the style of poetry. Later one can go for the cover to cover reading.
READING ALOUD, SILENTLY, OR WRITING DOWN?
One can read it silently. Loud reading is needed only if one is unable to focus with silent reading. A mantra is more potent when read subtly. I am aware that some people recommend reading it aloud which is fine if that helps one better. A certain flexibility in these things is always good and rigid rules either ways are not helpful.
One can also write some of the beautiful passages with which one feels suddenly connected. It is a help in the yoga since such a writing involves the pouring in of the consciousness of Savitri through the brain and nerves and the hand.
Reflecting upon some of these magnificent lines and passages while one is engaged in one\s daily activities helps to create a background state for our inner being to get absorbed in Savitri more and more.
HOW DO I UNDERSTAND THE MEANING? DO I NEED A DICTIONARY?
It is helpful if a brief background about the Canto is known. This helps the mind top focus and also to keep in sync with the overall scene and sense of what is being read.
But it is best not to keep referring to the dictionary while reading. Let the overall sense emerge. Specifics can be done during a detailed reading later and it may not be necessary at all. Besides the sense that Sri Aurobindo has given to many words may not be accurately conveyed by the standard dictionaries. A flexibility is required to understand the subtle suggestions hinted at by the Master-poet.
In this sense Savitri is in the line of Vedic poetry using images that are at once profound as well as commonplace. That is the beauty of mystic poetry. These are things actually experienced and seen by Sri Aurobindo, and ultimately it is Their Grace that alone can reveal the intrinsic sense of this supreme revelation of the Supreme. ~ Dr Alok Pandey,#KEYS
62:The true Mantra must come from within OR it must be given by a Guru
Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given; it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.
I saw, in my case, that my mantra has the power of immortality; whatever happens, if it is uttered, it's the Supreme that has the upper hand, it's no longer the lower law. And the words are irrelevant, they may not have any meaning - to someone else, my mantra is meaningless, but to me it's full, packed with meaning. And effective, because it's my cry, the intense aspiration of my whole being.
A mantra given by a guru is only the power to realize the experience of the discoverer of the mantra. The power is automatically there, because the sound contains the experience. I saw that once in Paris, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn't even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced "yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lecture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light.... I was probably the only one to notice it. I said to myself, "Well!" Then I didn't give it any more thought, I forgot about the story. But as it happened, the experience recurred in two or three different countries, with different people, and every time there was the sound OM, I would suddenly see the place fill with that same light. So I understood. That sound contains the vibration of thousands and thousands of years of spiritual aspiration - there is in it the entire aspiration of men towards the Supreme. And the power is automatically there, because the experience is there.
It's the same with my mantra. When I wanted to translate the end of my mantra, "Glory to You, O Lord," into Sanskrit, I asked for Nolini's help. He brought his Sanskrit translation, and when he read it to me, I immediately saw that the power was there - not because Nolini put his power into it (!), God knows he had no intention of "giving" me a mantra! But the power was there because my experience was there. We made a few adjustments and modifications, and that's the japa I do now - I do it all the time, while sleeping, while walking, while eating, while working, all the time.[[Mother later clarified: "'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't MY mantra, it's something I ADDED to it - my mantra is something else altogether, that's not it. When I say that my mantra has the power of immortality, I mean the other, the one I don't speak of! I have never given the words.... You see, at the end of my walk, a kind of enthusiasm rises, and with that enthusiasm, the 'Glory to You' came to me, but it's part of the prayer I had written in Prayers and Meditations: 'Glory to You, O Lord, all-triumphant Supreme' etc. (it's a long prayer). It came back suddenly, and as it came back spontaneously, I kept it. Moreover, when Sri Aurobindo read this prayer in Prayers and Meditations, he told me it was very strong. So I added this phrase as a kind of tail to my japa. But 'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't my spontaneous mantra - it came spontaneously, but it was something written very long ago. The two things are different."
And that's how a mantra has life: when it wells up all the time, spontaneously, like the cry of your being - there is no need of effort or concentration: it's your natural cry. Then it has full power, it is alive. It must well up from within.... No guru can give you that. ~ The Mother, Agenda, May 11 1963,#KEYS
63:All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real religion, - and Yoga is something more than religion, - only begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act.
Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his selfrevelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine,1 a liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature.
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion, 571 [T1],#KEYS
64:Mother, how to change one's consciousness?
Naturally, there are many ways, but each person must do it by the means accessible to him; and the indication of the way usually comes spontaneously, through something like an unexpected experience. And for each one, it appears a little differently.
For instance, one may have the perception of the ordinary consciousness which is extended on the surface, horizontally, and works on a plane which is simultaneously the surface of things and has a contact with the superficial outer side of things, people, circumstances; and then, suddenly, for some reason or other - as I say for each one it is different - there is a shifting upwards, and instead of seeing things horizontally, of being at the same level as they are, you suddenly dominate them and see them from above, in their totality, instead of seeing a small number of things immediately next to yourself; it is as though something were drawing you above and making you see as from a mountain-top or an aeroplane. And instead of seeing each detail and seeing it on its own level, you see the whole as one unity, and from far above.
There are many ways of having this experience, but it usually comes to you as if by chance, one fine day.
Or else, one may have an experience which is almost its very opposite but which comes to the same thing. Suddenly one plunges into a depth, one moves away from the thing one perceived, it seems distant, superficial, unimportant; one enters an inner silence or an inner calm or an inward vision of things, a profound feeling, a more intimate perception of circumstances and things, in which all values change. And one becomes aware of a sort of unity, a deep identity which is one in spite of the diverse appearances.
Or else, suddenly also, the sense of limitation disappears and one enters the perception of a kind of indefinite duration beginningless and endless, of something which has always been and always will be.
These experiences come to you suddenly in a flash, for a second, a moment in your life, you don't know why or how.... There are other ways, other experiences - they are innumerable, they vary according to people; but with this, with one minute, one second of such an existence, one catches the tail of the thing. So one must remember that, try to relive it, go to the depths of the experience, recall it, aspire, concentrate. This is the startingpoint, the end of the guiding thread, the clue. For all those who are destined to find their inner being, the truth of their being, there is always at least one moment in life when they were no longer the same, perhaps just like a lightning-flash - but that is enough. It indicates the road one should take, it is the door that opens on this path. And so you must pass through the door, and with perseverance and an unfailing steadfastness seek to renew the state which will lead you to something more real and more total.
Many ways have always been given, but a way you have been taught, a way you have read about in books or heard from a teacher, does not have the effective value of a spontaneous experience which has come without any apparent reason, and which is simply the blossoming of the soul's awakening, one second of contact with your psychic being which shows you the best way for you, the one most within your reach, which you will then have to follow with perseverance to reach the goal - one second which shows you how to start, the beginning.... Some have this in dreams at night; some have it at any odd time: something one sees which awakens in one this new consciousness, something one hears, a beautiful landscape, beautiful music, or else simply a few words one reads, or else the intensity of concentration in some effort - anything at all, there are a thousand reasons and thousands of ways of having it. But, I repeat, all those who are destined to realise have had this at least once in their life. It may be very fleeting, it may have come when they were very young, but always at least once in one's life one has the experience of what true consciousness is. Well, that is the best indication of the path to be followed.
One may seek within oneself, one may remember, may observe; one must notice what is going on, one must pay attention, that's all. Sometimes, when one sees a generous act, hears of something exceptional, when one witnesses heroism or generosity or greatness of soul, meets someone who shows a special talent or acts in an exceptional and beautiful way, there is a kind of enthusiasm or admiration or gratitude which suddenly awakens in the being and opens the door to a state, a new state of consciousness, a light, a warmth, a joy one did not know before. That too is a way of catching the guiding thread. There are a thousand ways, one has only to be awake and to watch.
First of all, you must feel the necessity for this change of consciousness, accept the idea that it is this, the path which must lead to the goal; and once you admit the principle, you must be watchful. And you will find, you do find it. And once you have found it, you must start walking without any hesitation.
Indeed, the starting-point is to observe oneself, not to live in a perpetual nonchalance, a perpetual apathy; one must be attentive.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1956, [T6],#KEYS
65:This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions, not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly material actions must assume this sublimated character; when we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves, for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul, our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and our aspiration are possible. For in his being all takes place; for him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her working and its containers and supporters, there should be the same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective practice must carry in them three results that are of a central importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening communion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved consecration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion, and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service. An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that are habitations of the Divine - not the brief restless grasping emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind can imagine.
Next, the practice of this Yoga demands a constant inward remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge, and a constant active externalising of it in works comes in too to intensify the remembrance. In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe, - this thought or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the worker. A memory, a self-dynamising meditation of this kind, must and does in its end turn into a profound and uninterrupted vision and a vivid and all-embracing consciousness of that which we so powerfully remember or on which we so constantly meditate. For it compels a constant reference at each moment to the Origin of all being and will and action and there is at once an embracing and exceeding of all particular forms and appearances in That which is their cause and upholder. This way cannot go to its end without a seeing vivid and vital, as concrete in its way as physical sight, of the works of the universal Spirit everywhere. On its summits it rises into a constant living and thinking and willing and acting in the presence of the Supramental, the Transcendent. Whatever we see and hear, whatever we touch and sense, all of which we are conscious, has to be known and felt by us as That which we worship and serve; all has to be turned into an image of the Divinity, perceived as a dwelling-place of his Godhead, enveloped with the eternal Omnipresence. In its close, if not long before it, this way of works turns by communion with the Divine Presence, Will and Force into a way of Knowledge more complete and integral than any the mere creature intelligence can construct or the search of the intellect can discover.
Lastly, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice compels us to renounce all the inner supports of egoism, casting them out of our mind and will and actions, and to eliminate its seed, its presence, its influence out of our nature. All must be done for the Divine; all must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded temple of his own vast cosmic existence. Life becomes more and more the sacrifice of the eternal in the individual constantly self-offered to the eternal Transcendence. It is offered in the wide sacrificial ground of the field of the eternal cosmic Spirit; and the Force too that offers it is the eternal Force, the omnipresent Mother. Therefore is this way a way of union and communion by acts and by the spirit and knowledge in the act as complete and integral as any our Godward will can hope for or our soul's strength execute.
It has all the power of a way of works integral and absolute, but because of its law of sacrifice and self-giving to the Divine Self and Master, it is accompanied on its one side by the whole power of the path of Love and on the other by the whole power of the path of Knowledge. At its end all these three divine Powers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each other.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [111-114],#KEYS
66:How to Meditate
Deep meditation is a mental procedure that utilizes the nature of the mind to systematically bring the mind to rest. If the mind is given the opportunity, it will go to rest with no effort. That is how the mind works.
Indeed, effort is opposed to the natural process of deep meditation. The mind always seeks the path of least resistance to express itself. Most of the time this is by making more and more thoughts. But it is also possible to create a situation in the mind that turns the path of least resistance into one leading to fewer and fewer thoughts. And, very soon, no thoughts at all. This is done by using a particular thought in a particular way. The thought is called a mantra.
For our practice of deep meditation, we will use the thought - I AM. This will be our mantra.
It is for the sound that we will use I AM, not for the meaning of it.
The meaning has an obvious significance in English, and I AM has a religious meaning in the English Bible as well. But we will not use I AM for the meaning - only for the sound. We can also spell it AYAM. No meaning there, is there? Only the sound. That is what we want. If your first language is not English, you may spell the sound phonetically in your own language if you wish. No matter how we spell it, it will be the same sound. The power of the sound ...I AM... is great when thought inside. But only if we use a particular procedure. Knowing this procedure is the key to successful meditation. It is very simple. So simple that we will devote many pages here to discussing how to keep it simple, because we all have a tendency to make things more complicated. Maintaining simplicity is the key to right meditation.
Here is the procedure of deep meditation: While sitting comfortably with eyes closed, we'll just relax. We will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. We just let them go by without minding them. After about a minute, we gently introduce the mantra, ...I AM...
We think the mantra in a repetition very easily inside. The speed of repetition may vary, and we do not mind it. We do not intone the mantra out loud. We do not deliberately locate the mantra in any particular part of the body. Whenever we realize we are not thinking the mantra inside anymore, we come back to it easily. This may happen many times in a sitting, or only once or twice. It doesn't matter. We follow this procedure of easily coming back to the mantra when we realize we are off it for the predetermined time of our meditation session. That's it.
Very simple.
Typically, the way we will find ourselves off the mantra will be in a stream of other thoughts. This is normal. The mind is a thought machine, remember? Making thoughts is what it does. But, if we are meditating, as soon as we realize we are off into a stream of thoughts, no matter how mundane or profound, we just easily go back to the mantra.
Like that. We don't make a struggle of it. The idea is not that we have to be on the mantra all the time. That is not the objective. The objective is to easily go back to it when we realize we are off it. We just favor the mantra with our attention when we notice we are not thinking it. If we are back into a stream of other thoughts five seconds later, we don't try and force the thoughts out. Thoughts are a normal part of the deep meditation process. We just ease back to the mantra again. We favor it.
Deep meditation is a going toward, not a pushing away from. We do that every single time with the mantra when we realize we are off it - just easily favoring it. It is a gentle persuasion. No struggle. No fuss. No iron willpower or mental heroics are necessary for this practice. All such efforts are away from the simplicity of deep meditation and will reduce its effectiveness.
As we do this simple process of deep meditation, we will at some point notice a change in the character of our inner experience. The mantra may become very refined and fuzzy. This is normal. It is perfectly all right to think the mantra in a very refined and fuzzy way if this is the easiest. It should always be easy - never a struggle. Other times, we may lose track of where we are for a while, having no mantra, or stream of thoughts either. This is fine too. When we realize we have been off somewhere, we just ease back to the mantra again. If we have been very settled with the mantra being barely recognizable, we can go back to that fuzzy level of it, if it is the easiest. As the mantra refines, we are riding it inward with our attention to progressively deeper levels of inner silence in the mind. So it is normal for the mantra to become very faint and fuzzy. We cannot force this to happen. It will happen naturally as our nervous system goes through its many cycles ofinner purification stimulated by deep meditation. When the mantra refines, we just go with it. And when the mantra does not refine, we just be with it at whatever level is easy. No struggle. There is no objective to attain, except to continue the simple procedure we are describing here.
When and Where to Meditate
How long and how often do we meditate? For most people, twenty minutes is the best duration for a meditation session. It is done twice per day, once before the morning meal and day's activity, and then again before the evening meal and evening's activity.
Try to avoid meditating right after eating or right before bed.
Before meal and activity is the ideal time. It will be most effective and refreshing then. Deep meditation is a preparation for activity, and our results over time will be best if we are active between our meditation sessions. Also, meditation is not a substitute for sleep. The ideal situation is a good balance between meditation, daily activity and normal sleep at night. If we do this, our inner experience will grow naturally over time, and our outer life will become enriched by our growing inner silence.
A word on how to sit in meditation: The first priority is comfort. It is not desirable to sit in a way that distracts us from the easy procedure of meditation. So sitting in a comfortable chair with back support is a good way to meditate. Later on, or if we are already familiar, there can be an advantage to sitting with legs crossed, also with back support. But always with comfort and least distraction being the priority. If, for whatever reason, crossed legs are not feasible for us, we will do just fine meditating in our comfortable chair. There will be no loss of the benefits.
Due to commitments we may have, the ideal routine of meditation sessions will not always be possible. That is okay. Do the best you can and do not stress over it. Due to circumstances beyond our control, sometimes the only time we will have to meditate will be right after a meal, or even later in the evening near bedtime. If meditating at these times causes a little disruption in our system, we will know it soon enough and make the necessary adjustments. The main thing is that we do our best to do two meditations every day, even if it is only a short session between our commitments. Later on, we will look at the options we have to make adjustments to address varying outer circumstances, as well as inner experiences that can come up.
Before we go on, you should try a meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit where you are not likely to be interrupted and do a short meditation, say ten minutes, and see how it goes. It is a toe in the water.
Make sure to take a couple of minutes at the end sitting easily without doing the procedure of meditation. Then open your eyes slowly. Then read on here.
As you will see, the simple procedure of deep meditation and it's resulting experiences will raise some questions. We will cover many of them here.
So, now we will move into the practical aspects of deep meditation - your own experiences and initial symptoms of the growth of your own inner silence. ~ Yogani, Deep Meditation,#KEYS
67:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:I desired dragons with a profound desire. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 2:We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 3:Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 4:From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 5:The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 6:Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove 7:Self-esteem is not a luxury; it is a profound spiritual need. ~ nathaniel-branden, @wisdomtrove 8:writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 9:Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 10:A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 11:I don't profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 12:Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 13:Few people realize the profound part angelic forces play in human events. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 14:Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 15:The truth was obscure, Too profound and too pure, To live it you had to explode ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 16:To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 17:All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 18:... how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 19:Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 20:... the pain that comes from loving someone who's in trouble can be profound. ~ melody-beattie, @wisdomtrove 21:Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 22:A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 23:She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 24:I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 25:A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 26:Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 27:The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 28:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 29:By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 30:He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 31:A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface! ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 32:Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 33:Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 34:I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 35:There is no make-up to compare with the radiance that comes from a profound sense of self-okayness. ~ aimee-davies, @wisdomtrove 36:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 37:Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 38:Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is? ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 39:A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 40:Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove 41:We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 42:The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 43:Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 44:Nothing may truly be said to be a miracle except in the profound sense that everything is a miracle. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 45:The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 46:Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 47:So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 48:A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 49:I might repeat to myself . . . a list of quotations from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 50:Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 51:Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 52:The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 53:Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 54:Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 55:Absurd, irreducible; nothing& 56:Hope is at once both simple and profound. It is hope that binds Heaven and earth. Hope is the bridge between Heaven and earth. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 57:That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 58:The Bhagavad-Gita has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by its devotion to God which is manifested by actions. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 59:As you go into the light, you will gain a more profound happiness. That happiness will free you from the desire-aversion cycle. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 60:Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 61:A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 62:Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 63:There is no counsel like God's counsel. No comfort like His comfort. No wisdom more profound than the wisdom of the Scriptures. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 64:Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 65:Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 66:We all have auras. But it's much easier to see the aura of someone who is in a state of samadhi or other profound state of awareness. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 67:His (God) love is not a passing fancy or superficial emotion; it is a profound and unshakable commitment that seeks what is best for us. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 68:Step out of your story and into the wonder of life. Enter a state of profound not-knowing and immerse yourself in the mystery of the moment. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 69:Step out of your story and into the wonder of life. Enter a state of profound not-knowing and immerse yourself in the mystery of the moment. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 70:Any profound view of the world is mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world, both of which are nonrational entities. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 71:Don't be a half-Christian. There are too many of such in the world. The world has a profound respect for people who are sincere in their faith. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 72:To become conscious of the deep mystery we need to enter a profound state of not-knowing. This is the gateway to deep knowing what-is before words. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 73:Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 74:The picture you have of yourself, your self-esteem, will have a profound effect on the way you see the world and the way your world sees you. ~ earl-nightingale, @wisdomtrove 75:It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 76:Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 77:That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 78:To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 79:We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 80:God is a specialist when the anguish is deep. His ability to heal the soul is profound... but only to those who rely on His wounded Son will experience relief. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 81:The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 82:Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 83:I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 84:I want to invite you to wonder so deeply about life that you find yourself in a profound state of not-knowing… and to experience what happens to your state of consciousness. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 85:... thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 86:Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 87:The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 88:And through the opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 89:Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 90:In [chess], where the pieces have different and "bizarre" motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 91:The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 92:Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 93:What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 94:... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.— ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 95:Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 96:She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 97:The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 98:The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 99:The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change. ~ richard-bach, @wisdomtrove 100:What happens if we put aside our ideas for a moment and enter a profound state of not knowing? What happens if we step out of confines of the conceptual mind into the spacious openness of the mystery? ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 101:Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values. ~ reinhold-niebuhr, @wisdomtrove 102:But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 103:There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 104:The mystery of being is arising as all individual beings. This profound idea brings us to the greatest teaching found at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world: Atman is Brahman. The soul is God. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 105:There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 106:I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 107:Single-minded devotion engenders deep thought, which expresses itself in action. The Lord's Light descends on the devotee, His power awakens in him and, as a result, profound inner inquiry blossoms forth. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 108:I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 109:Profound responsibilities come with teaching and coaching. You can do so much good–or harm. It’s why I believe that next to parenting, teaching and coaching are the two most important professions in the world. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 110:The Indians in the Southwestern United States went to many places of power. They were able to have profound dream experiences where they could see into the future or know what do to and make proper decisions. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 111:So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 112:Everything that I teach as an enlightened Buddhist teacher is towards directing an individual to happiness, a balanced wisdom and knowledge that is sometimes just bubbly and euphoric or just very still and profound. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 113:We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 114:There is profound responsibility in being Love... more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they'd be crushed by the realization of it. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 115:From the grasses in the field to the stars in the sky, each one is doing just that; and there is such profound peace and surpassing beauty in nature because none of these tries forcibly to transgress its limitations. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 116:I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity. ~ jony-ive, @wisdomtrove 117:While overeating would be seen by some as an indulgence of self, it is in fact a profound rejection of self. It is a moment of self-betrayal and self-punishment, and anything but a commitment to one's own well-being. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 118:The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 119:Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 120:What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 121:It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 122:I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, & 123:My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. & 124:Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 125:More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world& 126:Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 127:I am sure I have heard this several times from places I can't recall, but it's not already in the Gaia Quotes database, so I add this profound insight from the fields of psychological healing and spiritual evolution. It sure has helped me. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 128:Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 129:We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 130:I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of F√°fnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 131:She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 132:Ethics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 133:Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 134:I began to realize that the most profound wisdom of man was rooted in the answers given by faith and that I did not have the right to deny them on the grounds of reason; above all, I realized that these answers alone can form a reply to the question of life. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 135:Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 136:... one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything... nor ought one to blame others. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 137:As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 138:Each of us brings something alive in the world that is unique. There is a profound necessity at the heart of individuality. As we awaken to this sense of destiny, we can begin to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing that is always calling us. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 139:You can recollect the sayings of great men, you treasure up verse of renowned poets; ought you not be equally profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty or overthrow a doubt? ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 140:Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 141:In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 142:How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 143:Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 144:The greatest secret for eliminating the inferiority complex, which is another term for deep and profound self-doubt, is to fill your mind to overflowing with faith. Develop a tremendous faith in God and that will give you a humble yet soundly realistic faith in yourself. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 145:If I sink my attention deeply into the presence of awareness, it’s like sinking down into the depths of the ocean of being. The sense that I am an individual experiencing the world of separateness fades and I am immersed in a profound, undifferentiated oneness, beyond words to express. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 146:It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 147:There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 148:Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence‚Äì whether much that is glorious‚Äì whether all that is profound‚Äì does not spring from disease of thought‚Äì from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 149:There is the unknown and the unknowable which propounds all creation. This we cannot love , we can only accept it as a term of our own limitation and ratification. We can only know that from the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and that the fulfilling of these desires is the fulfilling of creation. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 150:Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself. ~ frida-kahlo, @wisdomtrove 151:One of the most profound teachings found at the mystical heart of all spiritual traditions is that essentially you don’t exist in the world. Your deepest being can’t be seen or heard or touched, because it has no form. The deep I is the formless presence of awareness within which all the forms of life are arising. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 152:And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 153:I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 154:My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even... malicious. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 155:The Neo-Platonic philosophers describe God as the ‘mystery of being’, which is in the process of ‘becoming’ all that is. The mystery of being is arising as all individual beings. This profound idea brings us to the greatest teaching found at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world: Atman is Brahman. The soul is God. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 156:I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 157:It is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 158:Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 159:We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 160:I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 161:The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my & 162:We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits& 163:All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 164:Men, learn to speak blessings over your wife and you will see that woman rise to a new level. She will respond to your praise and encouragement. Your words don't have to be poetic, fancy, or profound. Tell her simply but sincerely, "You're a great mother to our children. And you are a great wife to me. I'm so glad I can always count on you." ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 165:There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 166:The message that & 167:To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true non-duality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 168:I feel that the term "new age" is used by basically hostile media to diminish and marginalize a conversation that is very significant. It's held in place by journalists who are constantly looking for hooks and sound bites to keep them from having to make the effort of a deeper understanding and a more profound level of communication with the public. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 169:And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world? ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 170:The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or the next. It was the deep knowledge - and pray God we have not lost it - that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 171:After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 172:The name that no human research can discover& 173:We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 174:The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 175:He will long be remembered as one of the great Christian thinkers of our century, with a childlike faith and a profound compassion toward others. It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them for the better; it will be said of Francis Schaeffer that his life touched millions of souls and brought them to the truth of their creator. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 176:This is not a bland experience of some monolithic ‘oneness’. It’s a profound experience of the ‘uni-variety’ of the universe. It’s seeing that on the surface of life everything is separate, like waves on an ocean, but at the depths all is one. When I experience the universe vision I find myself appreciating the multifarious variety of life as an expression of one mysterious essence. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 177:Hence, as Narcissus, by catching at the shadow, plunged himself in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated, not with his body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect (the higher soul), through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 178:I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 179:Waking up to oneness isn’t a cold and colourless realization. It’s an experience of profound communion with all that is, which transforms how it feels to appear as a person in the story of life. It’s an experience of deep love that spontaneously arises when we get the great paradoxity that we’re both separate and not-separate from one another. Love is the wonderful dance of being two and one. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 180:LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of ‚Äì it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one ‚Äì but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 181:My favorite word is clarity... clarity... clarity. And the critical clarity is what is the transformation that is going to take place in the customer's life or work when they buy and use your product? And how profound is that? How important is that? You know the old saying, "If you could come up with a cure for cancer you'd be a billionaire by the end of the week" because of that profound result. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 182:We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 183:God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination, and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "0 Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 184:Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to express some of the most profound teachings of interdependence and emptiness I've ever heard. With the eloquence of a poet, he holds up a sheet of paper and teaches us that the rain cloud and the tree and the logger who cut the tree down are all there in the paper. He's been one of the most significant carriers of the lamp of the dharma to the West that we have had. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 185:While it may come as a profound surprise to those of us who are in the throes of an emotional or life crisis, the fact remains that the answer to virtually all of our problems resides within us already. It exist in the form of a vast reservoir of free-flowing energy that, when channeled to our muscles, can give us great strength and, when channeled to our brain, can give us great insight and understanding. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 186:My central arms control objective has been to reduce substantially and ultimately to eliminate nuclear weapons and rid the world of the nuclear threat. The prevention of the spread of nuclear explosives is to additional countries is an indispensable part of our efforts to meet this objective. I intend to continue my pursuit of this goal with untiring determination and a profound sense of personal commitment. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 187:Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read the lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 188:It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 189:The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 190:Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 191:The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 192:Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 193:There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 194:To me, one of the most profound questions we can ask is: "So what?" And so what if there's an indefinite number of worlds with alternate "us-es" in them? The "so what," to me, comes alive when I ask myself: "What if I could find a way to get in touch with those alternate mes who made those choices?" That is, persons who, if I saw them now, I wouldn't even recognize because their choices, once small, have multiplied to make them such different people. ~ richard-bach, @wisdomtrove 195:This is education, understood as a help to life; an education from birth, which feeds a peaceful revolution and unites all in a common aim, attracting them as to a single centre. Mothers, fathers, politicians: all must combine in their respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the little child carries on in the depth of a profound psychological mystery, under the tutelage of an inner guide. This is the bright new hope for mankind. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 196:Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 197:The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 198:Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 199:A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 200:Art and education may refine the taste, but they cannot purify the heart and regenerate the individual. His (Christôs) words were simple yet profound. And they shook people, provoking either happy acceptance or violent refection. People were never the same after listening to him¶.The people who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 201:Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self-contraction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is supendend in the clearing that great art creates in your awareness? ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 202:Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to affect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 203:Here is an example of Confucius sayings: "It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop." In a few words, Confucius teaches us about patience, perseverance, discipline, and hard work. But if you probe further, you will see more layers. Confucius' philosophies have significantly influenced spiritual and social thought. His views bear insight and depth of wisdom. You can apply his teachings in every sphere of life. Confucius' profound teachings are based on humanism. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 204:On Nov. 6, the day before my 94th birthday, our nation will hold one of the most critical elections in my lifetime. We are at a crossroads and there are profound moral issues at stake. I strongly urge you to vote for candidates who support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman, protect the sanctity of life and defend our religious freedoms. The Bible speaks clearly on these crucial issues. Please join me in praying for America, that we will turn our hearts back toward God. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 205:It seems to me that this demonizing of the mind is a profound mistake. It’s absolutely true, of course, that when we get lost in our habitual thoughts it makes it harder to awaken. This is a valuable insight, but it’s only half the story. I take a paralogical approach. To me the mind is a wonderful tool with which to create and criticize my story of life. But I don’t want to be only conscious of the mind and the story it weaves for me. To become deep awake I also need to be conscious of the deep mystery. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 206:We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights - the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 207:My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 208:It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 209:Jung first gave us the term ‘shadow’ to refer to those parts of our personality that have been rejected out of fear, ignorance, shame, or lack of love. His basic notion of the shadow was simple: ‘the shadow is the person you would rather not be.’ He believed that integrating the shadow would have a profound impact, enabling us to rediscover a deeper source of our own spiritual life. ‘To do this,’ Jung said, ‘we are obliged to struggle with evil, confront the shadow, to integrate the devil. There is no other choice.’ ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 210:On two chairs beneath the bole of the tree and canopied by a living bough there sat, side by side, Celeborn and Galadriel... Very tall they were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold, and the hair of the Lord Celeborn was of silver long and bright; but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 211:When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing‚ knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness‚ we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 212:Therefore, doing the Stations of the Cross was still more laborious than consoling, and required a sacrifice. It was much the same with all my devotions. They did not come easily or spontaneously, and they very seldom brought with them any strong sensible satisfaction. Nevertheless the work of performing them ended in a profound and fortifying peace: a peace that was scarcely perceptible, but which deepened and which, as my passions subsided, became more and more real, more and more sure, and finally stayed with me permanently. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 213:I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 214:Gandhi said & 215:Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the sacred part of your contract and the true meaning of your highest potential. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 216:Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and na√Øve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 217:J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 218:Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the sacred part of your contract and the true meaning of your highest potential. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 219:By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive. Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them. In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. - Albert Schweitzer ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 220:Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute... All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road... and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 221:The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth's joy and despair. The earth is full of soul ... .. Civilization has tamed place. Left to itself, the curvature of the landscape invites presence and the loyalty of stillness. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 222:When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 223:At some point in life, we all ask the same question: Who am I? And no one really knows the answer. The self is a slippery subject—especially when it’s the subject that is regarding itself as an object! So let’s begin by grounding this airy topic with an experiential activity—taking the body for a walk. Then we’ll investigate the nature of the self in your brain. Last, we’ll explore methods for relaxing and releasing self-ing in order to feel more confident, peaceful, and joined with all things. (For more on this profound matter, which reaches beyond the scope of a single chapter, see Living Dhamma by Ajahn Chah, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, or The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.) ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 224:One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. People were quick to point out the differences between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that’s connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that’s connected to practicing gratitude. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 225:What measures, then, shall we adopt? What machine employ, or what reason consult by means of which we may contemplate this ineffable beauty; a beauty abiding in the most divine sanctuary without ever proceeding from its sacred retreats lest it should be beheld by the profane and vulgar eye? We must enter deep into ourselves, and, leaving behind the objects of corporeal sight, no longer look back after any of the accustomed spectacles of sense. For, it is necessary that whoever beholds this beauty, should withdraw his view from the fairest corporeal forms; and, convinced that these are nothing more than images, vestiges and shadows of beauty, should eagerly soar to the fair original from which they are derived. For he who rushes to these lower beauties, as if grasping realities, when they are only like beautiful images appearing in water, will, doubtless, like him in the fable, by stretching after the shadow, sink into the lake and disappear. For, by thus embracing and adhering to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and horrid darkness; and thus blind, like those in the infernal regions, converses only with phantoms, deprived of the perception of what is real and true. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 226:And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity. Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 227:According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful! ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:All truth is profound. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
2:Buying is profound pleasure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
3:Buying is a profound pleasure. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
4:I desired dragons with a profound desire. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
5:With comedy I can search for the profound. ~ Dario Fo, #NFDB
6:Clearness ornaments profound thoughts. ~ Luc de Clapiers, #NFDB
7:Every profound spirit needs a mask ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
8:Every profound spirit needs a mask. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
9:Every war is a profound sexual revolution. ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
10:embrace of the kind of profound exuberance ~ Stephen White, #NFDB
11:I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
12:The most profound things are inexpressible. ~ Jenny Holzer, #NFDB
13:Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me. ~ Wilfred Burchett, #NFDB
14:Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
15:he may not be profound, he is always sincere. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
16:The essence of profound insight is simplicity. ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
17:The moon is profound except when we land on it. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
18:Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy. ~ Junot Diaz, #NFDB
19:Hope—for such a simple word its meaning is profound. ~ Sejal Badani, #NFDB
20:Ventilation is the profound secret of existence. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
21:Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured. ~ Andr Gide, #NFDB
22:Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death ~ Homer, #NFDB
23:There is merely profound horror and then there’s me. ~ Morgan Blayde, #NFDB
24:Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts. ~ Luc de Clapiers, #NFDB
25:Once a profound truth is seen, it cannot be unseen. ~ Dave Sim, #NFDB
26:Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
27:...when men like us do change, the change is profound. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
28:A lonely night is more profound then lonesome nights. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
29:Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet? ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
30:Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
31:Profound suffering makes you noble; it separates. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
32:The most profound statements are often said in silence. ~ Lynn Johnston, #NFDB
33:aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
34:I have a deep and profound mistrust of all politicians. ~ Craig Ferguson, #NFDB
35:That profound night freedom was agreeable and exciting. ~ Carmen Laforet, #NFDB
36:The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion. ~ Janna Levin, #NFDB
37:We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
38:Branding is a profound manifestation of the human condition ~ Wally Olins, #NFDB
39:It's good to be loved. It's profound to be understood. ~ Portia de Rossi, #NFDB
40:The type of work I like is pure and simple and profound. ~ Michael Heizer, #NFDB
41:What I'm saying might be profane, but it's also profound. ~ Richard Pryor, #NFDB
42:A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
43:A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. ~ R K Narayan, #NFDB
44:"There is a profound peace found only in non-reactivity." ~ Brian Thompson, #NFDB
45:What is God singing in his profound Delphi of gold and shadow? ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
46:True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
47:...every day in every life is of the most profound importance. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
48:For Erika, the most profound evidence of love is failure. ~ Elfriede Jelinek, #NFDB
49:My Father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic. ~ Spike Milligan, #NFDB
50:My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic. ~ Spike Milligan, #NFDB
51:Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
52:Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
53:I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny ~ Beryl Markham, #NFDB
54:There’s a plateau in pain where the most profound pleasure lives ~ Celia Aaron, #NFDB
55:To people, I may sound insane or profound, its their problem anyway! ~ Various, #NFDB
56:darkness makes the light more profound, and the words ring true. ~ Chelle Bliss, #NFDB
57:To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
58:From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
59:How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
60:Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
61:The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
62:The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
63:But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
64:need I see as he stares at me is foreplay of the most profound kind. ~ A M Madden, #NFDB
65:Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
66:Self-esteem is not a luxury; it is a profound spiritual need. ~ Nathaniel Branden, #NFDB
67:Something way more profound and lasting than happiness is peace. ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
68:There is a profound difference between information and meaning. ~ Warren G Bennis, #NFDB
69:writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
70:For six years profound silence was mistaken for profound wisdom. ~ Alben W Barkley, #NFDB
71:A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
72:A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
73:The effects of simplicity are profound indeed,
deep and far reaching. ~ Lao Tzu,#NFDB
74:Was a sadness so profound that the mind sought escape into fantasy? ~ Lorraine Heath, #NFDB
75:You will only find the profoundly inexpressible in profound silence. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
76:All profound truths startle you in the first announcement. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, #NFDB
77:I don't profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
78:Not every work of art is or need be a heavily profound statement. ~ Freeman Patterson, #NFDB
79:Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
80:The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
81:The most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism. ~ Jackson Lears, #NFDB
82:You've always mistaken my absolute self-assurance for profound thought. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
83:Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have. ~ Robin Lim, #NFDB
84:Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight? ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
85:Let it all go and enjoy the profound gifts found in your quiet places. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
86:Profound pain is often the unavoidable reality of conscious existence. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
87:Yes, we need to change, but simple changes can have profound impacts. ~ Louie Psihoyos, #NFDB
88:Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
89:I believe in loneliness so deep and profound it has a physical presence ~ Tarryn Fisher, #NFDB
90:In every age, the gospel fulfills people’s most profound aspirations. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
91:I think the most profound beauty is found in what our hearts love. ~ Julianne Donaldson, #NFDB
92:Silence is a profound melody, for those who can hear it above all the noise. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
93:...the exceptionally profound is always, by definition, basic and mundane. ~ K J Parker, #NFDB
94:When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
95:Few people realize the profound part angelic forces play in human events. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
96:Presence is one of the profound forms of Christian witness. ~ James William McClendon Jr, #NFDB
97:She entered my life so quietly, yet had such a profound impact on it. ~ Melanie Moreland, #NFDB
98:There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
99:When Jesus walks the waters of the sea, how profound the calm! ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
100:wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
101:I have to tell you, though, the sexism in late night talk is so profound. ~ Kathy Griffin, #NFDB
102:Selfless acts are a source of profound meaning for your self and your life. ~ Ron Kaufman, #NFDB
103:Today, more pastors than ever need profound encouragement and rejuvenation. ~ Will Graham, #NFDB
104:But there's nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing. ~ Rainbow Rowell, #NFDB
105:Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
106:James Clerk Maxwell's [work is the] most profound and the most fruitful. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
107:That raw need I see as he stares at me is foreplay of the most profound kind. ~ A M Madden, #NFDB
108:I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life. ~ James Ellroy, #NFDB
109:Profound commitment to a dream does not confine or constrain: it liberates. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
110:Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
111:The truth was obscure, Too profound and too pure, To live it you had to explode ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
112:To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
113:Trauma has a way of indelibly linking the incidentals to the profound. ~ Richard Paul Evans, #NFDB
114:All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
115:A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity. ~ John Howard Griffin, #NFDB
116:Even small acts of kindness can make a profound difference to somebody else. ~ Misha Collins, #NFDB
117:Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
118:...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
119:In Africa you have space...there a profound sense of space here, space and sky ~ Thabo Mbeki, #NFDB
120:The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
121:The Statue of Liberty really is profound, I just wish she'd lighten up a bit. ~ Dov Davidoff, #NFDB
122:If one desires to receive one must first give. This is called profound understanding. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
123:Profound virtue is indeed deep and wide. It leads all things back to the great order. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
124:...the pain that comes from loving someone who's in trouble can be profound. ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
125:Get in touch with nature. The stillness of nature is profound and yet subtle. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
126:I want to thank you for the profound joy I've had in the in the thought of you. ~ Rosie Alison, #NFDB
127:I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
128:Joys want the eternity of all things, they want deep, profound eternity! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
129:Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
130:To make profound changes in your life, you need either inspiration or desperation. ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
131:Hope was cruel. It could be an act of torture far more profound than despair. ~ Michelle Sagara, #NFDB
132:Raging anger and profound aching grief tend to make one act out of sorts. ~ Karen McCullah Lutz, #NFDB
133:Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
134:Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
135:There is something permanent, and something extremely profound, in owning a home. ~ Kenny Guinn, #NFDB
136:A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
137:Enlightenment gives profound joy of the heart and a great love for the fellow beings. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
138:It's such a profound alienation for a person not to be at home in their own body. ~ Marilyn Wann, #NFDB
139:Lost ages are neither more nor less profound than the one we live in right now. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
140:Magicians have taken something intrinsically profound and made it look trivial. ~ Jamy Ian Swiss, #NFDB
141:My sister comes on like a box of nails, but her devotion to the mythic is profound. ~ Leif Enger, #NFDB
142:She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
143:Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
144:This is the profound secret of innocence, that at the same time it is dread. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
145:The most profound, most memorable moments of life are the ones that make you feel. ~ Leylah Attar, #NFDB
146:There was sadness in his eyes, a sadness so profound it was almost frightening. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
147:The truth was obscure,
Too profound and too pure,
To live it you had to explode ~ Bob Dylan,#NFDB
148:Next I was plunged into a void so profound that I thought I´d gone blind. ~ Alexander Gordon Smith, #NFDB
149:Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
150:People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. ~ Albert Bandura, #NFDB
151:There is life after hell. There is breathing and life and profound love after hell. ~ Jessica Park, #NFDB
152:The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence. ~ Anthony Daniels, #NFDB
153:All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
154:Ancient masters of excellence had a subtle essence, and a depth too profound to comprehend. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
155:A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
156:Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother. ~ Christine Baranski, #NFDB
157:Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
158:Robert Allen said something quite profound: “No thought lives in your head rent-free. ~ T Harv Eker, #NFDB
159:Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments. ~ Stephen Crane, #NFDB
160:The profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discovery. ~ Joseph Fourier, #NFDB
161:There’s a moment of profound sadness that can be dispelled only by summoning my anger. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
162:I think 'Make love, not war' might be the most profound statement that's ever been made. ~ Jorja Fox, #NFDB
163:The energy of gratitude catapults us into the most profound experiences imaginable. ~ James F Twyman, #NFDB
164:You are unfolding with profound purpose; your purpose is revealing you, to yourself. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
165:Maia Sharp is one of America's great singer-songwriters. Her storytelling runs profound and ~ Don Was, #NFDB
166:Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
167:Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
168:The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
169:All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
170:A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
171:Being rich or famous is the only profound thing that some people have ever said. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
172:If you want to learn about America, watch The Wire. Its a profound piece of entertainment. ~ Sam Neill, #NFDB
173:On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
174:The profound divergences of opinion on war and peace had been shown to know no sex. ~ Sylvia Pankhurst, #NFDB
175:We never move on from the cross. We only get a more profound understanding of the cross. ~ C J Mahaney, #NFDB
176:He had fallen in love with her emotions, and that was a very profound feeling indeed. ~ Fran ois Lelord, #NFDB
177:I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste." ~ Cy Twombly, #NFDB
178:I'm such a profound believer that timing is everything; I would tattoo that on my arm. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
179:Profound silence; silence so deep that even their breathings were conspicuous in the hush. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
180:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
181:...when profound questions are asked of the heart, the answers are best kept to yourself. ~ Dan O Brien, #NFDB
182:Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
183:This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom. ~ Paul Ricoeur, #NFDB
184:Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers. ~ Peter Block, #NFDB
185:I doubt there is a loss in the universe more profound than a daughter losing her mother. ~ Sally Hepworth, #NFDB
186:Not that that's the goal, but sometimes these funny insights can also be deeply profound. ~ Ted Alexandro, #NFDB
187:The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
188:It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
189:I wish all difficult poems were profound. Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
190:The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
191:And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
192:At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity. ~ Yves Klein, #NFDB
193:Every Profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
194:In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
195:The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
196:whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
197:What we say has such a profound influence upon what we see, and hear, and taste of the world! ~ David Abram, #NFDB
198:Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
199:By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
200:every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
201:Her words were generically profound, like a Hallmark card I’d skim over to get to the check. ~ Julie Halpern, #NFDB
202:He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure. ~ Moliere, #NFDB
203:sometimes being superficial—taking things only at first glance—is the most profound approach. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
204:Spirit is like the wind, in that we can't see it but can see its effects, which are profound. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
205:The cross is proof of both the immense love of God and the profound wickedness of sin. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
206:The most profound difference between leaders is whether they fear or embrace new technology. ~ Satya Nadella, #NFDB
207:To watch how lovingly your children parent their own children is to know profound achievement. ~ Sally Field, #NFDB
208:We have to find a middle path, where there is neither joy nor suffering, only profound peace. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
209:And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
210:Beauty is that to what the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound. ~ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, #NFDB
211:but I doubt there is a loss in the universe more profound than a daughter losing her mother. ~ Sally Hepworth, #NFDB
212:People don't come to a comedy club simply to hear someone's thoughts, no matter how profound. ~ Ted Alexandro, #NFDB
213:That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
214:The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
215:A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface! ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
216:Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
217:In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
218:Knowing the Truth is Fairly Useless. Feeling it is Profound. Living it Makes All the Difference. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
219:Knowing the truth is fairly useless; feeling it is profound; living it makes all the difference. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
220:So often in life, moments that are long anticipated turn out to be profound disappointments. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
221:Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
222:The path of truth is profound—and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa, #NFDB
223:What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
224:'Fringe' is a sci-fi show. But once you go beyond the genre, you're immersed in a profound reality. ~ Anna Torv, #NFDB
225:God may call you to lead the charge, or he may call you to a quiet life of profound consequence. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
226:Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
227:Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots. ~ Delmore Schwartz, #NFDB
228:Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
229:To make profound changes in your life, you need either inspiration or desperation. —ANTHONY ROBBINS ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
230:How one election has exposed the true dire straits of the Democrat Party. It really is profound. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
231:Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
232:simple but very profound truth, “How can you let God down when you weren’t ever holding Him up? ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
233:The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known. ~ C L R James, #NFDB
234:The issue of transsexualism is an ethical one that has profound social and moral ramifications. ~ Janice Raymond, #NFDB
235:The profound aspect of technology is that once secrets are revealed, the magic doesn't disappear. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
236:They are all men (always men) of strong conviction and profound trust in their own judgement. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
237:Thought began to take over and obscured the simple yet profound joy of connectedness with being. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
238:What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
239:I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
240:I'm always without sleep. I've got two kids. I understand sleep deprivation on a profound level. ~ Cate Blanchett, #NFDB
241:Miss Marple made a ladylike noise of vexation like a cat sneezing to indicate profound disgust. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
242:Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
243:The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time. ~ Alan Hirsch, #NFDB
244:His most remarkable gift, as Laura saw it, was a deep and profound contentment with what he had. ~ Caroline Fraser, #NFDB
245:I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
246:Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
247:Men are men,” Whitebeard replied. “Dragons are dragons.” Ser Jorah snorted his disdain. “How profound. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
248:No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
249:No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
250:Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
251:She stays in the same spot, anchored by the profound, desperate loneliness of a bad relationship. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
252:That was when I realised that music is the most profound, magical form of communication there is. ~ Lesley Garrett, #NFDB
253:You want a profound and total lack of people violently dying on you, try dairy farming instead. ~ Anna Smith Spark, #NFDB
254:A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
255:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
256:I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
257:Our understanding of God’s love must be more profound than the naive expectation of a carefree life. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
258:Sorrow for not understanding like I understand now the unpredictable, profound journey that marriage is. ~ Ruby Dee, #NFDB
259:That’s the beauty of books, little sister. What means nothing to one has a profound effect on another. ~ Staci Hart, #NFDB
260:The ancients were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
261:What I really want from Music: That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
262:Clinton feels a profound alienation from the Washington culture here, and I happen to agree with him. ~ Bob Woodward, #NFDB
263:Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
264:Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
265:Meditation is a tool for helping us accept the profound fact that everything changes all the time. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
266:It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
267:It is useless to expect appreciation of his profound and fine senses from such men as the lieutenant. ~ Stephen Crane, #NFDB
268:results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. ~ James C Scott, #NFDB
269:And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
270:Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is? ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
271:In all of its vulnerability, profound sincerity does, in its relationship to knowledge, find its way. ~ John de Ruiter, #NFDB
272:Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
273:Profound things are simple. If it is not simple, it cannot be true. But simple things are difficult. ~ Douglas Harding, #NFDB
274:Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering. ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
275:That was one plus about profound self-loathing. Nobody could hate you worse than you hated yourself. ~ Francine Pascal, #NFDB
276:The silence following my speech was profound. He withdrew his hand. I felt its absence like a pressure. ~ Molly Tanzer, #NFDB
277:To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness. ~ Ivan Turgenev, #NFDB
278:A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
279:Certain small ways and observances sometimes have connection with large and more profound ideas. ~ Luther Standing Bear, #NFDB
280:Gratitude keeps your heart open. When you give with an open heart, you get the profound gift of humility. ~ Cami Walker, #NFDB
281:My eyebrows make a more profound impact on [other] people than they do on me... I just let 'em grow. ~ Peter Gallagher, #NFDB
282:Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting. ~ Julian Barbour, #NFDB
283:What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear. ~ Andrew Bird, #NFDB
284:Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
285:A woman who shaves or otherwise depilates her pubic curls has a profound interest in recreational sex. ~ Maureen Johnson, #NFDB
286:Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin, #NFDB
287:Here, inside her rooms, as she stood naked before him, an enchanted silence enclosed them, profound and ~ Meredith Duran, #NFDB
288:There’s a silence. A perfect, profound silence. One that sits low, twists a bit, and has damage within it. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
289:Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low. ~ Tom Peters, #NFDB
290:We are never more than a belief away from our greatest love, deepest healing, and most profound miracles. ~ Gregg Braden, #NFDB
291:Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
292:Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. ~ Damien Echols, #NFDB
293:My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I've ever had in my life. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
294:There is no loneliness more profound, in my experience, than being ignored by one's sole companion in life. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
295:There’s a silence. A perfect, profound, silence. One that sits low, twists a bit, and has damage within it. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
296:We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
297:We know the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
298:When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
299:I have a profound respect for cinematographers. That is my secret sauce. Like they are everything to me. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal, #NFDB
300:I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness." ~ Mark Leyner, #NFDB
301:It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can't reconcile for yourself. ~ Jerry A Coyne, #NFDB
302:I wake up to profound perspective that allows me to celebrate the choices of my moments, of my life. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher, #NFDB
303:Our life is just as long or short as our memory, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
304:The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
305:There is nothing more profound, nor will there ever be, than your place in the heart of the woman you love. ~ Kate Stewart, #NFDB
306:Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
307:What happened when we died? How were we to know that death wasn't as profound an adventure as life was? ~ Elin Hilderbrand, #NFDB
308:cruciferous vegetables are far more potent and have a more profound association in the scientific literature ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
309:The impact of all this persistent inequity on the economic (in)stability of unmarried women is profound. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
310:Happiness," he says, "is the price of profound thought."
"Who's that quote from?" I ask.
He winks. "Me. ~ Alice Oseman,#NFDB
311:It was a profound pleasure to her not to know what was coming next, provided some one whom she loved did. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
312:Nothing may truly be said to be a miracle except in the profound sense that everything is a miracle. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
313:The faculty of continual transformation... is a profound expression of the dynamic character of the mind ~ Anagarika Govinda, #NFDB
314:The party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
315:This was a profound realization that sex was the fruit of an emotional bond, not the dirt in which it grew. ~ Suanne Laqueur, #NFDB
316:All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
317:It is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction. ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
318:James Dean's death had a profound effect on me. The instant I heard about it, I vomited. I don't know why. ~ Montgomery Clift, #NFDB
319:Ken & Mark weave a simple, compelling tale that contains profound truths. If only we all knew The Secret. ~ Laurie Beth Jones, #NFDB
320:Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes. ~ Tony Reinke, #NFDB
321:Sincerity, a profound, grand, ingenuous sincerity is the first characteristic of all men who are in any way heroic. ~ Carlyle, #NFDB
322:The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
323:The opposite of a truth is a lie. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. ~ quantum physicist Niels #Bohr, #NFDB
324:Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
325:floccinaucinihilipilification, one of the most complicated. Hope—for such a simple word its meaning is profound ~ Sejal Badani, #NFDB
326:The experience of being cared for is profound, and it nourishes the soul as much as the food does the body. ~ Mariska Hargitay, #NFDB
327:The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
328:A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
329:But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you--though that's nothing new. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
330:Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is? ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
331:Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and penetrating influence of nature knows this. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
332:The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
333:There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.
You must translate. 'Tis fit we understand them. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
334:The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words. ~ Brian D McLaren, #NFDB
335:To disengage from the profound needs of those caught in suffering is to reject the call to bear the image of God. ~ Andy Crouch, #NFDB
336:Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root]. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
337:Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
338:I considered Nat King Cole to be a friend and, in many ways, a mentor. He always had words of profound advice. ~ Diahann Carroll, #NFDB
339:I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children. ~ Rosanne Cash, #NFDB
340:Of such divine neglect was atheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror. Thoughts ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
341:The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
342:Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
343:escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions ~ Lawrence M Krauss, #NFDB
344:Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
345:Friendships have profound effects on health, creating an impact that may be as significant as avoiding cigarettes. ~ Stacey Radin, #NFDB
346:I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it. ~ Banksy, #NFDB
347:It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
348:Maybe subconsciously I've kept activism separate from acting because it's important to me in a more profound way. ~ Blythe Danner, #NFDB
349:Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. ~ Cornel West, #NFDB
350:The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
351:I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through. ~ Ed Helms, #NFDB
352:One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound. ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
353:Our job is to get people to Jesus Christ and to get them back to Him in profound, life-altering ways every week. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
354:The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is. ~ Ernest Hello, #NFDB
355:A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
356:Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
357:He believed that a person’s most profound flaws or virtues emerge in great crisis, or they remain buried forever. ~ Julia Heaberlin, #NFDB
358:I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
359:No one likes it, apart from blind people, and I'm sure even they can sense it's profound ugliness as it passes by. ~ Richard Curtis, #NFDB
360:The fear of God is a profound respect for His holiness, which includes a fear of the consequences of disobeying Him. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
361:The men with stars on their shoulders supporting gays serving in the military is going to have a profound impact. ~ Norah O Donnell, #NFDB
362:...the point was that no one ever knows when something they say will cause a profound change in somebody else ~ Ambelin Kwaymullina, #NFDB
363:Disappointment for Slavs is always more poetic and profound, as well as more frequent, than it is for Americans. ~ Stuart Rojstaczer, #NFDB
364:I might repeat to myself . . . a list of quotations from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
365:It is my fate, it seems, to fall privy to rare and splendid vistas in a state of exhaustion too profound to care. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
366:The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
367:You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
368:Anime has sent me all over the world, introducing me to people who have touched my life in indescribably profound ways. ~ Steven Blum, #NFDB
369:Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
370:Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
371:Do you believe in soul mates? A connection so sacred and profound that one soul instantly recognizes it’s other half? ~ Siobhan Davis, #NFDB
372:Eat in a way that is relaxing and brings you joy. It doesn’t take too much organizing and the results are profound. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
373:Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
374:So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
375:There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
376:The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
377:All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
378:Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
379:Love cannot exist in peace, it will always come accompanied by agonies, ecstasies, intense joys and profound sadnesses. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
380:Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
381:Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as “Crazy Blues. ~ Elijah Wald, #NFDB
382:Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
383:Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ? ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
384:Joan Ashby is one of our most astonishing writers, a master of words whose profound characters slip free of the page... ~ Cherise Wolas, #NFDB
385:Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
386:The "times," "the age" what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
387:Thus, in setting an American agenda for a New World Order, we must begin with a profound alteration in traditional thought. ~ Joe Biden, #NFDB
388:A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
389:Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. ~ Eugene Ionesco, #NFDB
390:He had the expression of a man whose profound relief was horribly tempered by a dread that it wouldn't last very long. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
391:If you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst to profound reinvention. ~ Conan O Brien, #NFDB
392:India is the land of the profound and the profane; a place where spirituality and sanctimoniousness sit miles apart. I ~ Sarah Macdonald, #NFDB
393:Our experience has taught us that with goodwill a negotiated solution can be found for even the most profound problems. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
394:To pause one’s life for another was a profound gesture of caring. What greater gift can one give another person but time? ~ G L Carriger, #NFDB
395:...unearthing the truth was akin to creating it; something new and profound appeared where it hadn't been before. ~ Patti Callahan Henry, #NFDB
396:I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten. ~ Anne Frank, #NFDB
397:If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study. ~ Leslie Stephen, #NFDB
398:Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it. ~ Tiffany Madison, #NFDB
399:Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. ~ Mo Yan, #NFDB
400:Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
401:The need to belong goes beyond the need for superficial social ties . . . it is a need for meaningful, profound bonding. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
402:There’s a profound difference between interest and commitment. Interest reads a book; commitment applies the book 50 times. ~ M J DeMarco, #NFDB
403:The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
404:What are the convulsions of a city compared to the emeutes of the soul? Man is a depth still more profound than the people. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
405:What are the convulsions of a city compared with the riots of the soul? Man is a depth still more profound than the people. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
406:By taking the time to live life in the slow lane, we quickly experience a deeper, more profound experience of contentment. ~ Michael Neill, #NFDB
407:Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror. ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, #NFDB
408:My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
409:Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
410:Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate. ~ Bruce Sterling, #NFDB
411:And my inability to share this anger with anybody in the lobby aroused in me a profound sense of isolation." - Toru Okada ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
412:Doing something really profound and personal is bigger than a fad.
It's not some passing fancy.
It's always number one. ~ Chris Rock,#NFDB
413:Faith, even when profound, is never complete. It has to be endlessly sustained or, at least, preserved from destruction. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
414:I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves. ~ Shirley MacLaine, #NFDB
415:I had become Harry Potter. Except I was thirteen and not magic, and my destiny, whatever it was, held no profound purpose. ~ Tammara Webber, #NFDB
416:I think it's really important with kids just to show them the beauty of nature and teach them a profound respect for nature. ~ Jack Johnson, #NFDB
417:It was an organization of obstacles and precautions—based at bottom on a profound suspicion of human nature.”11 Furthermore, ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
418:I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. ~ Rand Paul, #NFDB
419:Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
420:Until man in his heart is ready, a profound change of the world conditions cannot come. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Internationalism, #NFDB
421:Hope is at once both simple and profound. It is hope that binds Heaven and earth. Hope is the bridge between Heaven and earth. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
422:I got a woman I'm loyal to above all things, above my career. She's profound to me. I'm quiet. I live in Kansas City. I work. ~ James Ellroy, #NFDB
423:Penis Maaaaan! Able to leap tall buildings … owing mostly to his profound motivation not to get snagged on a lightning rod. ~ Laurie Frankel, #NFDB
424:She had discovered that loving an imperfect, all-too-human man was a far more profound experience than loving a perfect idol. ~ Candice Hern, #NFDB
425:Packs a Huge Emotional Punch! Graceful Writing, Great Acting, Exquisite Direction, Suspense, Profound Subject Matter and It Rocks! ~ Rex Reed, #NFDB
426:Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning. ~ Sugata Mitra, #NFDB
427:The horror is having profound power in one hand and a strong moral sense in the other and absolutely no foundation to stand on. ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
428:You can't live your life in a state of profundity, because you're never going to get anything done, and you're just profound. ~ Timothy Spall, #NFDB
429:All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate. ~ Julio Cortazar, #NFDB
430:All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate. ~ Julio Cort zar, #NFDB
431:I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
432:once observed: “most people take the limits of their vision to be the limits of the world. A few do not. Join them.” Profound ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
433:That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
434:The Bhagavad-Gita has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by its devotion to God which is manifested by actions. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
435:There are not enough morally brave men in stock. We are out of moral-courage material; we are in a condition of profound poverty. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
436:Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures? And that, you gave to agree, is a profound question. ~ Ted Chiang, #NFDB
437:But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
438:Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films. ~ Jacques Rivette, #NFDB
439:If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery. ~ John R W Stott, #NFDB
440:In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in. ~ David Markson, #NFDB
441:Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
442:The ancients were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable. Because it is unfathomable, ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
443:The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
444:They had such a profound effect on those who sang and heard them that the ancient chants became known as “the beautiful mystery. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
445:"Those who give up dreams, do injury to their own hearts and cannot possibly enjoy a profound sense of fulfillment in the end. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
446:We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
447:A profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a compulsion to learn by doing are among the most reliable signs of genius. ~ Sylvia Nasar, #NFDB
448:As you go into the light, you will gain a more profound happiness. That happiness will free you from the desire-aversion cycle. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
449:Black and white are absolute...expressing the most delicate vibration, the most profound tranquility, and unlimited profundity. ~ Shiko Munakata, #NFDB
450:But sometimes in my reading I would discover new insights or have seemingly profound thoughts that would change my way of thinking. ~ Amy Harmon, #NFDB
451:Giving respect is an obligation, not a favor; it is an act of maturity, birthed in a profound understanding of God’s good grace. ~ Gary L Thomas, #NFDB
452:She wondered which wounds went deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination? ~ Vita Sackville West, #NFDB
453:..some say she is now nothing more than darkness manifest, a thing of absences so profound as to give the illusion of presence. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
454:Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
455:The adage: “He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom,” could never be applied to my profound and quiet master. Though ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
456:This is a powerful book--Tiny is mighty. Sharon Rowe's simple shift in thinking is a profound idea, precisely what we need to hear. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
457:Too much brilliance has its disadvantages, and misplaced wit may raise a laugh, but often beheads a topic of profound interest. ~ Margot Asquith, #NFDB
458:But sometimes, when you have to change, the metamorphosis is so profound, that the old you can’t look the new you in the eyes. “What’s ~ K Larsen, #NFDB
459:Global climate change has a profound impact on the survival and development of mankind. It is a major challenge facing all countries. ~ Hu Jintao, #NFDB
460:Heart thoughts are profound, hindsight aches and hope is obscure. I'm craving a great adventure -- one that leads me back home. ~ Donna Lynn Hope, #NFDB
461:I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do. ~ Saul Leiter, #NFDB
462:Our Lord needs from us neither great deeds nor profound thoughts. Neither intelligence nor talents. He cherishes simplicity. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
463:Profound, bottomless self-doubt - it has no value - what's the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
464:Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
465:Social media can have a profound impact on your life if you let it—but the power of any tool lies in the intentions of its user. ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
466:the key to life is to believe in something that matters, something big and beautiful, something more profound than fame, money. ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
467:The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
468:To know something about trees-about even one tree-is to know something profound about the nature of the world and our place in it. ~ Gerald Jonas, #NFDB
469:What an intense thing it is — this human need to be loved. It’s one of the most profound things that make social animals social. ~ Marina Chapman, #NFDB
470:wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
471:As writers we have the profound privilege and responsibility to create a new world when the current one takes a turn for the worse. ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
472:A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is consituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
473:Clever, witty and absorbing, Amortality is a much-needed anatomy of our profound malaise about ageing. Its charms will never fade. ~ David Baddiel, #NFDB
474:I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who love literature. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
475:If leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led. ~ George Takei, #NFDB
476:lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came
into the ragged meadow of my soul. ~ E E Cummings,#NFDB
477:The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
478:There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
479:There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
480:Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”) ~ Bruce Bawer, #NFDB
481:To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
482:And because God has entrusted you with such riches, you can use these resources to make a profound difference in countless lives. ~ Craig Groeschel, #NFDB
483:A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
484:Comedians can articulate some important and profound ideas that address a lot of the hypocrisy we're inundated with (in the media). ~ Ted Alexandro, #NFDB
485:Extreme emotional pain has a profound effect on the body. I witnessed my already frail body become even more toxic and plundered. ~ Sharon E Rainey, #NFDB
486:For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
487:How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
488:Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder. ~ Jennifer Stone, #NFDB
489:It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. ~ Josh Waitzkin, #NFDB
490:My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself. ~ Rachel Kushner, #NFDB
491:Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all things in God - this is the sign that you are on this right path. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
492:Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
493:Thats the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous. ~ Galway Kinnell, #NFDB
494:True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God. ~ Bill W, #NFDB
495:We call this the spirit of Ubuntu, that profound African sense that we are human only through the humanity of other human beings. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
496:But taking a few minutes out of your morning routine to spend outside can have a profound effect on your mental and physical well-being. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
497:Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
498:Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
499:Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
500:There is woven inside each of us a desire for something more—a craving to be part of something bigger, greater, and more profound ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
501:Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it." "You are very philosophical. 'A negation' is profound talking. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
502:We reflect on what has been lost and comfort those enduring a profound grief. And somehow we know that a brighter morning will come. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
503:we will see profound spiritual renovation if by God’s grace we make it our commitment not to put anyone down—except on our prayer list. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
504:What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
505:Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
506:I think that [respect for people] is of profound importance because it means you are caring and you trust them to do the right thing. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
507:It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. ~ Joshua Waitzkin, #NFDB
508:People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
509:Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
510:When you reject your sadness,you become unhappy.When you are presentwith your sadness,you discover profound joy.This is love’s paradox. ~ Jeff Foster, #NFDB
511:While nothing in the Bible is contradictory, many of the Bible’s most provocative and profound truths appear to us paradoxical. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
512:Words have less substance than air. Don't tell me about your zealous dreams, your firm convictions, your profound love―show me. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
513:You have the freedom to trust and the freedom to turn. This is the profound and sometimes painful mystery of community and love. ~ William Paul Young, #NFDB
514:In the early days, I often felt that I was taking a math test when we were playing. It was a profound feeling of having to prove myself. ~ Chris Stein, #NFDB
515:our world has a growing need for people trained in profound degrees of doubt, more so than for people skilled at handling certainties. ~ Nilton Bonder, #NFDB
516:Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
517:there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
518:The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - the principle of civilian ascendency over the military. ~ William O Douglas, #NFDB
519:We all have auras. But it's much easier to see the aura of someone who is in a state of samadhi or other profound state of awareness. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
520:Afflictions make the heart more deep, more experimental, more knowing and profound, and so, more able to hold, to contain, and beat more. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
521:Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to maintain its difference from—and position above—other cultural forms. ~ Sarah Thornton, #NFDB
522:His (God) love is not a passing fancy or superficial emotion; it is a profound and unshakable commitment that seeks what is best for us. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
523:how you perform and treat others within the context of those expectations will have a profound effect, whether or not you want it to. ~ Jennifer Chance, #NFDB
524:I don't believe that songwriting has to be profound, but I truly believe that it's a crime for you to go outta your way for it not to be. ~ Steve Earle, #NFDB
525:It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
526:It has been said that if you don't see God in the profane and the profound, you're missing half the story. That is a great Truth. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
527:It has been said that if you don’t see God in the profane and the profound, you’re missing half the story. That is a great Truth. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
528:It's all kinds of these profound things crashing on you when your child arrives into the world. It's like you've met your reason to live. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
529:Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
530:My hope is that this movie will affect people on a very profound level and reach them with a message of faith, hope, love and forgiveness. ~ Mel Gibson, #NFDB
531:Our Lord needs from us neither great deeds nor profound thoughts. Neither intelligence nor talents. He cherishes simplicity. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
532:Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
533:Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories. ~ Pierre Simon Laplace, #NFDB
534:The most generous choices, especially the persevering, are the fruit of profound and prolonged union with God in prayerful silence. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
535:The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
536:There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
537:They found its teachings profound. So much love. So much joy. Such inner peace. In their idealism, they overlooked its harsher realities. ~ Shulem Deen, #NFDB
538:who knows that he is profound strives for clearness; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
539:You cannot learn a lesson of profound forgiveness unless you understand what it is to be wounded and forgive that which has wounded you. ~ Ben Kingsley, #NFDB
540:America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be. ~ A A Gill, #NFDB
541:Getting married has shifted my focus, in such a profound way. You just realize, "Oh, I can't be so selfish anymore. There's someone else." ~ Jason Biggs, #NFDB
542:I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
543:It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books. ~ Baltasar Gracian, #NFDB
544:Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
545:The emergence of wholes from parts exudes an aroma of mystery, of elusive but profound truths. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind, #NFDB
546:Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
547:To know that everything we say and do to this new little human being may have a profound effect on him or her is a daunting obligation. ~ Gloria Estefan, #NFDB
548:Do you have a lot of other profound thoughts like that? Blood is blood? A toaster is a toaster? A Gelatinous Cube is a Gelatinous Cube? ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
549:I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
550:It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. ~ Wilfred Owen, #NFDB
551:...Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
552:Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
553:The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
554:Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
555:Godzilla. The big, green G-man has had a profound influence on my creative endeavors and imagination since I was blueberry-avoiding kid. ~ Jeremy Robinson, #NFDB
556:I cannot conceive of a great scientist without this profound faith: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
557:In all the books I’ve read, I’ve come to learn that the effort of reading an entire book is often rewarded with a single profound sentence. ~ Tim Challies, #NFDB
558:Law Number IX: Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum extent possible to make trivial ideas profound ... Q.E.D. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine, #NFDB
559:Real benefits come when managers begin to understand the profound difference between 'cost cutting' and 'eliminating the causes of costs' ~ Brian L Joiner, #NFDB
560:The most profound security threat we face today is global warming....climate change has the capacity to change the way all of us live. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
561:There was no darkness so profound as the simple daylight they left me in, nor any noise so soul-cracking as the silence left when they departed. ~ Various, #NFDB
562:And let me make the radical statement that I don’t believe that you can say something profound in the 140 characters that make up a tweet. ~ Bernie Sanders, #NFDB
563:Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness. ~ Stephen Levine, #NFDB
564:He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
565:I love my mystery, I love the abstract world I live in, the delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously, wordless sensations I experience. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
566:inspiration is no guarantee of truth, any more than a profound religious experience is a guarantee that it comes from a good source. ~ Ben Witherington III, #NFDB
567:It was no wonder my love life was so messed up when the most profound and intimate moments were always being interrupted by dire situations ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
568:Niels Bohr wrote, “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
569:Seal the openings, shut the doors, dull the sharpness, untie the knots, dim the light, become one with the dust. This is called the profound union. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
570:The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
571:The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence. ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
572:And" was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
573:Any profound view of the world is mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world, both of which are nonrational entities. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
574:Beauty is always found in the profound and deepest actions of a person who does things from the heart not from the shallowness of materialism. ~ Paul Isaacs, #NFDB
575:Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love. ~ William Ralph Inge, #NFDB
576:Love for children is the enormous untapped power that can wake us up to the profound changes we need to make if we’re to have a future worth living. ~ Raffi, #NFDB
577:One of the more profound lessons that I've learnt in politics is that everything is related to everything else. Nothing exists in a vacuum. ~ Bernie Sanders, #NFDB
578:Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids. ~ James Turrell, #NFDB
579:Surfing's a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
580:To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
581:Try, but thou shalt not find the frontiers of the soul even if thou scourest all its ways; so profound is the extension of its reasoning being. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
582:After his retirement, Pranabananda wrote Pranab Gita, a profound commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, available in Hindi and Bengali. The ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
583:I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
584:My parents were divorced and I didn't grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound. ~ Laura Linney, #NFDB
585:Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
586:The fact is that the creative person is a disciplined craftsman whose 'gift' is a reaching out toward his most profound personal potential. ~ Joseph C Zinker, #NFDB
587:The masters were said to be profound
because they show the greatest wisdom
when comfortable
in Life’s mysterious
and unknown depths ~ Lao Tzu,#NFDB
588:The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
589:when all of life becomes crowded with profound and weighty matters, making time to engage in trivial things becomes an even greater priority. ~ Galen Beckett, #NFDB
590:You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
591:Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
592:Don't be a half-Christian. There are too many of such in the world. The world has a profound respect for people who are sincere in their faith. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
593:He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust--a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything. ~ Andr Gide, #NFDB
594:I believe that incentivized prizing is the best solution to help unlock the answers to the some of the profound problems that plague our planet. ~ Naveen Jain, #NFDB
595:It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.' ~ Charles Lyell, #NFDB
596:The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional readjustment. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
597:We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
598:We speak it literally, metaphorically, rhythmically and harmoniously; yet it is perceived diversely to have the most profound affect, universally. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
599:At bottom the character of M. Bonacieux was one of profound selfishness mixed with sordid avarice, the whole seasoned with extreme cowardice. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
600:I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
601:The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine might be the most helpful and profound book I've read in years. If you're in pastoral ministry grab a copy. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
602:The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
603:The shallow is easy to embrace, but the profound is difficult. To discard the shallow and seek the profound is the way of a person of courage. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
604:A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever. ~ Warren G Bennis, #NFDB
605:But perhaps the main reason I was not ground down by Irene’s rage was that I always knew that it masked her profound sadness, despair, and fear. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
606:Clinton's hands remain incredibly clean, don't they, and Tony Blair's smile remains as wide as ever. I view these guises with profound contempt. ~ Harold Pinter, #NFDB
607:Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
608:I think when you go through something that changes you, it is profound in a way and if somebody is helping you, it brings you closer together. ~ Emily Deschanel, #NFDB
609:Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty. ~ William Gay, #NFDB
610:My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. ~ Peter S Beagle, #NFDB
611:Nobody knows like a woman how to say things at the same time sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is all of Heaven. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
612:Our problem is that when you lose the touchstone, which is humanity, then when you have something like humans dying, it needs to feel profound. ~ Caroline Dries, #NFDB
613:The profound originality of a divine-human pact in which both parties complain endlessly about each other has too rarely been acknowledged as such. ~ Jack Miles, #NFDB
614:I've been in a lot of fiery relationships, and it is so exciting. But there's a more profound feeling when the love is just real and not so painful. ~ Ali Larter, #NFDB
615:People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
616:President Obama's actions are an unconscionable betrayal of America's fundamental values and a profound insult to the oppressed Cuban people. ~ Mario Diaz Balart, #NFDB
617:The turmoil that my dad went through, and then by extension, the kids went though, was profound and disastrous for the marriage, for the family. ~ Bryan Cranston, #NFDB
618:When you love people and have the desire to make a profound, positive impact upon the world, then will you have accomplished the meaning to live. ~ Sasha Azevedo, #NFDB
619:Yet sometimes, when the secret cup Of still and serious thought went round, It seemed as if he drank it up, He felt with spirit so profound. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
620:And what do we have? A profound if sexless intimacy of a kind I’ve never known with either man or woman since childhood, and perhaps not even then. ~ Andrew Pyper, #NFDB
621:How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
622:Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound. ~ Kamila Shamsie, #NFDB
623:Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
624:The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
625:Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound. ~ Lars Fredrik H ndler Svendsen, #NFDB
626:Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
627:Fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity. It is a reaction usually based on profound fear and defensiveness against “losing the faith. ~ Jim Wallis, #NFDB
628:I guess when you'd lived as long, and pondered as much, as Old Tom had...a game of hopscotch could be more profound than village politics or gossip. ~ Linda Medley, #NFDB
629:I hurry to express to you and your fellow citizens my profound sorrow and my closeness in prayer for the nation at this dark and tragic moment. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
630:Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
631:Profound theology doesn’t make anyone righteous; what pleases me is an exemplary life. Regret for wrongdoing is better than knowing its definition. ~ Thomas Kempis, #NFDB
632:To such atrocities may men be driven who use the dagger for a cross, and upon whose mind the most trivial event makes a deep and profound impression. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
633:was profound insight of a spiritual nature that could help me live my everyday life unconstrained by conflict, either with others or within myself. These ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
634:When the voice and the vision on the inside is more profound, and more clear and loud than all opinions on the outside, you've begun to master your life. ~ Dr John, #NFDB
635:A profound design process eventually makes the patron, the architect, and every occasional visitor in the building a slightly better human being. ~ Juhani Pallasmaa, #NFDB
636:As a child, I came across the Bible, but nobody in my family had anything to do with religion. I just felt a profound truth there that appealed to me. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
637:Dreams provide a kind of wisdom of the heart, an echoing voice of a profound human sensitivity too often lost to us in the reasonable life of days. ~ Sheldon B Kopp, #NFDB
638:Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection admits a sacrifice. ~ Luc de Clapiers, #NFDB
639:The concept of recovery is rooted in the simple yet profound realization that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are human beings. ~ Patricia Deegan, #NFDB
640:There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word. ~ Ben Kingsley, #NFDB
641:Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong. ~ Carolyn Heilbrun, #NFDB
642:We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of women within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
643:Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,--on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
644:Built into bad news is that sense of profound disbelief. The mind struggles to absorb the bare facts, defending itself against the larger implications. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
645:I think we live in a period of profound transformation. Very similar to when we had a transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies. ~ Angela Merkel, #NFDB
646:One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
647:To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault. ~ Robert Conquest, #NFDB
648:All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance. ~ Frederic Laloux, #NFDB
649:Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
650:I always have had, and always shall have, a profound regard for Christianity, the religion of my fathers, and for its rights, its usages and observances. ~ Henry Clay, #NFDB
651:I'm not a pop act, churning stuff out really quickly. I find the music that arises from that style of working is distracted, not particularly profound. ~ Paloma Faith, #NFDB
652:It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
653:I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me. ~ Brian Clough, #NFDB
654:The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
655:There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives. ~ Barbara Kruger, #NFDB
656:I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. ~ Vernor Vinge, #NFDB
657:If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness. ~ Marjorie Garber, #NFDB
658:Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
659:The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. ~ Mark Weiser, #NFDB
660:When you tidy your space completely, you transform the scenery. The change is so profound that you feel as if you are living in a totally different world. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
661:A mystical experience is a profound awakening to a cosmic truth in which that truth goes from being a mental idea to an animated force within your soul. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
662:God made you for a reason and your life has profound meaning! We discover that meaning and purpose only when we make God the reference point of our lives. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
663:Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd. ~ Pete Walker, #NFDB
664:Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
665:Probably the most profound thing in the Bible is 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.' This is what, to me, is the essence of Christianity. ~ Dave Brubeck, #NFDB
666:Revolutions that upend established scientific truth are exceedingly rare. But when they happen, they can have profound effects on science and technology. ~ Kip S Thorne, #NFDB
667:What you said the other day about the futility of running away was very profound; and very courageous. Listen, Henry, I believe you should talk with Jung. I ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
668:When do you feel most loved? Are you willing to be loved today? Self-love is the magnet that attracts deep and profound expressions of love from others ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
669:A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
670:My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
671:People who open themselves to the beauty and excellence around them are more likely to find joy, meaning, and profound connections in their lives, ~ Stephanie Rosenbloom, #NFDB
672:The soil of suffering and its painful growing conditions yield deep roots and beautiful fruit: great comfort, transparency, heart healing, profound joy. — ~ Melanie Dale, #NFDB
673:Walden, which is a diary that oscillates between eye-rolling minute tedium and laughable hyperbole, with sections of profound whimsy and social condescension. ~ A A Gill, #NFDB
674:When service members are discharged, we should express our gratitude for their profound personal sacrifice, not hand them a bill for their hospital food. ~ Barbara Boxer, #NFDB
675:wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
676:You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
677:You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
678:And it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
679:A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices. ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
680:Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
681:I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
682:Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. ~ Andre Breton, #NFDB
683:That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
684:The gospel is so simple that small children can understand it, and it is so profound that studies by the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches. ~ Charles Hodge, #NFDB
685:There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
686:They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
687:Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly. ~ Robert McKee, #NFDB
688:I always say, when the voice and the vision on the inside become more profound, clear, and loud than the opinions on the outside, you’ve mastered your life! ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
689:Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense. ~ George Friedman, #NFDB
690:In a profound, symbolic gesture, I am giving you this bar of Vosges I got when we went to Edgartown. You can eat it, or just sit next to it and feel superior. ~ E Lockhart, #NFDB
691:That to be an activist, you have to stay active. For me, it's profound; it's not something you choose to do every five years because it's chic to say it. ~ Iman Abdulmajid, #NFDB
692:the profound insight of the activated trans-personal layer, and the sharp vision of a highly developed consciousness, have to be brought into relationship, ~ Erich Neumann, #NFDB
693:When my father died in my arms it had such a profound affect on me that at that very moment when my dad passed I realized that I needed to face my own fears. ~ Criss Angel, #NFDB
694:When the voice and the vision on the inside is more profound, and more clear and loud than all opinions on the outside, you've begun to master your life ~ John F Demartini, #NFDB
695:Why do you think that's the most profound thing for a person? It's both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved. ~ Ava Dellaira, #NFDB
696:Why do you think that’s the most profound thing for a person? It’s both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved. ~ Ava Dellaira, #NFDB
697:Words will not be able to ever express how sorry I am for this, and I have profound regret and sorrow for the multitude of mistakes and harm I have caused. ~ Jack Abramoff, #NFDB
698:You have been created by God and for God, and someday you will stand amazed at the simple yet profound ways He has used you even when you weren't aware of it. ~ Kay Arthur, #NFDB
699:Soon there will be nothing truly profound that is not achieved by everyone, and of the difficult things in this world only one will be left: simplicity. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
700:Whatever the drawbacks and failures I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration ~ Ronnie Kasrils, #NFDB
701:What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
702:What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
703:Words - especially written ones, meant only for us - have a power to comfort, tell truths, and communicate profound emotions in a way that few things can. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
704:You make me think of Casanova, except that in between the erotic, Casanova was boring, while you, in between eroticism and even because of it, you get profound. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
705:A myth... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension... A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
706:I got involved with classical music when I was in high school and it's followed me throughout my entire life and probably had a profound effect on my life. ~ Benjamin Carson, #NFDB
707:the party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, but i think they do it to make us feel important ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
708:A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business. ~ Jack Kevorkian, #NFDB
709:Colin: I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.
Hassan: Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice. ~ John Green,#NFDB
710:I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build. ~ Vinton Cerf, #NFDB
711:It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage. ~ Julian Fellowes, #NFDB
712:The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound. ~ William Finnegan, #NFDB
713:this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
714:What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant... ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
715:a campaign against the two most profound evils threatening America at that time: the drinking of alcohol and the teaching of evolution in public schools. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
716:fellow Commissioners, whose dedication to this task has been profound. We have reasoned together over every page, and the report has benefited from this remarkable ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
717:I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound—if I can remember any of the damn things. —Dorothy Parker ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
718:Not all murder is evil...
In the right time, the right place, for the right reason --
it can be a blessing more profound than any you can imagine ~ J Michael Straczynski,#NFDB
719:...and sank into the profound slumber which comes only to such fortunate folk as are troubled neither with mosquitoes nor fleas nor excessive activity of brain. ~ Nikolai Gogol, #NFDB
720:Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
721:I hear the beating of the waves you carry in your chest
That simple and that profound
This love that binds us
Folded in pieces inside love’s soul. ~ Rachel Thompson,#NFDB
722:It is a misconception that the innocent sleep well. The worse a man is, the more profound his slumber; for if he had a conscience, he would not be a villain. ~ Elizabeth Peters, #NFDB
723:peace. Profound happiness, unlike fleeting pleasures, is spiritual by nature. It depends on the happiness of others, and it is based on love and tenderness. We ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
724:Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
725:When you're in front of an audience, you know if it didn't work. I get very nervous and have a fear of failure that is much more profound than in the podcast world. ~ Andy Daly, #NFDB
726:Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine. ~ Emily Greene Balch, #NFDB
727:I believe we have a profound fundamental need for areas of the earth where we stand without our mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment. ~ Howard Zahniser, #NFDB
728:Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
729:Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse. ~ Samuel Thayer, #NFDB
730:Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
731:Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel, #NFDB
732:To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
733:Toxic remnants of war represent a profound challenge for the protection of public health and the restoration of the environment in countries affected by conflict. ~ Widad Akreyi, #NFDB
734:Within this circle of ideas, c, h, and G attain an exalted status. They are the enablers of profound principles of physics that couldn't make sense without them. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
735:With purpose to be dressed in an opinion of wisdom gravity profound conceit as who should say 'I am Sir Oracle and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.' 1.1 ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
736:With the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women began—widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more profound change. ~ Friedrich Engels, #NFDB
737:And it occurred to me that there was no profound difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
738:Everything is darkest," Xaphen mused, "before the dawn."
"That, my brother, is an axiom that sounds immensely profound until you realize it's a lie. ~ Aaron Dembski Bowden,#NFDB
739:I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if i can remember any of the damn things. ~ Dorothy Parker, The Little Hours., #NFDB
740:It's interesting, editing can be so immersive for me that I've noticed that the authors I edit have a pretty profound effect on how I hear language for a while. ~ Danielle Dutton, #NFDB
741:It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.
....
The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
742:Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
743:Society suffers from a profound feeling of unhappiness, not so much when it is in material poverty as when its members are deprived of a large part of their humanity. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
744:War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
745:Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
746:Agape love is...profound concern for the well-being of another, without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
747:...and sank into the profound slumber which comes only to such
fortunate folk as are troubled neither with mosquitoes nor fleas nor excessive activity of brain. ~ Nikolai Gogol,#NFDB
748:I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
749:Life is not all about profundity. Life is about little things that piss you off, little triumphs, little defeats. So, you can't spend all your time being profound. ~ Timothy Spall, #NFDB
750:More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
751:States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
752:The mistake that people make in stand-up is thinking they're profound or they're deep when there are so many people who have more worthwhile ways of phrasing things. ~ Colin Quinn, #NFDB
753:There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
754:There is Bengal, and Bihar, Barakor river is in the middle of them; so strange, so profound! No other river (not even Ganga) has cast so vast a spell on me. ~ Sukanta Bhattacharya, #NFDB
755:They hope they’ll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative. ~ Michael Cunningham, #NFDB
756:To ache so deeply now for Nana gave the older woman’s life profound meaning. It was a privilege to mourn such a loss because it meant you had loved and been loved. ~ Deborah Raney, #NFDB
757:"To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
758:What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology. ~ Barry Commoner, #NFDB
759:You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew? ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
760:You could be a rebel, a profound thinker, and a rock and roll maniac and still eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and drink a nice cup of tea with your friends. ~ Pamela Des Barres, #NFDB
761:Authentic happiness is not linked to an activity; it is a state of being, a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
762:Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo. ~ Peter Senge, #NFDB
763:I knew that these people were not idiots, so the only thing I could attribute their insane response to was a profound lack of courage and intellectual integrity. ~ Patrick Lencioni, #NFDB
764:Now my ability to notice things and respond to things and be here is far more profound. With that comes happiness, with it comes sadness, but it's a beautiful life. ~ Nicole Kidman, #NFDB
765:Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. And the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
766:The audience wants a safety blanket. It's the storyteller's job to take that safety blanket and choke them with it until they experience a profound narrative orgasm. ~ Chuck Wendig, #NFDB
767:The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
768:There was a profound silence, abruptly broken by an enormously loud rumble from George's stomach. Plaster didn't actually fall from the ceiling, but it was close. ~ Jonathan Stroud, #NFDB
769:What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
770:And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
771:An intuitive grasp of your character is formed by exploring scenes of profound emotional import-moments of overwhelming shame, joy, fear, pride, regret, forgiveness. ~ David Corbett, #NFDB
772:Anything’s possible, I suppose. It’s a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
773:As you progress, you will discover a profound truth: in life, as in meditation, physical pain is unavoidable, but suffering of every kind is entirely optional. ~ Culadasa John Yates, #NFDB
774:finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience. Art becomes profound when it exposes us, explains us, or inspires us. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus, #NFDB
775:In this momentous night, however, he knew far more sadness than grief, and while deep sadness bruises the heart, it doesn’t leave the enduring scars of profound grief. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
776:It is a misconception that the innocent sleep well. The worse a man is, the more profound his slumber; for if he had a conscience, he would not be a villain. When ~ Elizabeth Peters, #NFDB
777:Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
778:Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be 'unseen'. There's no 'going back' to the person you were. Even if such a possibility did exist... why would you want to? ~ Dave Sim, #NFDB
779:Sometimes losses in life are not losses at all. They are simply the evidence God provides, in order to build a story so profound, that it will cause social change. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
780:This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If ~ Kim Addonizio, #NFDB
781:What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
782:You just get this profound feeling of instability . . . the Earth isn't stable anymore and then it passes and it becomes more infrequent, but I still get it sometimes. ~ Liam Neeson, #NFDB
783:Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
784:Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
785:Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, largely withdrew from public life for thirty years. “All profound things,” he wrote, “are preceded and attended by Silence. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
786:I'm thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it'll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together. ~ Harold Ramis, #NFDB
787:I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
788:There are many soul-stirring things in this world, but not many as profound as watching the beautiful man you love holding the baby you created together. No, not many. ~ Mia Sheridan, #NFDB
789:And do not suppose that I am so candid out of pure simplicity of soul. Oh dear no, it is by no means the case! Perhaps I have my own very profound object in view. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
790:Due to many cosmic and worldly reasons, we will surely lose our planet one day! Till that dark day comes, let us give our profound affection to our beloved earth! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
791:Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
792:I think the need to go on stage speaks to some sort of a profound psychological deficit, but something that happened when you were a kid. Or something your parents did. ~ W Kamau Bell, #NFDB
793:It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
794:Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. This quest for enlightenment must begin now. ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
795:The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people. ~ C L R James, #NFDB
796:The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
797:When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity. ~ Alix Kates Shulman, #NFDB
798:At last he said to me, 'My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. ~ Peter S Beagle, #NFDB
799:I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable." Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice. ~ John Green, #NFDB
800:My argument is that we could use some profound works of God in our here and now, and He may just be waiting for us to muster up some corporate belief and start asking Him. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
801:Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
802:Revival begins here: with a profound awareness of God's absolute holiness, our absolute sinfulness, and our complete inability to bridge the divide that separates us. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
803:That young girl," he added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
804:The economic times we are facing... are arguably the worst they've been in 60 years. And I think it's going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought. ~ Alistair Darling, #NFDB
805:There is a simple but profound principle that emerges from understanding the way your perceptive filters work: you won’t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it. ~ David Allen, #NFDB
806:The Spanish authorities attributed La Pérouse's opinions to the regrettable fact that the man was French, but his writings made a profound impression on Padre Mendoza. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
807:...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
808:at the start of our together you were the prelude to a vast orchestration. at the end of it all you will have been the most profound and enduring music of my life. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher, #NFDB
809:Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit. He ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
810:Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. ~ Haskell Wexler, #NFDB
811:There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good? ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
812:Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
813:To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
814:We can’t reduce the contents of a novel to a summary of the plot, nor whittle down philosophical insight to a sound bite without something profound being lost along the way. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
815:Beware of that profound enemy of the free enterprise system who pays lip-service to free competition, but also labels every antitrust prosecution as a persecution. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
816:for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection. ~ Patricia Hampl, #NFDB
817:It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever! sooner or later they will give themselves away. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
818:it opens up new perspectives on how actions that involve noticing and befriending the sensations in our bodies can produce profound changes in both mind and brain ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
819:Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries. ~ Leon M Lederman, #NFDB
820:Very few of us are capable of being Free Thinkers, needing neither to adore nor to insult God, the insult often being an act of faith more profound than adoration. ~ Alexandra David Neel, #NFDB
821:Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith, #NFDB
822:From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective. ~ Lee Hall, #NFDB
823:My ambition is not only to chronicle but to interpret and reveal the movement of the mind and unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature. ~ Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, #NFDB
824:My dog and two cats are such a vital part of my life. To say that I am their owner doesn't reflect at all the profound bond and responsibility that I have towards them. ~ Tiffani Thiessen, #NFDB
825:Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony. ~ Gino Severini, #NFDB
826:The ancients were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable. Because it is unfathomable, All we can do is describe their appearance. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
827:Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it. ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
828:When does life start? When does it end? Who makes these decisions?... Every day, in hospitals and homes and hospices... people are struggling with those profound issues. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
829:while most readers recognize the profound wisdom imbued in Tao Te Ching, the language remains mysterious to many. Utter simplicity can seem confusing to the complicated mind. ~ Alan Cohen, #NFDB
830:All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind. ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
831:But I hope that it will also be demonstrated soon that in my experiments in the West I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
832:But there is a God who made you for a reason, and your life has profound meaning! We discover that meaning and purpose only when we make God the reference point of our lives. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
833:Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
834:Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa. ~ Ella Leya, #NFDB
835:None of us are ever far from death. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, our vulnerability is profound and intrinsic, our time on this Earth borrowed, fleeting. ~ Greg F Gifune, #NFDB
836:Profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason, and it is the superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
837:The art of speaking,” it was later said, “depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense. ~ Stacy Schiff, #NFDB
838:Today, because photography exercises such a profound influence upon the study of art, we tend to disregard the way in which prints continue to function as information. ~ Edward Lucie Smith, #NFDB
839:When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way. ~ Hod Lipson, #NFDB
840:By following this simple path, you become extraordinary, unfathomable, a being of profound cosmic subtlety. You outlive time and space by realizing the subtle truth of the universe. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
841:For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge. ~ W Edwards Deming, #NFDB
842:It's phenomenal the kind of support Donald Trump has, despite the best efforts to suppress it, and those efforts are being made, I think it's profound, the number of people. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
843:It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized. ~ Asa Gray, #NFDB
844:Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession. ~ How to Dress Well, #NFDB
845:Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
846:smile. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. It’s a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
847:The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian ~ David Hume, #NFDB
848:Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by civilized man. ~ Constantine the Great, #NFDB
849:Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
850:And through the opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
851:but it opens up new perspectives on how actions that involve noticing and befriending the sensations in our bodies can produce profound changes in both mind and brain ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
852:I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people. ~ Frederick The Great, #NFDB
853:Meditation is a simple yet powerful tool that takes us to a state of profound relaxation that dissolves fatigue and the accumulated stress that accelerates the aging process. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
854:Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. ~ Andrei Sakharov, #NFDB
855:What we are doing is deeply unfair and a profound tragedy - what we're doing in the way of global warming, what we're doing to the oceans - and none of it makes any sense to me. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
856:Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career. ~ Lawrence Klein, #NFDB
857:Commenting on the importance of Maxwell's equations, Einstein wrote that they are "the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
858:he heard the siren song of family—how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence. ~ Chloe Benjamin, #NFDB
859:I do love My country's good with a respect more tender, More holy and profound, then mine own life, My dear wife's estimate, her womb increase, And treasure of my loins. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
860:I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."
Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice. ~ John Green,#NFDB
861:If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound. ~ John Shelby Spong, #NFDB
862:Major problem for Black women, and all people of color, when we are challenged to oppose anti-Semitism, is our profound skepticism that white people can actually be oppressed. ~ Barbara Smith, #NFDB
863:She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening. ~ Tanith Lee, #NFDB
864:She knew she should say something profound, something beautiful in response. Instead, she spoke the truth. "If we make it out of here alive, I'm going to kiss you unconscious. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
865:The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. ~ David Rakoff, #NFDB
866:We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
867:We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake. ~ Van Jones, #NFDB
868:When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down. ~ Emile Zola, #NFDB
869:Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
870:Climate change is more remote than terror but a more profound threat to the future of the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren I hope all of you have. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
871:If I was good at marketing, I’d spin you an empty story that sounds profound. But the truth is that we’re all just stumbling around in the dark. Sometimes we hit something terrible. ~ Susan Ee, #NFDB
872:Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an Abstainer: I find it far easier to give up something altogether than to indulge moderately. And this distinction has profound implications for habits. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
873:Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
874:When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: "If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down. ~ mile Zola, #NFDB
875:I have many friends and family members who have served (or are currently serving) in our nation's Armed Forces. I have such a profound respect for what they do day in and day out. ~ Karl Malone, #NFDB
876:The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery. ~ George Will, #NFDB
877:The victory of conservatism and the profound transformation brought about over the course of the next three decades was thus far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
878:Twenty-four years ago I went through a profound conversion of heart and God led me to the Catholic Church. A few years later I felt Him calling me to start a Bible study program. ~ Gail Buckley, #NFDB
879:Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary. ~ Warren G Bennis, #NFDB
880:I built my home in the feeling of waking up at dawn in a new city, where every road is the right road because there is no ordinary. Everything is as profound as you make it. ~ Charlotte Eriksson, #NFDB
881:No generation has had the opportunity, as we now have, to build a global economy that leaves no-one behind. It is a wonderful opportunity, but also a profound responsibility. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
882:On the outskirts of our sad savage town, I was overcome by a feeling of profound melancholy, though I fought it off by stuffing a large amount of jasmine essence up my nose. ~ Leonora Carrington, #NFDB
883:That fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make a profound impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor. ~ Jostein Gaarder, #NFDB
884:Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
885:Even the most complicated and the most profound message can be given in a simplest way! Be like a light beam entering into a dark sanctuary: Be clear, be pure, and be simple! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
886:IN 1445 IN THE GERMAN city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg unveiled an innovation with profound consequences for subsequent economic history: a printing press based on movable type. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
887:In [chess], where the pieces have different and "bizarre" motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
888:It's kind of hard to articulate, but, like, this notion of mercy, forgiveness, was very appealing for me. It was very profound. And it had a deep impact, and I think it still does. ~ Jim Gaffigan, #NFDB
889:Just be yourself."
She made a face, walking next to him. "I was hoping for something a little more profound."
"Then go see a priest. I'm just a glorified housekeeper. ~ Amelia LeFay,#NFDB
890:My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences. ~ Alfred Stieglitz, #NFDB
891:Myths may not satisfy the demands of rationality or science, but they contain profound wisdom - provided one believes they do and is willing to find out what they communicate. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
892:Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words.
You will not care because you will not exist. ~ Lucretius,#NFDB
893:people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice. ~ Robin Morgan, #NFDB
894:The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
895:The purpose of Yoga is to facilitate the profound inner relaxation that accompanies fearlessness. The release from fear is what finally precipitates the full flowering of love. ~ Erich Schiffmann, #NFDB
896:Henry-despite his youth, his inexperience, and above all his profound gratitude for having just lost his virginity-made a mental note that this girl Lila was something of an idiot. ~ Lisa Grunwald, #NFDB
897:it was as if no woman could be really happy even when she was being taken out to dinner. He felt he ought to say something profound, but, naturally enough, nothing profound came out. ~ Barbara Pym, #NFDB
898:I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column. ~ David Plotz, #NFDB
899:Of all the reasons that we fail to know the truth about mass incarceration, though, one stands out: a profound misunderstanding regarding how racial oppression actually works. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
900:One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
901:Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
902:That young girl,” he added unexpectedly, “is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
903:The mess of the human condition is that fundamental trust has not yet been realized. The true value of profound spiritual experience lies in the discovery of that fundamental trust. ~ Andrew Cohen, #NFDB
904:In order to create an identity, people need an idea of nationhood which transcends religion. Pakistanis to this day have not been able to answer that profound question: who are we? ~ K Natwar Singh, #NFDB
905:In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
906:I wish for you constantly for I want to talk about everybody and everything. I can't go up to a stranger & say 'your manners &looks have stirred me to this profound meditation'- ~ W B Yeats, #NFDB
907:The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
908:We are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably, itself. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
909:What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
910:What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
911:I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer's duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better. ~ W P Kinsella, #NFDB
912:It is the result of a ‘gestalt’. From its various individual members, a culture emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding culture has profound implications ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
913:My mom is one of 14 children. She's a great lady. She's a Taurus. Has been a profound influence in my life, still is to this day. Born in meager surroundings in rural South Carolina. ~ Julius Erving, #NFDB
914:Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become. ~ Caleb Carr, #NFDB
915:A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution. ~ John Green, #NFDB
916:a taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution. ~ John Green, #NFDB
917:Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
918:great relationships—the masters—are built on respect, empathy, and a profound understanding of each other. Relationships don’t last without talk, even for the strong and silent type. ~ John M Gottman, #NFDB
919:It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
920:Until visiting Haiti, I had no idea what poverty really was or the difference between relative and absolute poverty. To see poverty so plainly and pervasively left a profound mark on me. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
921:If the church today took the effort it spends on political maneuvering and lobbying and poured that energy into intercessory prayer, we might see a profound impact on our nation. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
922:Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
923:Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity. ~ Jean Genet, #NFDB
924:could we not conceive of a philosophy of existence linked, not solely to experiences of separation, forlornness, and profound melancholy, but also to feelings of hope and confidence? ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
925:Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
926:I am of the African race, and in the colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. ~ Benjamin Banneker, #NFDB
927:It can be lost, and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
928:I want to remind people of the great and profound joy that can be found in stories, and that stories can connect us to each other, and that reading together changes everybody involved. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
929:The effort to lift one's self into perfect enlightenment is a profound thing. It has nothing to do with individual will. It's a refraction of the cosmos. The cosmos delights in itself. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
930:The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human? ~ Wesley J Smith, #NFDB
931:The more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
932:When the enemies of Spire Albion were in the walls, the great-great granddaughter of old Admiral Tagwynn had refused to have a good lie-down, and it was as simple and as profound as that. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
933:39:4.13
There is no material reward for righteous living, but there is profound satisfaction — consciousness of achievement — and this transcends any conceivable material reward. ~ Urantia Foundation,#NFDB
934:Dr. Lipsenthal is a profound explorer of our inner and outer worlds. Enjoy Every Sandwich will help you heal your fear of death and embrace the true joy of life's extraordinary journey. ~ Edgar Mitchell, #NFDB
935:...I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.— ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
936:I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful. ~ Robert Lopez, #NFDB
937:I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
938:No amount of scholastic attainment, of able and profound exposition of brilliant and stirring eloquence can atone for the absence of a deep impassioned sympathetic love for human souls. ~ David Brainerd, #NFDB
939:Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17, emphasis added). This is an especially profound and life-changing Scripture, and ~ Stormie Omartian, #NFDB
940:One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
941:There is woven inside each of us a desire for something more—a craving to be part of something bigger, greater, and more profound than our relatively meaningless day-by-day existence. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
942:The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious. ~ George Gaylord Simpson, #NFDB
943:To see the Logos, the principle of consciousness, crucified on the cross of time and space in our own selves is not an evasion but among the most profound insights a human being can have. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
944:It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child. ~ Jim Holt, #NFDB
945:It's this thing that's going on all the time - aging. Paul Auster quotes the poet George Opren on growing old: "What a strange thing to happen to a little boy." Which I think is so profound. ~ Geoff Dyer, #NFDB
946:We know what to do and we know how to do it, these investments save lives, empower women and girls, strengthen health systems and have a profound and lasting impact on development. ~ Babatunde Osotimehin, #NFDB
947:When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium. ~ Hans Hofmann, #NFDB
948:Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems. ~ Alec J Ross, #NFDB
949:God's poet is silence! His song is unspoken, And yet so profound, so loud, and so far, It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken, And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star. ~ Joaquin Miller, #NFDB
950:I thought of a line from the Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind: “‘We should work toward cherishing the welfare of others to the point where we are unable to bear the sight of their misery. ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
951:Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language. ~ Robert Fripp, #NFDB
952:People change based on what they feel, not what they know. Which means that understanding all that advice doesn't matter if there's no deep, profound, visceral awareness of why it's important. ~ Mehmet Oz, #NFDB
953:Profound love demands a deep conception and out of this develops reverence for the mystery of life. It brings us close to all beings, to the poorest and smallest as well as all others. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
954:Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself. ~ Owen Gingerich, #NFDB
955:She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
956:You don't have to patronize your audience, and you can mix art and commerce in a profound way. You can simultaneously play to the sophisticated, 60-year-old theatergoers and to 4-year-olds. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
957:Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
958:In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia. They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism ~ Gad Saad, #NFDB
959:I once dreamed of launching revolutions, sparking movements, mobilizing the masses, and changing everything. Now I’ve learned the beauty and profound significance of simply loving my neighbor. ~ Jim Palmer, #NFDB
960:I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
961:Magic comprises the most profound contemplation of the most secret things, their nature, power, quality, substance, and virtues, as well as the knowledge of their whole nature. ~ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, #NFDB
962:The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
963:The wonderment of God is so all-encompassing and enormous that it surpasses all possible imagination. To be at last truly and finally home is profound in the totality of its completeness. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
964:What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
965:Sometimes the most profound experiences of our lives start with an act so simple and careless that we hardly think about it - like tossing a small stone that causes a massive avalanche. ~ Richard Paul Evans, #NFDB
966:... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
967:As our world becomes smaller, through a growing common culture, the true test of community will be our tolerance for our most profound differences and love for the most challenging among us. ~ Wayne Teasdale, #NFDB
968:Hell is the backdrop that reveals the profound and unbelievable grace of the cross. It brings to light the enormity of our sin and therefore portrays the undeserved favor of God in full color. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
969:The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
970:The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
971:The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change. ~ Richard Bach, #NFDB
972:Whosoever can cry to the All-Powerful with sincerity and an intense passion of the soul has no need of a Master. But so profound an aspiration is very rare; hence the necessity of a Master. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
973:At its purest, Jainism is almost an atheistic religion, and the much venerated images of the Tirthankaras in temples represent not so much a divine presence as a profound divine absence. I ~ William Dalrymple, #NFDB
974:For the frequent user, the impact of a cooler, better, easier-to-use input device is profound – so profound that many users are happy to proselytize to their peers. More sneezing of a Purple Cow. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
975:Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
976:His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
977:In the 21st Century I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound, awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
978:Joe DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player I ever saw. His career can not be summed up in numbers and awards. It might sound corny, but he had a profound and lasting impact on the country. ~ Ted Williams, #NFDB
979:Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick, #NFDB
980:Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, the silence of places Brian had not yet been: gazing at the lifeless body of a beloved, the echo of a lost illusion, the tinnitus of betrayal. ~ Rafael Yglesias, #NFDB
981:Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
982:She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
983:The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
984:Whosoever can cry to the All-Powerful with sincerity and an intense passion of the soul has no need of a Master. But so profound an aspiration is very rare; hence the necessity of a Master. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
985:A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values? ~ William Greider, #NFDB
986:Every mission constitutes a pledge of duty. Every man is bound to consecrate his every faculty to its fulfilment. He will derive his rule of action from the profound conviction of that duty. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
987:Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level. ~ Hal Duncan, #NFDB
988:In Simon’s voice, he heard the siren song of family—how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence. ~ Chloe Benjamin, #NFDB
989:Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue. ~ Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, #NFDB
990:No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
991:People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It’s a profound insight—first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.1 ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
992:This is the profound meaning of at-tawbah, offered to everyone: sincerely returning to God after a slip, a mistake, a sin. God loves that sincere return to Him and He forgives and purifies. The ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
993:Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. ~ Hans Hofmann, #NFDB
994:Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
995:Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world—man has never known anything higher than these two blessings. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
996:I played music practically my entire life. But the first time I ever really played music was with John and Robby and Jim That's where it happened. it was an epiphany, a moment of profound clarity ~ Ray Manzarek, #NFDB
997:One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come. ~ Lars Fredrik H ndler Svendsen, #NFDB
998:The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
999:To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1000:An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
1001:Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1002:For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge. ~ Erich Maria Remarque, #NFDB
1003:Have Jesus always for your patron, His Cross for a mast on which you must spread your resolutions as a sail. Your anchor shall be a profound confidence in Him, and you shall sail prosperously. ~ Francis de Sales, #NFDB
1004:In Simon’s voice, he heard the siren song of family – how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence. ~ Chloe Benjamin, #NFDB
1005:There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth. ~ Heinz Pagels, #NFDB
1006:Those in blue suits who use thinly veiled race symbols -- when they say welfare and crime and three strikes and anti- affirmative action -- they are sending messages more profound their language. ~ Jesse Jackson, #NFDB
1007:But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
1008:Depending on one’s point of view, Hagakure represents a mystical beauty intrinsic to the Japanese aesthetic experience, and a stoic but profound appreciation of the meaning of life and death. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #NFDB
1009:Don’t think that you must involve yourself with complex intellectual philosophies. Don’t try to be profound or educated. That only wears you out. Just be simple. Let everyday life be your teacher. ~ Vernon Howard, #NFDB
1010:I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, and I just loved film. My folks would take us to the drive-in on summer nights, and we'd sit on the hood of the car. I just had this profound love for storytelling. ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
1011:I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual. ~ Baldur von Schirach, #NFDB
1012:I regret to say that my hand did, in fact, have an improper relationship with Chelsea Clinton. The incident represents a profound lapse of judgment for which my hand takes sole responsibility. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
1013:So, you know when the limit’s up on love?” he asked and I felt my chest depress as the profound weight of his question hit me. “No,” I whispered. “Right. No. No one does. Not you. Not me. No one. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
1014:The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers. ~ Simon Winchester, #NFDB
1015:The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
1016:The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
1017:The only way someone can see something is by being outside it. A person who fits into the culture, who is truly acceptable to a society, would never become a writer in the profound sense of that word. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1018:There is a subtle yet profound difference between giving up and letting go' Just let go. Look at me, Moe seems to say. I can't speak, I can't move, but by my soul I know what this life is for. ~ Michael Ignatieff, #NFDB
1019:A symbol is mysterious and can only be discerned by intuition or poetic understanding. It is symbolic knowledge that Jung is concerned with, and he is attracted to what is deep, profound and obscure. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
1020:Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world. ~ George Friedman, #NFDB
1021:For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB
1022:If you want to be happy, then it is within your grasp. The book you are holding can have a profound impact on your thinking and your attitude and can help you to do more, be more, and achieve more! ~ Willie Jolley, #NFDB
1023:It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
1024:Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
1025:Because of my training as a clinician, I believe that this kind of moment, if it happens between people, has profound therapeutic potential. We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
1026:For me to get to work with a writer-director over time in developing a project - my investment feels much more profound. I know that whatever is on the other end I'm going to feel that much closer to. ~ Maggie Siff, #NFDB
1027:Girls like Lucy were charming to look at, but Mr. Beebe was, from rather profound reasons, somewhat chilly in his attitude towards the other sex, and preferred to be interested rather than enthralled. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1028:In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day. ~ Robert B Laughlin, #NFDB
1029:I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound. ~ Ann Kidd Taylor, #NFDB
1030:Our country, like every modern state, needs profound democratic reforms. It needs political and ideological pluralism, a mixed economy and protection of human rights and the opening up of society. ~ Andrei Sakharov, #NFDB
1031:The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and be free from labor; even the ataraxia of the Stoic falls far short of his profound indifference to every other object. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
1032:The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1033:"We may think that true insight is complex and requires many words to explain, but the reverse is closer to the truth: the simple statements are often the most profound." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh (From preface) for SIMPLE, #NFDB
1034:Your own imagination as to the true ability of the permaculture design system, you need to trust the system and stick to main frame basics with profound and thorough thinking while trusting yourself. ~ Geoff Lawton, #NFDB
1035:All I want is to know what happened - I want to somehow grasp every detail of the events of that day, that one day like a tiny dewdrop... but now it's all engulfed in the profound darkness of time. ~ Takashi Hiraide, #NFDB
1036:How do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1037:I don’t want to speak about Jesus; I want to know Jesus. I want to be Jesus to people. I don’t want just to write about the Holy Spirit; I want to experience His presence in my life in a profound way. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
1038:If there is some profound method that offers a quick way, we would rather follow that than undertake arduous journeys and difficult practices. But some manual work and physical effort is necessary. ~ Chogyam Trungpa, #NFDB
1039:In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow. ~ Mikhail Lermontov, #NFDB
1040:The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
1041:Whoever applies himself intelligently to profound meditation, soon finds joy in what is good; he becomes conscious that beauty and riches are transient things and wisdom the fairest ornament. ~ Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, #NFDB
1042:You have before you the task of seeking new ways to announce Christ in situations of rapid and often profound transformation, and of emphasizing the missionary character of all pastoral activity. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1043:Gratitude is both a vaccine and an antidote for grief. Grief may be an inevitable fact of life, but gratitude has the power to transform the experience of grief from agonizing suffering to profound joy. ~ Darren Main, #NFDB
1044:Religious or secular, all myths make profound sense to one group of people. Not to everyone. They cannot be rationalized beyond a point. In the final analysis, you either accept them or you don’t. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
1045:So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
1046:The problem of madness is profound. Divine madness- a higher form of the irrationality of the life streaming through us - at any rate a madness that cannot be integrated into present-day society- but how? ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1047:This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. Refering to James Clerk Maxwell's contributions to physics. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1048:When you start out as a parent, you have these big ambitions for your child: success, popularity, brilliance. But as life goes on, sometimes that scales back to something much more profound. Happiness. ~ Keith Stuart, #NFDB
1049:You cannot do anything without God.It's a profound and elemental truth. Not, you cannot do most things without God. You will not be able to do anything that you want, truly, in fulfillment, without God. ~ Marco Rubio, #NFDB
1050:And yet, despite the horror it caused, the plague turned out to be the catalyst for social and economic change that was so profound that far from marking the death of Europe, it served as its making. ~ Peter Frankopan, #NFDB
1051:Have Jesus always for your patron, His Cross for a mast on which you must spread your resolutions as a sail. Your anchor shall be a profound confidence in Him, and you shall sail prosperously. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #NFDB
1052:In Hitler the rare union has taken place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher, and the iron man of action...I follow no leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God. ~ Hermann Goring, #NFDB
1053:It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara, #NFDB
1054:Meditation simply means entering into states of mind which are happiness, profound happiness, simple happiness, beautiful happiness, complicated, uncomplicated - There are ten thousand states of mind. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1055:Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1056:You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1057:Does your manager trust you?” is a profound question. If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom. ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
1058:In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
1059:In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1060:Prayer is not to be a casual routine that gives passing homage to God; it is to be a profound experience that should open up great dimensions of reverence, awe, appreciation, honor, and adoration. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
1061:The context for music is varied and profound. If their fantasy is to be awakened-so that their sounds may be incisive or ravishing-then the menagerie of saints and dragons must be faithfully recalled. ~ Russell Sherman, #NFDB
1062:The ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
1063:There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
1064:Even if you're not a Catholic, even if you're not a Christian, in fact even if you have no religious faith at all, what people could see in Pope John Paul was a man of true and profound spiritual faith. ~ Chris Matthews, #NFDB
1065:In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare—. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1066:Masses of girls identified with Bella in a really profound way, for want of a better word. The connection that I've seen people have - I've seen it physically. It's the characters they're flipping for. ~ Kristen Stewart, #NFDB
1067:Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1068:There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1069:There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1070:The weight of time and history felt profound in the quiet night in a tiny chapel with several wooden pews and a granite altar. If I were a religious man, someplace like this might move me to speak with God. ~ Bonnie Dee, #NFDB
1071:We turn now over the debate of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero....The controversy has raised profound questions about religious tolerance and prejudice in the United States. ~ Christiane Amanpour, #NFDB
1072:When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
1073:An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
1074:Another aspect of the psychedelic vision for me that has been very profound, is the sense that every-thing is alive or at that at least, there is no distinction between what we call living and non-living. ~ Andrew Weil, #NFDB
1075:I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1076:Single-minded devotion engenders deep thought, which expresses itself in action. The Lord's Light descends on the devotee, His power awakens in him and, as a result, profound inner inquiry blossoms forth. ~ Anandamayi Ma, #NFDB
1077:Sometimes it seems like "pain" is too obvious a place to turn for inspiration. Pain isn't always deep, anyway. Sometimes it's awful and that's it. Or boring. Surely other things can be as profound as pain. ~ Ellen Forney, #NFDB
1078:The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility. ~ Clement Greenberg, #NFDB
1079:Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
1080:When you trust and act on your intuition, you increase your self-esteem, build trust in yourself and experience a profound sense of security that no relationship or amount of money will ever give you. ~ Cheryl Richardson, #NFDB
1081:For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy. ~ Maurice Ravel, #NFDB
1082:I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1083:Invents creation’s paradox profound;
Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter’s forms,
Unseen it throws out a dumb energy
And works a miracle by a machine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal,#NFDB
1084:I've come to believe that total nakedness, that is absolute transparency, that is utter and unfettered and profound visibility, is the only way that we can truly love. Anything less, is self-defense. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1085:Sun Tzu's ideas as expressed above had a profound effect on Ho Chi Minh, who sought to defeat both the French and the Americans without recourse to violence - or at least to conventional battle tactics. ~ William J Duiker, #NFDB
1086:The artificial products do not have any molecular dissymmetry; and I could not indicate the existence of a more profound separation between the products born under the influence of life and all the others. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
1087:The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1088:Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1089:I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
1090:Movies always fascinated me. They are an endless source of inspiration. There are countless images by great directors that made a profound impression on me, and I see film as a sublime example of teamwork. ~ Giorgio Armani, #NFDB
1091:So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces (139). ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
1092:Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
1093:There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
1094:When you are truly passionate about something that God has designed for you to do; things unexplainably click. You experience a profound sense of joy in what you do. It feels natural and it completes you. ~ Debbie Macomber, #NFDB
1095:Although you might believe that certainty and control over your circumstances brings you pleasure, it is often uncertainty and challenge that actually bring you the most profound and longest-lasting benefits. ~ Todd Kashdan, #NFDB
1096:It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
1097:Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
1098:Like all social theories, internationalism must seek its basis in the economic and technical fields; here are to be found the most profound and the most decisive factors in the development of society. ~ Christian Lous Lange, #NFDB
1099:I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it. ~ Beryl Markham, #NFDB
1100:If we don't rededicate ourselves to education with the same attitude Americans have applied to going to the moon and fighting wars, the results will be profound. We will gradually lose our successful workforce. ~ Meg Whitman, #NFDB
1101:Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1102:In the Fragments, sensations are more profound and richly clarified through deliberate and explicit pattern; emotions are given a sequence and development such as the exigencies of practical life rarely permit. ~ Alton Tobey, #NFDB
1103:I think there are profound differences between women and men. In intelligence and creativity, there is no difference, but in what one loves, what one likes, the passions - there are differences. ~ Christiane Nusslein Volhard, #NFDB
1104:Sometimes the heart makes decisions the mind cannot, and though we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1105:There is no denying I’m once again complete in her presence. This is my place. I belong to her and my place is by her side. And the absoluteness of that statement is profound, and it begs to rewrite my life. ~ Elizabeth Finn, #NFDB
1106:Ultimately, it’s an invention’s intellectual ethic that has the most profound effect on us. The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
1107:We sing a little song before we eat, a little blessing before we eat, and it's really - we're thanking the Lord and the Earth for the food that we eat, and it really brings you together in a profound kind of way. ~ Phil Lesh, #NFDB
1108:When Holy God draws near in true revival, people come under terrible conviction of sin. The outstanding feature of spiritual awakening has been the profound consciousness of the Presence and holiness of God. ~ Henry Blackaby, #NFDB
1109:Around, around, Companions all, take your ground, And name the bell with joy profound! CONCORDIA is the word we've found Most meet to express the harmonious sound, That calls to those in friendship bound. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1110:Happiness can’t be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world—a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
1111:Love of neighbor for the sake of loving God is a profound political philosophy that strikes a balance between the disobedience of political disengagement and the idolatry of politics as our main priority. ~ R Albert Mohler Jr, #NFDB
1112:Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured. ~ Nicholas Lemann, #NFDB
1113:The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
1114:The Indians in the Southwestern United States went to many places of power. They were able to have profound dream experiences where they could see into the future or know what do to and make proper decisions. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1115:There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: foreign aid goes from government to government. It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialistic. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
1116:What is perhaps most characteristically Taoist about The Art of War in such a way as to recommend itself to the modern day is the manner in which power is continually tempered by a profound undercurrent of humanism. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
1117:With each challenging situation, each nightmare— each new piece of grit embraced and transformed—I came through with a more loving family, deeper friendships, and an even more profound relationship with God. ~ Sharon E Rainey, #NFDB
1118:It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum. ~ Craig Venter, #NFDB
1119:Mindfulness is the bedrock of all spiritual practice. With mindfulness, the simple becomes profound, and the common becomes extraordinary. Without mindfulness, even gold and silver will quickly lose their luster. ~ Darren Main, #NFDB
1120:The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1121:All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
1122:Does your manager trust you?” is a profound question. If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom. Remember ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
1123:Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body. ~ Freya Stark, #NFDB
1124:How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence--I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound. ~ Rutherford B Hayes, #NFDB
1125:Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires. ~ Kevin DeYoung, #NFDB
1126:We would, however, perform an injustice to the bourgeois women's rights movement if we would regard it as solely motivated by economics. No, this movement also contains a more profound spiritual and moral aspect. ~ Clara Zetkin, #NFDB
1127:A profound theme is of trifling importance if the characters knocked around by it are uninteresting, and brilliant technique is a nuisance if it pointlessly prevents us from seeing the characters and what they do. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
1128:Around the average workplace, stress seems to hang in oppressive clouds in the air above everyone’s cubicle. And much like secondhand smoke, secondhand stress can have a profound effect on everyone in its vicinity. ~ Susan David, #NFDB
1129:His hatred of society, his profound melancholy, his rigid observation of the duties of his order, and his voluntary seclusion from the world at his age so unusual, attracted the notice of the whole fraternity. He ~ Matthew Lewis, #NFDB
1130:if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1131:I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1132:It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum. ~ J Craig Venter, #NFDB
1133:I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
1134:My heart leaps with euphoria (gladness), whilst my mind send sweet memories and imaginations of you, through the deep secret winding passages of my being, bursting into my soul with profound whispers of "I Love You". ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1135:Often times in physics we want to talk about empty space as a first step toward nothingness, but nothingness is far more profound than empty space. Nothingness is the absence of everything including space itself. ~ Rivka Galchen, #NFDB
1136:One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
1137:So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
1138:What I want to do is basically tell my generation's story about how music and culture helped affect a generation, and a generation that's so profound, that it went on to elect the first African-American president. ~ Steve Stoute, #NFDB
1139:When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1140:'Climb Every Mountain' is a beautiful statement of philosophy. Critics may think 'The Sound of Music' is saccharine, but I think it's profound. The message, that we can't accommodate evil, is just as important today. ~ Jon Voight, #NFDB
1141:In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1142:In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
1143:Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of “thinking in pure meanings.” I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth—it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
1144:Some of life's moments mark a break in consciousness; others give rise to streams of scintillating, philosophical ideas or astonishing works of art; still others, to important meeting or profound personal upheavals. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
1145:The Blessed Sacrament is the first and supreme object of our worship. We must preserve in the depths of our hearts a constant and uninterrupted profound adoration of this precious pledge of Divine Love. ~ Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, #NFDB
1146:The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
1147:The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
1148:The remark of Goethe is as profound as it is true: "The conflict of faith and unbelief remains the proper, the only, the deepest theme of the history of the world and mankind, to which all others are subordinated. ~ Philip Schaff, #NFDB
1149:There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture. ~ Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, #NFDB
1150:There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
1151:What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life. All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance. ~ Frederic Laloux, #NFDB
1152:Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier. ~ Marya Hornbacher, #NFDB
1153:Fumbling blindly for the mystical, we miss what is holy within the mundane event of walking down a city street. Interdependence only seems like a profound truth because we don’t recognize it 99% of the time. While ~ Ethan Nichtern, #NFDB
1154:If I was the dictator, with my profound understanding of Marx’s real intent, and my universal benevolent compassion, uncontaminated by any proclivity toward darkness or sin, I would bring on the socialist Utopia. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1155:if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you are insufficient and mortal and bound by tragedy ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1156:I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1157:In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction. ~ Elliot W Eisner, #NFDB
1158:It was only when I began modeling at 18 that I really began enjoying fashion and reading any fashion magazine I could get my hands on, and developing a profound respect for designers, fashion and how to wear it. ~ Poppy Delevingne, #NFDB
1159:No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. ~ Anthony Kennedy, #NFDB
1160:Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1161:So it does turn out that we do need to begin by contemplating the profound nature of self and other. Because if you change the leaves and branches but leave the roots intact, you run the risk of reverting to type. ~ Norman Fischer, #NFDB
1162:The profound discovery was that our patients with four or more ACEs were twice as likely to be overweight or obese and 32.6 times as likely to have been diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems. ~ Nadine Burke Harris, #NFDB
1163:There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1164:Discovering himself everywhere and in all things, the disciple embraces the entire world in a sentiment of peace, of compassion, of love-large, profound and without limits, delivered from all wrath and all hatred. ~ Magghima Nikaya, #NFDB
1165:For a political movement to not understand that sexuality is a profound component of both how people are oppressed and how people dream, is not to recognize the reality of political power and where it's centered. ~ Amber Hollibaugh, #NFDB
1166:The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1167:You can’t be good to others if you’re not strict with yourself. The more shallow you are with yourself, the harsher you are with others. The more profound you are with yourself, the more generous you are with others ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1168:After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President’s secretary, it erased portions of the official record. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
1169:Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
1170:Everything that I teach as an enlightened Buddhist teacher is towards directing an individual to happiness, a balanced wisdom and knowledge that is sometimes just bubbly and euphoric or just very still and profound. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1171:If I was the dictator, with my profound understanding of Marx’s real intent, and my universal benevolent compassion, uncontaminated by any proclivity toward darkness or sin, I would bring on the socialist Utopia. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1172:I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture. ~ Robert Delaunay, #NFDB
1173:Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
1174:The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1175:For this reason, almost without exception, champions are specialists whose styles emerge from profound awareness of their unique strengths, and who are exceedingly skilled at guiding the battle in that direction. With ~ Josh Waitzkin, #NFDB
1176:I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high. ~ Anna Wickham, #NFDB
1177:I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about. ~ Richard Marx, #NFDB
1178:Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1179:There is profound responsibility in being Love... more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they'd be crushed by the realization of it. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
1180:There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which were merry and asquint with unselfconscious happiness. The change was profound. If he was beautiful when grave-and he was-smiling, he was nothing short of glorious. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1181:We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1182:We now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1183:Did it ever occur to you that this might require a modicum of concentration?” snapped Myfanwy in irritation, breaking out of her trance. “Did the dramatic pose and the look of profound focus not tip you off?” “Sorry, ~ Daniel O Malley, #NFDB
1184:I never had come up with a really profound and strong gesture - nothing like Julia Butterfly's. So I figured the best thing I could do was live by my beliefs. That's probably the most profound thing that anybody can do. ~ Daryl Hannah, #NFDB
1185:…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it. ~ Jesse Ball, #NFDB
1186:I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1187:No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
1188:The effect she had on him was druglike, a tantalizing combination of sexual need and profound ease. Like he was having an orgasm and falling into a peaceful sleep at the same time. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1189:The heart of mathematics consists of concrete examples and concrete problems. Big general theories are usually afterthoughts based on small but profound insights; the insights themselves come from concrete special cases. ~ Paul Halmos, #NFDB
1190:We were an imperfect family. I knew that. But at last we were on each other's side, dug in with a new and more profound commitment. Our happiness was hard won, it was ours and I was determined to keep us whole. ~ Dorothea Benton Frank, #NFDB
1191:You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1192:By striving to see through the veil of our ordinary perceptions, we can come closer to understanding our profound relationship to all created things—all possibilities and potentialities—past and present, great and small. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
1193:It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1194:The key to happiness lies in strength of mind, inner serenity, and a quality like steadfastness. We can approach this by developing tenderness and love, which correspond to the profound nature of every human being. The ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1195:There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect. ~ John Muir, #NFDB
1196:To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1197:...untroubled by the thought of death because he fears himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life the greatest joy is to be found. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1198:What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence? ~ V clav Havel, #NFDB
1199:Although I can’t possibly have a single memory of this place. Then, from deep within me, a profound sense of love radiating out to everything around me complemented by reciprocal waves of love coming at me, enveloping me. All ~ Lisa See, #NFDB
1200:It is apparent that only a certain kind of person will want to make ethnographic films, It will, above all, be those who sense the profound affinity that exists between the film medium and a desire to understand people. ~ Robert Gardner, #NFDB
1201:It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
1202:It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure. ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
1203:It was as if single nights had the duration of centuries, so within that time the most profound alterations in the whole of mankind, in the earth itself and the whole solar system could very well have taken place. ~ Daniel Paul Schreber, #NFDB
1204:My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1205:The fruits of this profound union with Jesus are marvelous: our whole being is transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit: soul, intelligence, will, affections and even the body, because we are united in body and spirit. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1206:There are many Americans who regardless of the intelligence or the profound political persuasion of a figure will never vote for a black man. Not all of them are racists; some are skeptical, and some are suspicious. ~ Michael Eric Dyson, #NFDB
1207:True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
1208:Upon walking into Eva's kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she'd settled like a bird. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
1209:we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1210:Esoteric more generally means simply a continuing knowledge of reality which is rejected. That it is esoteric not because it cannot be known but because we refuse to recognize it. Therefore it remains a profound secret.
~ Manly P Hall,#NFDB
1211:If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mind-set. A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1212:In terms of what I write about, I consider no subject too small. Often it's the small moments, that through the amplification of poetry, reveal the larger, more profound truths that we all come to recognize and treasure. ~ Allison Joseph, #NFDB
1213:[Malick] didn't move when Fen leaned in again, slowly closed his eyes, slid his hand up to cup Malick's cheek and replaced his fingertips with his lips again--light and sweet and warm, and so...private. Profound, maybe. ~ Carole Cummings, #NFDB
1214:Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
1215:She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1216:The arrival of the Spaniards must have been like the arrival of people from Mars to us would be today. The shock must have been profound…In a sense, I think the Aztec Empire died of astonishment, more than anything else. ~ Carlos Fuentes, #NFDB
1217:Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it. ~ Bruce Catton, #NFDB
1218:From the grasses in the field to the stars in the sky, each one is doing just that; and there is such profound peace and surpassing beauty in nature because none of these tries forcibly to transgress its limitations. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
1219:God the Creative Spirit, and intimate with others. To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting to the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community. This ~ Matthew Fox, #NFDB
1220:I felt about life and the way I felt about my children was so deep and profound. It was the first time I'd felt anything like that. I knew as an artist that it was going to make a huge difference in everything that I did. ~ Jennifer Lopez, #NFDB
1221:It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept. ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
1222:Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of skeptical opinions and experiences of life - all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1223:Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1224:The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells. ~ Yiyun Li, #NFDB
1225:We utilize energy from carbon, not because we are bad people, but because it is the affordable foundation on which the profound improvements in our standard of living have been achieved - our progress in health and welfare. ~ John Christy, #NFDB
1226:While overeating would be seen by some as an indulgence of self, it is in fact a profound rejection of self. It is a moment of self-betrayal and self-punishment, and anything but a commitment to one's own well-being. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1227:Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days - when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you're out of options, when the pain is great - and you turn to God alone. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
1228:All along I’ve thought the best way to keep out all the voices in my head directing my life this way and that was to stay busy, to distract my brain from itself, but it’s this profound silence that releases me from worry. ~ Rachel Friedman, #NFDB
1229:I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art. ~ Janet Echelman, #NFDB
1230:I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was! ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
1231:like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1232:Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1233:Some of the most remarkable and profound worship encounters I've experienced have happened in churches with no production, no lighting, no exciting visuals or amplification, sometimes with not even a single musical instrument. ~ Tim Hughes, #NFDB
1234:The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
1235:This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1236:We write to tell a story, to describe an event, to imagine or explain what has been or will happen, to warn or touch or inspire. We write to express our most profound emotions—love and hatred, joy and sorrow, humor and sadness. ~ Sam Barry, #NFDB
1237:Being in the moment with these guys was just a profound experience every day, and when we shoot a movie it's actually a very short process, especially an independent movie like this. It was only thirty five days of shooting. ~ Oren Moverman, #NFDB
1238:Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing absurdity. ~ V clav Havel, #NFDB
1239:It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept. I ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
1240:Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
1241:My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. ‘Something cannot emerge from nothing,’ he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ can be. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1242:No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
1243:Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes. ~ Pope Paul VI, #NFDB
1244:The Booker triumph of Graham Swift's moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro, #NFDB
1245:There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing. ~ Daniel Abraham, #NFDB
1246:A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1247:For a democracy committed to being a great military power, its leaders professing to believe that war can serve transcendent purposes, the allocation of responsibility for war qualifies as a matter of profound importance. ~ Andrew J Bacevich, #NFDB
1248:On the other hand, there are only so many people who really knew how she was exactly, like what did her accent sound like, and the fact that she developed profound deafness when she was first running the Harriet Lane. ~ Mary Stuart Masterson, #NFDB
1249:Someone else’s opinion of you is none of your business. Those words are so powerful for anyone who tends to hold other people’s opinions ahead of their own; and they are never more profound than when we’re creating something. ~ Rachel Hollis, #NFDB
1250:We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. ~ Eric Schmidt, #NFDB
1251:What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1252:I am patient and am waiting for a profound revolution in the consciousness of the Israelis. The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
1253:I think the difference is that when we drink tea, we just drink tea. But if you're in the presence of a genuine master, they don't have to do anything but drink their tea, and yet it affects you at an incredibly profound level. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
1254:I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity. ~ Jonathan Ive, #NFDB
1255:Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1256:Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It's the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
1257:The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1258:Theologian Hart goes on to note a secret irony hidden in the arguments of the skeptics: “They would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
1259:Earl Moncrief, the butler, built his financial, procurement, and secret service organizations with the brute power of cash and a profound understanding of clever, malicious, discontented people who lived behind servile facades. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1260:Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people. ~ Kenneth Lonergan, #NFDB
1261:For years I have been accused of making snap judgments. Honestly, this is not the case because I am a profound military student and the thoughts I express, perhaps too flippantly, are the result of years of thought and study. ~ George S Patton, #NFDB
1262:His faculties are so ample, so vast, so profound that it is as if an immense source from which everything issues in its time. They are as vast and extended as the heavens; the hidden source from which they issue is deep as the abyss. ~ Tsu-tse, #NFDB
1263:If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years on this planet, it’s that the happiest and most fulfilled people I’ve known are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self interest. ~ John Glenn, #NFDB
1264:I love my mystery, I love the abstract, fuyant world I live in as long as I don’t begin my work, the forcing out of delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously wordless sensations into something you can seize on—perhaps never. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
1265:I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager. ~ Noah Baumbach, #NFDB
1266:I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
1267:I intended lilies, said the magician. but in the clutches of a desparate desire to do something extraordinary, I called down a greater magic and inadvertently caused you a profound harm. I will now try to undo what I have done. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
1268:Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity. ~ Vaclav Havel, #NFDB
1269:There is a claim coming from the West that says that all art must be outside any moral consideration. I can understand this as a provocation, but I also believe that we can still have very profound creativity with a moral sense. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1270:This piece of iron which he had been allowed to keep aroused a more profound wave of gratitude towards heaven in his heart than he had experienced, in his previous life, from the greatest blessings that had descended upon him. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1271:We found that just by the way we stood, affected women dramatically, and if you look at our show, you'll see that we always stood with our legs open our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women! ~ Burt Ward, #NFDB
1272:For the first time he became aware of the profound silence of the place, insulated by stone and metal from the noise of the street outside. It gave the mosque a sympathetic air, as if it could speak but chose instead to listen. ~ G Willow Wilson, #NFDB
1273:how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops. ~ David Wallace Wells, #NFDB
1274:Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1275:People say, "Well, you went on television, it enlarged your readership." It did not at all, not at all. I might as well tell you, I lost some readership, because the profound audience felt somehow bothered by my too easy manner. ~ Jerzy Kosinski, #NFDB
1276:Taxicabs might seem like a luxury item, and given the profound needs of so many disabled people in New York, why would we bother with taxis? I contend that even if you need a taxi once a year - there are times when you need a taxi. ~ Simi Linton, #NFDB
1277:To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge, knowledge for leadership of transformation. ~ W Edwards Deming, #NFDB
1278:Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?'
And the answer: 'Where was man? ~ William Styron,#NFDB
1279:During adolescence, your sense of who you are–your moral and political beliefs, your music and fashion tastes, what social group you associate with–undergoes profound change. During adolescence, we are inventing ourselves. ~ Sarah Jayne Blakemore, #NFDB
1280:In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound ~ John Grierson, #NFDB
1281:Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild - and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1282:You are more than entitled not to know what the word 'performative' means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it doesnot mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word. ~ J L Austin, #NFDB
1283:Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself. ~ Eve Ensler, #NFDB
1284:Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function…exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems. ~ John Ratey, #NFDB
1285:It's traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That's because there's virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1286:The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, #NFDB
1287:... There's no reason why everyone has to listen to records in hi-fi. Having the violins on the left and the bass on the right doesn't make the music more profound. It's just a more complex way of stimulating a bored imagination. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1288:Charles Baudelaire’s refusal was the most profound form of refusal, for it was in no way the assertion of an opposite principle. It only expressed that which was indefensible and impossible in the poet’s obstructed state of mind. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1289:Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
1290:I'm just in profound gratitude that we get to go back and work on a show that we love, with amazing actors and great writers, and be a part of the Marvel universe. As with all of the characters in Jessica Jones, Trish has an alias. ~ Rachael Taylor, #NFDB
1291:In Brekkukot, words were too precious to use -- because they meant something; our conversation was like pristine money before inflation; experience was too profound to be capable of expression; only the bluebottle was free. ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness, #NFDB
1292:Indian classical dance is sustained by a profound philosophy. Form seeks to merge with the formless, motions seek to become a part of the motionless, and the dancing individual seeks to become one with the eternal dance of the cosmos. ~ Nita Ambani, #NFDB
1293:In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1294:It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we shiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1295:It's traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That's because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1296:It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1297:James Watt was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and chemist; his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius - the union of them for practical application. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
1298:Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck, #NFDB
1299:Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1300:The man who has plunged deep into a pure knowledge of the profound secrets of the spirit, is neither a terrestrial nor a celestial being. He is the most high spirit robed in the perishable body, the sublime and very Divinity. ~ Pico de la Mirandola, #NFDB
1301:There`s a - kind of an undercurrent of the stories we read during the campaign of, [Michael Flynn] was a guy we thought we knew who seems to have changed in a profound way and become this much more kind of [ controversial] person . ~ John Heilemann, #NFDB
1302:Between now and 2015, we must make sure that promises made become promises kept. The consequences of doing otherwise are profound: death, illness and despair, needless suffering, lost opportunities for millions upon millions of people. ~ Ban Ki moon, #NFDB
1303:I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. It's always at the back of my mind - let's give up this silly business of film-making and concentrate on something more satisfying and worthwhile. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
1304:I’m tempted to walk away from this city and this life and this relationship that’s brought me the greatest feelings of joy but also the most profound feelings of guilt. I’m tempted to nurse my sorrows elsewhere, to rethink my life. ~ Gilly Macmillan, #NFDB
1305:I smash things and make pithy yet profound observations. You make plans and then things go wrong.” “Did you say ‘pithy’?” “And we always have this kind of conversation before risking our lives. See? Pithy and profound is what that was. ~ Paul S Kemp, #NFDB
1306:It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1307:I wanted to say something, but what? There were no words to describe what I felt or what I wanted. All I knew was that I was overcome by a desire so profound, no amount of self-discipline or control was powerful enough to stop it. ~ Julianne MacLean, #NFDB
1308:I was often overwhelmed as a boy by feelings of anxiety, and by profound embarrassment about the kind of family that I came from, my fears made worse by my inability to share them with anyone else or even to comprehend what they meant. ~ Rinker Buck, #NFDB
1309:We have reached a profound point in economic history where the truth is unpalatable to the political class - and that truth is that the scale and magnitude of the problem is larger than their ability to respond - and it terrifies them. ~ Hugh Hendry, #NFDB
1310:And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
1311:But when we recognize that these are not really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it. That is no trivial task; it is a profound path of self-realization. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1312:He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
1313:I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous. ~ Alanis Morissette, #NFDB
1314:Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue. ~ Kenan Malik, #NFDB
1315:Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1316:(On the book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me") Coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch. Hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1317:There is seldom black and white in our world. Sometimes the things we perceive as good have moments of profound evil, but profound evil will always tell you that it’s always good. It never admits that it could, in any way, be evil. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1318:...Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1319:At its heart shamanism is an ouroboros that, regardless of
cultural or religious trappings that have crowded its path, what
remains its critically profound gift to the present lies in its
simplistic roots of the past. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div,#NFDB
1320:My most profound confidence is however based upon the fact that at the head of Germany there stands a man by his entire development, his desires, and striving can only have been destined by fate to lead our people into a brighter future. ~ Alfred Jodl, #NFDB
1321:[Vala] provides a profound analysis of man’s limitations but no hint of escape from the prison - no suggestion that it is conceiving of the world as a prison that makes it a prison, that the key to the Gates of Paradise is in the mind. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
1322:Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1323:[E]very profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the continuously false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every sign of life he gives. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1324:It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention. ~ Conan O Brien, #NFDB
1325:It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1326:Lisp is worth learning for ... the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. ~ Eric S Raymond, #NFDB
1327:Preoccupied with her self, the adolescent sees enormous changes, whereas the parent sees the child she knew all along. For the parent, new developments are superficial and evanescent. For the adolescent, they are thrilling and profound. ~ Terri E Apter, #NFDB
1328:She cried for the life she could not control. She cried for the mentor who had died before her eyes. She cried for the profound loneliness that filled her heart. But, above all, she cried for the future ... which suddenly felt so uncertain. ~ Dan Brown, #NFDB
1329:There are moments in your life so profound, so extraordinarily crystal clear that even the remembrance of them is enough to feel like you’re being consumed by fire. Moments that might not mean much to anyone else, but mean the world to you. ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
1330:the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
1331:When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
1332:When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1333:Apart from these revelations, the profound discovery was that our patients with four or more ACEs were twice as likely to be overweight or obese and 32.6 times as likely to have been diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems. ~ Nadine Burke Harris, #NFDB
1334:Before meeting your baby it is impossible to know how profound the feeling of love is and how intense the anxious feelings about your baby’s survival and well-being can be. —Baby Love, “Australia’s Baby-Care Classic,”
by Robin Barker ~ Liane Moriarty,#NFDB
1335:I always used to reach for the cigarette when the phone rang, and I figured nobody would ever call me in Tokyo. The time difference is so profound it's, like, already September in Tokyo, and I figured nobody would be able to work it out. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1336:If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is a source of profound satisfaction. ~ Primo Levi, #NFDB
1337:Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now. ~ Edward St Aubyn, #NFDB
1338:After the terrible events of last week, there is still the shock and disbelief; there is anger; there is fear; but there is also, throughout the world, a profound sense of solidarity; there is courage; there is a surging of the human spirit. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
1339:... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
1340:I am sure I have heard this several times from places I can't recall, but it's not already in the Gaia Quotes database, so I add this profound insight from the fields of psychological healing and spiritual evolution. It sure has helped me. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1341:I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase "speaking truth to power." I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1342:It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
1343:The completely profound senselessness of my own existence explodes into it's own blissful freedom. There is no impending moment, no past moment, only this one, and without past there is no sorrow, and without future there can be no loss. ~ Carol Cassella, #NFDB
1344:You live on the surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1345:Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude. ~ Jean Genet, #NFDB
1346:cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work and the need to constantly improve your ideas, along with a sense of uncertainty—you are not exactly sure where to go next, and this uncertainty drives the creative urge and keeps it fresh. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1347:It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer. ~ Julianna Baggott, #NFDB
1348:The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah. ~ Walter Kaufmann, #NFDB
1349:...the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound--when the truth was tat it had all been done a million billion times. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
1350:Up until I started working with him, I had thought that music was a nice thing that I enjoyed and liked making, but it wasn’t a serious healing modality. What Dr. Sacks has proven is that music is actually a quantifiable, profound healing modality. ~ Moby, #NFDB
1351:Advertising expresses a power relationship . . . One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose. ~ Jerry Mander, #NFDB
1352:Giving government aid to a bank basically transforms it into a utility. The huge salaries in this sector are only a symptom of a more profound misalignment. The profitability of the finance industry has been excessive. [...] That was absurd. ~ George Soros, #NFDB
1353:I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril. ~ J R R Tolkien, #NFDB
1354:I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am." ~ Frances Moore Lappe, #NFDB
1355:It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics. ~ Wayne Swan, #NFDB
1356:The advent of the bicycle stirred sudden and profound changes in the social life of England. It was unprecedented that a person of modest means could travel substantial distances, quickly, cheaply and without being limited to railway schedules. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
1357:We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1358:When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic. An accomplished meditator has achieved a profound understanding of life, and he or she inevitably relates to the world with a deep and uncritical love. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
1359:I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1360:Most importantly, if we approach the passage with the assumption that the author was concerned with chronology, we miss the profound thematic point the author is making throughout this passage, namely, that God brings order out of chaos. 4. ~ Gregory A Boyd, #NFDB
1361:Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
1362:Sometimes fate brings you to a place in life for a reason. It’s not up to you to figure out what that reason is. It’s only up to you to decide what you’re going to make of it.” It seemed like such a profound comment even if it did confuse me. ~ Aly Martinez, #NFDB
1363:The desire to be and have a sister is a primitive and profound one that may have everything or nothing to do with the family a woman is born to. It is a desire to know and be known by someone who shares blood and body, history and dreams. ~ Elizabeth Fishel, #NFDB
1364:The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1365:Yoga means union of the individual mind with universal mind, so meditation is considered the essence of yoga. The transformation of the mind and body during meditation is significantly more profound than simply resting with your eyes closed. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1366:But you must love with a sublime , genuine , profound sympathy , with devotion, with intelligence , and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God , that will lead to an unshakeable faith . ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
1367:Each returning soldier is an in-the-flesh memoir of war. Their chapters might vary, but similar imagery fills the pages, and the theme of every book is the same--profound change. The big question became, could I live with that kind of change? ~ Ellen Hopkins, #NFDB
1368:Good is somebody who delivered and allowed the company to overcome obstacles, without leaving a profound impact on its culture. Great is somebody who leads his company to achievements and performance and value that nobody was expecting it had. ~ Carlos Ghosn, #NFDB
1369:It's a powerful experience, shiting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
1370:Now imagine that you are going beneath the surface of the ocean. Below the surface all is calm, silent, and serene. As you visualize yourself going deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, feel that a profound peace is entering you. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1371:Please let me assure you, however, that the keen disappointment and regret which I feel in this regard serve only to enhance my profound appreciation of the great honor which you have done me; and my sincere gratitude for your generous action. ~ Cordell Hull, #NFDB
1372:To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies. ~ Cornel West, #NFDB
1373:Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
1374:Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story(from the Bible)turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was,but now I know it is.
~ John Steinbeck,#NFDB
1375:I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1376:<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor. ~ David Brion Davis, #NFDB
1377:Not one man in a million would have allowed me the time without speaking. I opened my mind, let my gaurd down completely, relaxed. His silence washed over me. I stood, closed my eyes, breathed out the relief that was too profound for words. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
1378:The most profound and important thing a person can do to erase fear and access the power of intention is repeating these five key words: I want to feel good! This is the same thing as saying, I want to be in harmony with the source of well-being. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
1379:A watershed moment exists in every man's life...sometimes it's profound, sometimes it's barely a blip. But every man has the moment when he stops being his mother's son and becomes another woman's man. When he goes from protected to protector. ~ Suanne Laqueur, #NFDB
1380:Catholic education aims not only to communicate facts but also to transmit a coherent, comprehensive vision of life, in the conviction that the truths contained in that vision liberate students in the most profound meaning of human freedom. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
1381:I don't have enough knowledge or wisdom to say anything profound to people all over the world. But maybe a simple "I love you," as corny as it may sound, shows them that I am willing to be compassionate, generous, and peaceful with them. ~ Richard Brancatisano, #NFDB
1382:I have the profound sense that many people who complain of not being able to rejoice in God treat the knowledge of God as something that ought to be easy to get. They are passive. They expect spiritual things to happen to them from out of nowhere. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1383:I know that the precise magnitude and patterns of climate change cannot be fully predicted. But global warming clearly is a growing, long-term threat with profound consequences. And make no mistake about it, it will take decades to reverse. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
1384:I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
1385:I think support of the straight community is very important and I think there has been a profound shift in public opinion seen reflected in many ways. We do not need straight people to speak for us but we do want straight people to stand with us. ~ Cleve Jones, #NFDB
1386:Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1387:Premodern peoples are said to have no creative ability and anti-modern fundamentalists are said to have a profound ability to be destructive. The destruction is taken as proof that they have no appreciation for human life, including their own. ~ Mahmood Mamdani, #NFDB
1388:We are living through the most profound changes in the economy since the Industrial Revolution. Technology, globalization, and the accelerating pace of change have yielded chaotic markets, fierce competition, and unpredictable staff requirements. ~ Bruce Tulgan, #NFDB
1389:We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And it is our own. ~ Ian Douglas, #NFDB
1390:But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1391:Gaiety is forgetfulness of the self, melancholy is memory of the self: in that state the soul feels all the power of its roots, nothing distracts it from its profound homeland and the look that it casts upon the outer world is gently dismayed. ~ Adrienne Monnier, #NFDB
1392:If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1,5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
1393:If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a
happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a
moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is
a source of profound satisfaction. ~ Primo Levi,#NFDB
1394:In Africa there is a concept known as 'ubuntu' - the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievement of others. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
1395:I shall say another word for the most select ears: what I really want from music. That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October. That it be individual, frolicsome, tender, a sweet small woman full of beastliness and charm. I ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1396:I woke from a dream in which I was walking on cookies. Lots of cookies—enough to carpet the ground. That’s it, not much of a dream, not very profound or insightful. Dreams become less insightful, less draped in deep symbolism, when you’re hungry. ~ Will McIntosh, #NFDB
1397:One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and religious life…people on the left need to acknowledge – we need to grapple with – the question of religion. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
1398:One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and religious life…people on the left need to acknowledge – we need to grapple with – the question of religion. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1399:We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self. ~ Marya Hornbacher, #NFDB
1400:Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
1401:It doesn’t matter how powerfully sexuality, one with your being, moves; it’s all profound goodness. You’re safe in it. What you know in it, of its depth and its quality, is what you’re saying yes to, what you’re resting in, what you’re warmed in. ~ John de Ruiter, #NFDB
1402:More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1403:She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1404:The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not 'meant' to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, 'But we're working on it. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1405:. . . there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn't. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB
1406:They really didn’t want me there. I finally realized. So I didn’t fight it. I took an honorable discharge and walked away.” “When was this?” “A long time ago.” “And you’re still walking.” “That’s too profound.” “You sure?” “Deep down I’m very shallow. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
1407:What I believe unites the people of this nation, regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all - the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1408:A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other..
Until their secret is given to another to look after, then perhaps two human creatures may know each other.. ~ Charles Dickens,#NFDB
1409:Diotallevi and Belbo, both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say “You think so?” in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt his profound disapproval ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1410:For if there was one human condition that Madame Mallory understood, it was jealousy, the intense pain of realising there are those in the world who simply are greater than we are, surpassing us, in some profound way, in all our accomplishments. ~ Richard C Morais, #NFDB
1411:I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before — and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1412:No matter how happy a person may be in a certain lifetime, eventually the lessons are learned and nothing more can be gained by staying there. It is then time for the spirit to move on to more profound and complex lessons. The spirit must advance. ~ Dolores Cannon, #NFDB
1413:Rethinking the future: It is a profound challenge, at the end of an era of cheap oil and materials to rethink and redesign how we produce and consume; to reshape how we live and work, or even to imagine the jobs that will be needed for transition ~ Ellen MacArthur, #NFDB
1414:The world today is experiencing a profound and rapid socio-cultural transformation. But the changes do not occur at a uniform pace, and the discrepancies in the change process have differentiated the various countries and regions of our planet. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez, #NFDB
1415:Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1416:Ethics are complete, profound and alive only when addressed to all living beings. Only then are we in spiritual connection with the world. Any philosophy not representing this, not based on the indefinite totality of life, is bound to disappear. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
1417:Higher good is like water:
the good in water benefits all,
and does so without contention.
It rests where people dislike to be,
so it is close to the Way.
Good ground;
profound is the good in its heart,
Benevolent the good it bestows. ~ Lao Tzu,#NFDB
1418:The Christmas spirit brings home to us-or should bring home to us-the profound Biblical truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Anything which inspires unselfishness makes for our ennoblement. Christmas does that. I am all for Christmas. ~ B C Forbes, #NFDB
1419:The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1420:What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life? ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
1421:It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1422:Parenthood brings profound pleasure and satisfactions--the unparalleled pleasure of caring so intensely for another human being, of watching growth, of reliving childhood, of seeing oneself in a new perspective, and of understanding more about life. ~ Ellen Galinsky, #NFDB
1423:Perhaps the most sophisticated and highly evolved system is that originated by Joseph Scogna. I was impressed by the profound insights into the relationship between my own bodily functions and the psychological and emotional issues that emerged. ~ Rudolph Ballentine, #NFDB
1424:The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal, and we are all standing at the foot of mountains. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1425:There is a park that is known 4 the face it attracts colorful people whose hair On 1 side is swept back The smile on their faces It speaks of profound inner peace Ask where they're going They'll tell U nowhere They've taken a lifetime lease On Paisley Park. ~ Prince, #NFDB
1426:We seem to have lost contact with the earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies beneath and above this world. ~ Peter London, #NFDB
1427:Again, let's pay all due respect to De Palma and put him over here so we're not saying, "Mine's deeper, mine's better." Let's just say, in reading the book, what I fell in love with was this mother-daughter story that was so amazing and so profound. ~ Kimberly Peirce, #NFDB
1428:Knitting has a profound connective power. The culture and people and rituals around it, the values, they all contribute to an immediate and profound trust in one another. It's home. You belong and are accepted, which rings true no matter where you are. ~ Clara Parkes, #NFDB
1429:When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain. ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
1430:Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1431:And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1432:The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . ~ Margaret Sanger, #NFDB
1433:We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
1434:A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story. ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
1435:Beyond the profound federal perks, married people make more money; we're healthier, physically and emotionally; we produce happier, more stable and more successful kids; we have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends; we even live longer. ~ Jenna McCarthy, #NFDB
1436:Eyes are windows to the soul.” His voice rang with profound meaning I couldn’t grasp. Deep-chested baying alerted us to the approaching pack. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. “Curtains are half off at JCPenney,” I snapped. “What’s your point? ~ Hailey Edwards, #NFDB
1437:I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1438:It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1439:Most of us move through life with little chance to learn much about ourselves. We know some things we like and some things we dislike, we have a few ideas about what makes us happy, and we die in ignorance regarding anything profound within ourselves. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
1440:The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. ~ Stephen Crane,#NFDB
1441:The process of liberation brings with it a profound conflict. Having the project be clear is not enough. What is necessary is a spirituality of resistance and of renewed hope to turn ever back to the struggle in the face of the defeats of the oppressed. ~ Leonardo Boff, #NFDB
1442:To love light, you have to love dark. I'm not trying to be profound, I know you'll understand. I don't mean that you have to hate to love, or that you have to die to live.
I mean that sometimes, you turn out the lights just to turn them back on. ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson,#NFDB
1443:And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve- the utter silence of non-rain. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty, #NFDB
1444:Evaluating and altering the way you use the word “we” in speech, thought and writing is the simplest, yet also one of the most profound changes you can make in your everyday life to secede psychologically from the global collective and become a barbarian. ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
1445:I believe that in any initiative, you can't have a flavor of the month. When you believe something is profound in a company, you can not be a logical leader. You have to go to the lunatic fringe. There is no way that logic is what you need to change people. ~ Jack Welch, #NFDB
1446:If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully. ~ Pete Walker, #NFDB
1447:Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
1448:She's one of those third year girls who gripe my liver... You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture... They're officious and dull. They're always making profound observations they've overheard. ~ Gene Kelly, #NFDB
1449:The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style. ~ Gary Kildall, #NFDB
1450:This is the most religious country in the world and sometimes we try to stifle that fact or hide it. But the profound and ultimately most important reality is that we are not only citizens of this blessed country, we are citizens of the same awesome God. ~ Joe Lieberman, #NFDB
1451:When you're "East Coast" person, you are so insufferable, and you have no idea. And I was. One, because I was miserable, and nobody liked to be around a miserable person, and two, everything that I thought was so profound, everyone had already dealt with. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1452:You stand before a god! Speak your eloquence for all posterity. Be Profound!"
"Profound ... huh." Temper was silent for a long moment, studying the cobbles of the alley mouth. And then he lifted his helmed head faced Shadowthrone, and said "Fuck off. ~ Steven Erikson,#NFDB
1453:Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
1454:Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities—something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1455:I begin and end with her. It's as simple and as profound as that. Our worlds have entwined and wrapped around each others completely. Then shaped into something new and fixed and whole. There is no longer her story or mine. But now and always, only ours. ~ Laurelin Paige, #NFDB
1456:If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
1457:It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1458:There is no other relationship quite like that which can and should exist between a boy and his dad. It can be one of the most nurturing, joyful relationships in life, one that can have a profound impact on who boys become and also on who dads become. ~ M Russell Ballard, #NFDB
1459:We should live each and every day with the certainty that this armor will protect us from danger, and then we will no longer be bound to the duality of existence. We have to find a middle path, where there is neither joy nor suffering, only profound peace. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1460:Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all. ~ Imre Kert sz,#NFDB
1461:A myth... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth. ~ Christopher Vogler, #NFDB
1462:I began to realize that the most profound wisdom of man was rooted in the answers given by faith and that I did not have the right to deny them on the grounds of reason; above all, I realized that these answers alone can form a reply to the question of life. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1463:The film industry has become a universal medium exercising a profound influence on the development of people's attitudes and choices, and possessing a remarkable ability to influence public opinion and culture across all social and political frontiers. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
1464:Unlike the bounded-set approach where we're constantly trying to measure ourselves up to see whether we're in or out, the centered-set paradigm invites us to ask far more simple and profound questions: "Am I moving toward Jesus? Am I moving toward love? ~ Benjamin L Corey, #NFDB
1465:An humble man without learning, but filled with the Holy Spirit,
is more powerful than the most nobly-born profound scholar
without that inspiration. He who is educated by the Divine Spirit
can, in his time, lead others to receive the same Spirit.
~ Abdu l Bah,#NFDB
1466:As we share our stories with those people God has specifically ordained to walk with us on this side of eternity—and as they share their stories with us—we see the sacred in the ordinary. We see the profound in the mundane. We see the joy in the day to day. ~ Sophie Hudson, #NFDB
1467:Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1468:Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. ~ Ian Mcewan, #NFDB
1469:It was beautiful. Every second like a dream. Even if we didn't do anything but lie around and talk! I want nothing more than to be with him, Ellie. It's so...profound...it's frightening. I can't put it into words, but i swear i'd chuck it all to be with him. ~ Kahlen Aymes, #NFDB
1470:Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. ~ Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker., #NFDB
1471:One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
1472:The free society does not guarantee virtue, any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed, it has to be won through personal striving. ~ Dinesh D Souza, #NFDB
1473:The most profound of those realizations was that part of healing is taking care of your body and learning how to have a humane relationship with your body. I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1474:There is in St. Paul's definite, soul-stirring assertion of the wrath of God and the reality of the judgment at hand, a truth more profound than any that underlies our somewhat enfeebled ideas of universal benevolence and the determined progress of the race. ~ Roland Allen, #NFDB
1475:We may experience moments of profound inner peace, a sense of oneness with nature, or a sense of something that is more important that we're not reaching by the usual goals of human society. Perhaps we could say there's a common heart to all the religions. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
1476:At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It's a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives. ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
1477:Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
1478:Mum and Dad are there too, of course. No one’s doing anything in particular, no schmaltzy dancing or profound speeches. We’re all just there, and it’s so heartwarming and perfect that I don’t want to open my eyes and see all the empty chairs around the table. ~ Josie Silver, #NFDB
1479:...one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything...nor ought one to blame others. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1480:Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. The man who knows nothing thinks he is teaching others what he has just learned himself; the man who knows a great deal can't imagine that what he is saying is not common knowledge, and speaks more indifferently. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
1481:The day after I became king, S'yan offered a single piece of wisdom. 'Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.' This was profound. For it meant that the majesty of kings lay in their mystique... not in their might. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1482:The director, Moisés Kaufman, just received the national medal of the arts from President [Barack] Obama . He wrote and directed The Laramie Project and he has directed several Pulitzer prize-winning plays. He's a pretty profound director in the theater. ~ Patrick Heusinger, #NFDB
1483:The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly into the heart ~ Viktor Schauberger, #NFDB
1484:Thus as foreign mining and logging companies open up new areas for new forms of colonial exploitation they set up prostitution industries to service the workers. These industries have a profound effect on local cultures and relations between men and women. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
1485:Aside from what it teaches you, there is simply the indescribable degree of peace that can be achieved on a sailing vessel at sea. I guess a combination of hard work and the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea - the profound solitude - that does it for me. ~ Billy Campbell, #NFDB
1486:I begin and end with her. It’s as simple and as profound as that. Our worlds have entwined and wrapped around each other’s completely. They’ve shaped into something new and fixed and whole. There is no longer her story or mine, but now and always, only ours. ~ Laurelin Paige, #NFDB
1487:I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril. ~ J R R Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, #NFDB
1488:I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me. Even when I couldn’t do it right, it was still interesting to me. It still interests me. Nothing has ever interested me more. That profound sense of interest kept me working, ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1489:Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
1490:Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him—the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
1491:The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1492:Today's announcement projects a picture of profound weakness in U.S. diplomacy. It should not have been a heavy lift for our diplomats in New York and in foreign capitals to recruit the necessary 96 affirmative votes to seat the United States in the new council. ~ Tom Lantos, #NFDB
1493:As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
1494:For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself? ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1495:It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1496:The sign of the new Covenant is humility, hiddenness—the sign of the mustard-seed. The Son of God comes in lowliness. Both these elements belong together: the profound continuity in the history of God’s action and the radical newness of the hidden mustard-seed. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1497:We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1498:What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. ~ David Whyte, #NFDB
1499:Whenever they spoke, most of us would just keep quiet, nod our heads, and put on what author Mark Bowden calls “the glaze.” This is the “unmistakable look of profound confusion and disinterest that takes hold whenever conversation turns to workings of a computer. ~ P W Singer, #NFDB
1500:writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it. ~ Edna Ferber, #NFDB
217 Integral Yoga
75 Poetry
55 Christianity
42 Philosophy
42 Fiction
37 Occultism
25 Psychology
19 Science
14 Yoga
11 Integral Theory
6 Mythology
5 Buddhism
4 Baha i Faith
3 Philsophy
2 Theosophy
2 Sufism
2 Kabbalah
2 Hinduism
2 Education
1 Thelema
1 Mysticism
1 Alchemy
231 Sri Aurobindo
106 The Mother
47 Satprem
42 Nolini Kanta Gupta
39 H P Lovecraft
32 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
22 Carl Jung
13 William Wordsworth
13 Friedrich Nietzsche
13 Aleister Crowley
13 Aldous Huxley
12 Saint Augustine of Hippo
10 Sri Ramakrishna
10 James George Frazer
8 Robert Browning
8 Plotinus
7 Paul Richard
7 Jorge Luis Borges
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley
6 George Van Vrekhem
5 Swami Krishnananda
5 Lucretius
5 Jordan Peterson
4 Walt Whitman
4 Ovid
4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4 Bokar Rinpoche
4 Baha u llah
3 Saint Teresa of Avila
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 Plato
3 Nirodbaran
3 Ken Wilber
3 Edgar Allan Poe
3 A B Purani
2 Vyasa
2 Saint John of Climacus
2 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Anonymous
2 Alice Bailey
71 The Synthesis Of Yoga
39 Lovecraft - Poems
22 The Life Divine
16 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
15 The Future of Man
15 Essays On The Gita
15 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
13 Wordsworth - Poems
13 The Perennial Philosophy
13 The Human Cycle
13 Savitri
13 Prayers And Meditations
10 Words Of Long Ago
10 The Phenomenon of Man
10 The Golden Bough
10 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
10 Liber ABA
10 City of God
9 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
9 Record of Yoga
8 Vedic and Philological Studies
8 Labyrinths
8 Browning - Poems
8 Agenda Vol 02
8 Agenda Vol 01
7 Twilight of the Idols
7 Questions And Answers 1956
7 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
6 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
6 The Secret Of The Veda
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Practice of Psycho therapy
6 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
6 Shelley - Poems
6 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
6 Preparing for the Miraculous
6 Mysterium Coniunctionis
6 Essays Divine And Human
5 The Study and Practice of Yoga
5 Of The Nature Of Things
5 Maps of Meaning
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
5 Agenda Vol 13
5 Agenda Vol 10
5 Agenda Vol 03
5 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
4 Whitman - Poems
4 Tara - The Feminine Divine
4 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
4 Some Answers From The Mother
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
4 Metamorphoses
4 Let Me Explain
4 Isha Upanishad
4 Faust
4 Aion
3 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
3 The Lotus Sutra
3 The Divine Comedy
3 The Bible
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Questions And Answers 1954
3 Questions And Answers 1953
3 On Education
3 Magick Without Tears
3 Letters On Yoga II
3 Letters On Yoga I
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 Hymn of the Universe
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
3 Emerson - Poems
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
3 Collected Poems
3 Agenda Vol 12
2 Vishnu Purana
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
2 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
2 The Book of Certitude
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
2 Poe - Poems
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
2 On the Way to Supermanhood
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Kena and Other Upanishads
2 General Principles of Kabbalah
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
2 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
2 Anonymous - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 08
2 Agenda Vol 06
2 Agenda Vol 04
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mystic realities cannot be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderl and where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, -n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.
Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualtiesone can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara. He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.12 A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his,nigam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun,srya caku.13 He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.14 In the second place, the Poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, ncak;15 he is the Seer-Will,kavikratu.16 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.17 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the Poet gives birth to the Truth, srya satyasava, satyya satyaprasavya. But the Poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator,savit, he is also the builder or fashioner,ta, and he is the organiser,vedh is personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara, of the Truth.18 As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,19 the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The Poet pursues the Path of the Right;20 it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.21 He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;22 he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond 23into the world of felicity.
Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyi His hand is dripping with sweetness,kavir hi madhuhastya.24 The Poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.25 He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.26? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.27Indeed this sparkling Delight is the Poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.28
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
I began the study of the Qabalah at an early age. Two books I read then have played unconsciously a prominent part in the writing of my own book. One of these was "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" by Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones), which I must have first read around 1926. The other was "An Introduction to the Tarot" by Paul Foster Case, published in the early 1920's. It is now out of print, superseded by later versions of the same topic. But as I now glance through this slender book, I perceive how profoundly even the format of his book had influenced me, though in these two instances there was not a trace of plagiarism. It had not consciously occurred to me until recently that I owed so much to them. Since Paul Case passed away about a decade or so ago, this gives me the opportunity to thank him, overtly, wherever he may now be.
By the middle of 1926 I had become aware of the work of Aleister Crowley, for whom I have a tremendous respect. I studied as many of his writings as I could gain access to, making copious notes, and later acted for several years as his secretary, having joined him in Paris on October 12, 1928, a memorable day in my life.
--
In his profound investigation into the origins and basic nature of man, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis recently made a shocking statement. Although man has begun the conquest of outer space, the ignorance of his own nature, says Ardrey, "has become institutionalized, universalized and sanctified." He further states that were a brotherhood of man to be formed today, "its only possible common bond would be ignorance of what man is."
Such a condition is both deplorable and appalling when the means are readily available for man to acquire a thorough understanding of himself-and in so doing, an understanding of his neighbor and the world in which he lives as well as the greater Universe of which each is a part.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Gadadhar was seven years old when his father died. This incident profoundly affected him. For the first time the boy realized that life on earth was impermanent. Unobserved by others, he began to slip into the mango orchard or into one of the cremation grounds, and he spent hours absorbed in his own thoughts. He also became more helpful to his mother in the discharge of her household duties. He gave more attention to reading and hearing the religious stories recorded in the Puranas. And he became interested in the wandering monks and pious pilgrims who would stop at Kamarpukur on their way to Puri. These holy men, the custodians of India's spiritual heritage and the living witnesses of the ideal of renunciation of the world and all-absorbing love of God, entertained the little boy with stories from the Hindu epics, stories of saints and prophets, and also stories of their own adventures. He, on his part, fetched their water and fuel and
served them in various ways. Meanwhile, he was observing their meditation and worship.
--
When Ramkumar reprimanded Gadadhar for neglecting a "bread-winning education", the inner voice of the boy reminded him that the legacy of his ancestors — the legacy of Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Sankara, Ramanuja, Chaitanya — was not worldly security but the Knowledge of God. And these noble sages were the true representatives of Hindu society. Each of them was seated, as it were, on the crest of the wave that followed each successive trough in the tumultuous course of Indian national life. All demonstrated that the life current of India is spirituality. This truth was revealed to Gadadhar through that inner vision which scans past and future in one sweep, unobstructed by the barriers of time and space. But he was unaware of the history of the profound change that had taken place in the land of his birth during the previous one hundred years.
Hindu society during the eighteenth century had been passing through a period of decadence. It was the twilight of the Mussalman rule. There were anarchy and confusion in all spheres. Superstitious practices dominated the religious life of the people. Rites and rituals passed for the essence of spirituality. Greedy priests became the custodians of heaven. True philosophy was supplanted by dogmatic opinions. The pundits took delight in vain polemics.
--
On a certain occasion Mathur Babu stealthily entered the temple to watch the worship. He was profoundly moved by the young priest's devotion and sincerity. He realized that Sri Ramakrishna had transformed the stone image into the living Goddess.
Sri Ramakrishna one day fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to Kali. This was too much for the manager of the temple garden, who considered himself responsible for the proper conduct of the worship. He reported Sri Ramakrishna's insane behaviour to Mathur Babu.
--
Sri Ramakrishna set himself to the task of practising the disciplines of Tantra; and at the bidding of the Divine Mother Herself he accepted the Brahmani as his guru. He performed profound and delicate ceremonies in the Panchavati and under the bel-tree at the northern extremity of the temple compound. He practised all the disciplines of the sixty-four principal Tantra books, and it took him never more than three days to achieve the result promised in any one of them. After the observance of a few preliminary rites, he would be overwhelmed with a strange divine fervour and would go into samadhi, where his mind would dwell in exaltation. Evil ceased to exist for him. The word "carnal" lost its meaning. The whole world and everything in it appeared as the lila, the sport, of Siva and Sakti. He beheld held everywhere manifest the power and beauty of the Mother; the whole world, animate and inanimate, appeared to him as pervaded with Chit, Consciousness, and with Ananda, Bliss.
He saw in a vision the Ultimate Cause of the universe as a huge luminous triangle giving birth every moment to an infinite number of worlds. He heard the Anahata Sabda, the great sound Om, of which the innumerable sounds of the universe are only so many echoes. He acquired the eight supernatural powers of yoga, which make a man almost omnipotent, and these he spurned as of no value whatsoever to the Spirit. He had a vision of the divine Maya, the inscrutable Power of God, by which the universe is created and sustained, and into which it is finally absorbed. In this vision he saw a woman of exquisite beauty, about to become a mother, emerging from the Ganges and slowly approaching the Panchavati. Presently she gave birth to a child and began to nurse it tenderly. A moment later she assumed a terrible aspect, seized the child with her grim jaws, and crushed it. Swallowing it, she re-entered the waters of the Ganges.
--
Sri Ramakrishna never taught his disciples to hate any woman, or womankind in general. This can be seen clearly by going through all his teachings under this head and judging them collectively. The Master looked on all women as so many images of the Divine Mother of the Universe. He paid the highest homage to womankind by accepting a woman as his guide while practising the very profound spiritual disciplines of Tantra. His wife, known and revered as the Holy Mother, was his constant companion and first disciple. At the end of his spiritual practice he literally worshipped his wife as the embodiment of the Goddess Kali, the Divine Mother. After his passing away the Holy Mother became the spiritual guide not only of a large number of householders, but also of many monastic members of the Ramakrishna Order.
--- THE MASTER'S YEARNING FOR HIS OWN DEVOTEES
--
The Master knew Hari's passion for Vedanta. But he did not wish any of his disciples to become a dry ascetic or a mere bookworm. So he asked Hari to practise Vedanta in life by giving up the unreal and following the Real. "But it is not so easy", Sri Ramakrishna said, "to realize the illusoriness of the world. Study alone does not help one very much. The grace of God is required. Mere personal effort is futile. A man is a tiny creature after all, with very limited powers. But he can achieve the impossible if he prays to God for His grace." Whereupon the Master sang a song in praise of grace. Hari was profoundly moved and shed tears. Later in life Hari achieved a wonderful synthesis of the ideals of the Personal God and the Impersonal Truth.
--- GANGADHAR
--
She spent about two months in uninterrupted communion with God, the Baby Gopala never leaving her for a moment. Then the intensity of her vision was lessened; had it not been, her body would have perished. The Master spoke highly of her exalted spiritual condition and said that such vision of God was a rare thing for ordinary mortals. The fun-loving Master one day confronted the critical Narendranath with this simple-minded woman. No two could have presented a more striking contrast. The Master knew of Narendra's lofty contempt for all visions, and he asked the old lady to narrate her experiences to Narendra. With great hesitation she told him her story. Now and then she interrupted her maternal chatter to ask Narendra: "My son, I am a poor ignorant woman. I don't understand anything. You are so learned. Now tell me if these visions of Gopala are true." As Narendra listened to the story he was profoundly moved. He said, "Yes, mother, they are quite true." Behind his cynicism Narendra, too, possessed a heart full of love and tenderness.
--- THE MARCH OF EVENTS
--
"I shall make the whole thing public before I go", the Master had said some time before. On January 1, 1886, he felt better and came down to the garden for a little stroll. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Some thirty lay disciples were in the hall or sitting about under the trees. Sri Ramakrishna said to Girish, "Well, Girish, what have you seen in me, that you proclaim me before everybody as an Incarnation of God?" Girish was not the man to be taken by surprise. He knelt before the Master and said, with folded hands, "What can an insignificant person like myself say about the One whose glory even sages like Vyasa and Valmiki could not adequately measure?" The Master was profoundly moved. He said: "What more shall I say? I bless you all. Be illumined!" He fell into a spiritual mood. Hearing these words the devotees, one and all, became overwhelmed with emotion. They rushed to him and fell at his feet. He touched them all, and each received an appropriate benediction. Each of them, at the touch of the Master, experienced ineffable bliss. Some laughed, some wept, some sat down to meditate, some began to pray. Some saw light, some had visions of their Chosen Ideals, and some felt within their bodies the rush of spiritual power.
Narendra, consumed with a terrific fever for realization, complained to the Master that all the others had attained peace and that he alone was dissatisfied. The Master asked what he wanted. Narendra begged for samadhi, so that he might altogether forget the world for three or four days at a time. "You are a fool", the Master rebuked him. "There is a state even higher than that. Isn't it you who sing, 'All that exists art Thou'? First of all settle your family affairs and then come to me. You will experience a state even higher than samadhi."
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
with profound respect. Thus they have flattered
me into praising them thus publicly.
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"M", as the author modestly styles himself, was peculiarly qualified for his task. To a reverent love for his master, to a deep and experiential knowledge of that master's teaching, he added a prodigious memory for the small happenings of each day and a happy gift for recording them in an interesting and realistic way. Making good use of his natural gifts and of the circumstances in which he found himself, "M" produced a book unique, so far as my knowledge goes, in the literature of hagiography. No other saint has had so able and indefatigable a Boswell. Never have the small events of a contemplative's daily life been described with such a wealth of intimate detail. Never have the casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with so minute a fidelity. To Western readers, it is true, this fidelity and this wealth of detail are sometimes a trifle disconcerting; for the social, religious and intellectual frames of reference within which Sri Ramakrishna did his thinking and expressed his feelings were entirely Indian. But after the first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin to find something peculiarly stimulating and instructive about the very strangeness and, to our eyes, the eccentricity of the man revealed to us in "M's" narrative. What a scholastic philosopher would call the "accidents" of Ramakrishna's life were intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the West are concerned, unfamiliar and hard to understand; its "essence", however, was intensely mystical and therefore universal. To read through these conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of humour, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality, is in itself a liberal, education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgment. We must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version of a book so curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious, at the same time, for what it teaches us of the life of the spirit.
--------------------
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the profoundest reason of its being in that general truth and that unceasing aim of Nature which it represents, and find by virtue of this new self-knowledge and self-appreciation its own recovered and larger synthesis. Reorganising itself, it will enter more easily and powerfully into the reorganised life of the race which its processes claim to lead within into the most secret penetralia and upward to the highest altitudes of existence and personality.
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and - highest condition of victory in that effort - a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises selfconscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained.
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
see things from above, and thus see them more profoundly.
9 December 1932
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being sufficiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence, sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and so absorbing its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily justified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. Even, by an opposite exaggeration to that which sees all things in Mind and the mental life as an exclusive ideal, Mind comes to be regarded as an unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine intention.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
reasons that he thinks are very profound?
But don't you still have your mother's friendship? And also
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga, which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Vama Marga, started from a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, - Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This music aims at awakening certain profound feelings.
In listening to it, one should make oneself as silent and
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This mastery will be effected not merely in will, but in mind and heart also. For the New Man will know not by the intellect which is egocentric and therefore limited, not by ratiocination which is an indirect and doubtful process, but by direct vision, an inner communion, a soul revelation. The new knowledge will be vast and profound and creative, based as it will be upon the reality of things and not upon their shadows. Truth will shine through every experience and every utterance"a truth shall have its seat on our speech and mind and hearing", so have the Vedas said. The mind and intellect will not be active and constructive agents but the luminous channel of a self-luminous knowledge. And the heart too which is now the field of passion and egoism will be cleared of its noise and obscurity; a serener sky will shed its pure warmth and translucent glow. The knot will be rent asunderbhidyate hridaya granthih and the vast and mighty streams of another ocean will flow through. We will love not merely those to whom we are akin but God's creatures, one and all; we will love not with the yearning and hunger of a mortal but with the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the divine identity of souls.
And the new society will be based not upon competition, nor even upon co-operation. It will not be an open conflict, neither will it be a convenient compromise of rival individual interests. It will be the organic expression of the collective soul of humanity, working and achieving through each and every individual soul its most wide-winging freedom, manifesting the godhead that is, proper to each and every one. It will be an organisation, most delicate and subtle and supple, the members of which will have no need to live upon one another but in and through one another. It will be, if you like, a henotheistic hierarchy in which everyone will be the greatest, since everyone is all and all everyone simultaneously.
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It was as though even in this Nought's profound,
Even in this ultimate dissolution's core,
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
profound of things,
Where murmurs never sound of harp or lute
--
it cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound; his technical devices are commendable; but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal, or even Sarojini Naidu."The Times Literary Supplement, July 8, 1944.
***
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: "Blue profound" in Strange Journey.
Katha Upanishad.
01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being, - but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects, - wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of him. It follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or another of him. The only thing needed for that is, first, to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and each thing else begins to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
Your argument that because we know the union with the
--
I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. The selfgiving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, carries in its wake an inexpressible Ananda - and it is brought by this method sooner than by any other, so that one can say almost,
"A self-less self-giving is the best policy." Only one does not do it out of policy. Ananda is the result, but it is done not for the result, but for the self-giving itself and for the Divine himself - a subtle distinction, it may seem to the mind, but very real.
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The style and manner of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation1 is also supremely characteristic: it does not carry the impress of a mere metaphysical dissertation-although in matter it clothes throughout a profound philosophy; it is throbbing with the luminous life of a prophet's message, it is instinct with something of the Gita's own mantraakti.
Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An aspiration in the Night's profound,
Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,
--
In the heart's profound audition they can catch
The murmurs lost by Life's uncaring ear,
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This spiritual march or progress can also be described as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul, because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes the first or old Adam, the image of Nought, the body of death which means at bottom the "false misruled love in to thyself." This self-love is the mother of sin, is sin itself. What it has to be replaced by is charity that is the true meaning of Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he? This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets purified, you approach gradually your soul, the scales fall off from your eyes too and you have the knowledge and "ghostly vision." Here too there are three degrees; first, you start with faith the senses can do nothing better than have faith; next, you rise to imagination which gives a sort of indirect touch or inkling of the truth; finally, you have the "understanding", the direct vision. "If he first trow it, he shall afterwards through grace feel it, and finally understand it."
It is never possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an emanation created out of his substancehis embodied loveas a human being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore has no longer its final or definitive hold upon mankind. Man has been made potentially free, pure and worthy of salvation. This is the mystery of Christ, of God the Son. But there is a further mystery. Christ not only lived for all men for all time, whether they know him, recognise him or not; but he still lives, he still chooses his beloved and his beloved chooses him, there is a conscious acceptance on either side. This is the function of the Holy Ghost, the redeeming power of Love active in him who accepts it and who is accepted by it, the dynamic Christ-Consciousness in the true Christian.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
for behind the words there is always something profound to be
understood.
0 1955-06-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
If only I could see a distinct error blocking my path which I could clearly attack But I feel that I am not responsible, that it is not my personal fault if I remain without aspiration, stagnating. I feel like a battlefield of contending forces that are beyond me and against which I can do NOTHING. Oh Mother, it is not an excuse for a lack of will, or at least I dont think so I profoundly feel like a helpless toy, totally helpless.
If the divine force, if your grace, does not intervene to shatter this obscure resistance that is drawing me downwards in spite of myself, I dont know what will become of me Mother, I am not blackmailing you, I am only expressing my helplessness, my anguish.
--
Mother, it is an impossible, absurd, unlivable life. I feel as though I have no hand in this cruel little game. Oh Mother, why doesnt your grace trust that deep part in me which knows so well that you are the Truth? Deliver me from these evil forces since, profoundly, it is you and you alone I want. Give me the aspiration and strength I do not have. If you do not do this Yoga for me, I feel I shall never have the strength to go on.
There is something that must be SHATTERED: can it not be done once and for all without lingering on indefinitely? Mother, I am your child.
0 1955-09-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, I would like you to forgive me, to understand me and, above all, not to deprive me of your Love. I would like you to tell me if I may leave for a few weeks and how you feel about it. It seems to me that I am profoundly your child, in spite of all this??
Signed: Bernard
0 1956-12-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I feel that this Truth of my being, this self most intensely felt, is independent from any form or institution. As far back as I can reach in my consciousness, this thing has been there; it was what drove me at an early age to liberate myself from my family, my religion, my country, a profession, marriage or society in general. I feel this thing to be a kind of absolute freedom, and I have been feeling within me this same profound drive for more than a year. Is this need for freedom wrong? And yet is it not because of this that the best in me has blossomed?
This is actually what is happening in me: I never really accepted the W solution, and the solution of Somalil and doesnt appeal to me. But I feel drawn by the idea of Turkestan, as I already told you, and this is why:
0 1957-04-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
That is the situation, Mother. I feel my unworthiness profoundly. I am the opposite of Satprem, unable to love and to give myself. Everything in me is sealed tight.
So what is to be done? I intend asking your permission to leave as soon as the book is finished (I am determined to finish it, for it will rid me of the past it represents). I expect nothing from the world, except a bit of external space, in the absence of another space.
0 1958-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have one thing to add: we must not misinterpret the meaning of this experience and imagine that henceforth everything will take place without difficulties or always in accordance with our personal desires. It is not at this level. It does not mean that when we do not want it to rain, it will not rain! Or when we want some event to take place in the world, it will immediately take place, or that all difficulties will be abolished and everything will be like a fairy tale. It is not like that. It is something more profound. Nature has accepted into her play of forces the newly manifested Force and has included it in her movements. But as always, the movements of Nature take place on a scale infinitely surpassing the human scale and invisible to the ordinary human consciousness. It is more of an inner, psychological possibility that has been born in the world than a spectacular change in earthly events.
I mention this because you might be tempted to believe that fairy tales are going to be realized upon earth. The time has not yet come.
--
The miracles that are taking place are not what could be called literary miracles, for they do not take place as in storybooks. They are visible only to a very profound vision of thingsvery profound, very comprehensive, very vast.
(silence)
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The gods of the Puranas are merciless gods who respect only power and have nothing of the true love, charity or profound goodness that the Divine has put into the human consciousness and which compensate psychically for all the outer defects. They themselves have nothing of this, they have no psychic.1 The Puranic gods have no psychic, so they act according to their power. They are restrained only when their power is not all-powerful, thats all.
But what does Anusuya represent?2
0 1959-05-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
After the wave of rebelliousness this morning, I was seized by a great sadness, a great bitterness, as though I were being confronted with a profound injustice.
There is a spiritual destiny in me, but there are three other destinies so intimately bound up with it that I cannot cut off any one without mutilating something of my living soulwhich is why, periodically, these suppressed destinies awaken and call to meand the dark forces seize upon these occasions to sow chaos within and drive me to ruin everything since I cannot really fulfill myself. And the problem is insoluble.
--
2) There is the destiny of the writer in me. And this too is linked to the best of my soul. It is also a profound need, like adventuring upon the heaths, because when I write certain things, I brea the in a certain way. But during the five years I have been here, I have had to bow to the fact that, materially, there is no time to write what I would like (I recall how I had to wrench out this Orpailleur, which I have not even had time to revise). This is not a reproach, Mother, for you do all you can to help me. But I realize that to write, one must have leisure, and there are too many less personal and more serious things to do. So I can also sit on this and tell myself that I am going to write a Sri Aurobindo but this will not satisfy that other need in me, and periodically it awakens and sprouts up to tell me that it too needs to breathe.
3) There is also the destiny that feels human love as something divine, something that can be transfigured and become a very powerful driving force. I did not believe it possible, except in dreams, until the day I met someone here. But you do not believe in these things, so I shall not speak of it further. I can gag this also and tell myself that one day all will be filled in the inner divine love. But that does not prevent this other need in me from living and from finding that life is dry and from saying, Why this outer manifestation if all life is in the inner realms? But neither can I stifle this with reasoning.
0 1959-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
On another occasion, he said to me, I am ALWAYS taking care of you. And when I asked him why he was taking such trouble for me, he replied, Because I have orders. This attention that comes to me from you and him surprises me, for I do not feel that I am good, and upon the least occasion I know that I am seriously prepared to quit everything because something in me is profoundly revolted by this excess of suffering, by a lack of love and flowering, by an excess of solitude. Yesterday evening, it was still fully there, with all my approval, and at such a time no one in the world can hold me back. It is this POINT OF SUFFERING that makes me want to turn my back on everything. Not to commit suicide: to turn my back.
X told me the story of my last three existences (rather grim), but I will write you about that in another letter.
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ultimately, disgust, rebellion and anger, all movements of violence, are necessarily movements of ignorance and of limitation with all the weakness that limitation implies. Rebellion is a weakness, for its the feeling of an impotent will. When you feel, when you see that things are not as they should be, then you rebel against whatever is out of keeping with your vision. But if you were all-powerful, if your will and your vision were all-powerful, there would be no opportunity to rebel! You would always see that all things are as they should be! That is omnipotence.1 Then all these movements of violence become not only useless but profoundly ridiculous.
Consequently, there is only one solution: by aspiration, concentration, interiorization and identification, to unite with the supreme Will. And that is both omnipotence and perfect freedom. Its the only omnipotence, the only freedomall the rest are approximations. You may be en route, but its not That, not the total thing.
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For Sri Aurobindo, the important thing was always the Mother. As he explained it, the Mother has several aspects, and certain aspects are still unmanifest. So if he has represented the Mother by Kali in particular, I believe its in relation to all those gods. Because, as he wrote in The Mother, the aspects to be manifested depend upon the time, the need, the thing to be done. And he always said that unless one understands and profoundly feels the aspect of Kali, one can never really participate in the Work in the worldhe felt that a sort of timid weakness makes people recoil before this terrible aspect.
***
0 1961-05-19, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every word, mon petit! Every word and the POSITION of the word in the sentenceeven the position of an adverb has a fundamental importance for the meaning. All the finesse, all the profound wisdom evaporates in translation, and finally we express only platitudes by comparisonplatitudes. They are not platitudes compared to ordinary intellect, but they are platitudes compared to the kind of keen PRECISION with which Sri Aurobindo discerns things.
And the trouble is that if one translates literally, into poor French, it doesnt yield the deeper sense either, because that also considerably demolishes the meaning.
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be in a condition in which all is the Supreme, all is wonderful, all is marvelous, all is marvelous love, all is all is profound Joyan unchanging, immutable, ever-present condition. To live in That, and then to have this bodily substance contradict it through every possible stupiditylosing sight, losing strength, pains here, pains there, disorders, weaknesses, incapacities of every type. And at the SAME TIME, the response within this body, no matter what happens to it, is, O Lord, Your Grace is infinite. The contradiction is VERY disconcerting.
From experience, I know perfectly well that when one is satisfied with being a saint or a sage and constantly maintains the right attitude, all goes well the body doesnt get sick, and even if there are attacks it recovers very easily; all goes very well AS LONG AS THERE IS NOT THIS WILL TO TRANSFORM. All the difficulties arise in protest against the will to transform; while if one says, Very well, its all right, let things be as they are, I dont care, I am perfectly happy, in a blissful state, then the body begins to feel content!
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now I see that these rays emanate from a recumbent oval of white light encircled by a superb rainbow, and I sense that the one whom the light hides from my view is plunged into a profound repose. For long I remain at the outer edge of the rainbow, trying to pierce through the light and see the one who is sleeping encircled by such splendor. Unable to discern anything, I enter the rainbow, and thence into the white and shining oval. Here I see a marvelous being: stretched on what seems to be a mass of white eiderdown, his supple body, of incomparable beauty, is garbed in a long, white robe. His head rests on his folded arm, but of that I can see only his long hair, the hue of ripened wheat, flowing over his shoulders. A great and gentle emotion sweeps through me at this magnificent spectacle, and a deep reverence as well.
Has the sleeper sensed my presence? For now he awakens and rises in all his grace and beauty. He turns towards me and his eyes meet mine, mauve and luminous eyes with a gentle, an infinitely tender expression. Wordlessly he bids me a sublime welcome and my whole being joyously responds. Taking my hand, he leads me to the couch he has just left. I stretch out on this downy whiteness, and his harmonious visage bends over me; a sweet current of force enters wholly into me, invigorating, revitalizing each cell.
0 1961-09-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is the complete negation of bluff. I find it very beautiful. When I saw this flower, it struck me as something very profound, very calmabsolutely sure, immobile. I dont know why, but the longer I looked at it, the more it gave that impression and when I was asked its significance, I said, Unostentatious Certitude. Its what one might call a superlative good-taste in the realm of spiritual experience: something with greater content than it expresses.
***
0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The story began with an entirely concrete and material incident something very amusing; this is not the first time it has happened, but it was so concrete and so precise that it became interesting. Someone was complaining of being ill, quite a serious, psychological illness: periodic possession by a spirit of falsehood, recurring regularly every month, of more or less long duration. This person comes to see me, and the moment shes here theres an upwelling of that profound Compassion of Love, with a considerable, concentrated Power to drive away the possession; and all of this accompanied, even outwardly, by quite an affectionate gesture. This person leaves and within half an hour I receive a letter: Now I know: you hate me, you want me to be ill and you want me to die because I disgust you.
It was interesting because it was so concrete. I was conscious of my movement of compassion and love and of what it had become in the other persons consciousness!
0 1961-12-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Coming from here, of course, it will take much more time to touch the general public, but I see how things work in the universe: it will go far more surely and directly to those who are ready to receive it. And we mustnt believe that only an elite public of especially intelligent and refined people will be touched: among very simple, open-hearted people there is a deep intelligence that understands and responds to these things far better than very cultivated people dofar betterbecause they feel, they feel the vibration of this profound Hope, this profound Joy, something corresponding to the intense need of their being. While the others begin to reason and sophisticate, which takes away half the power.
From the practical standpoint, I would much prefer the book to be printed here and for us to make the necessary effort for it to go out and touch as many people as possible. The publisher may be a handy and less troublesome channel, but hes not at all the best onefar from it. THAT I know, because I am constantly seeing your book with Sri Aurobindos perception, and I am absolutely positive that he likes it very much; he has put a lot into it and he sees that it can be an enormous help but not in the short run. There is always the sense of it needing a hundred years to have its full effect. With your publisher, on the other hand, the effects are far more violent, more external and noisy, but they fade far more quickly.
--
I dont know, Im putting it poorly, but this experience was concrete to the point of being physical. It happened in a Japanese country-house where we were living, near a lake. There was a whole series of circumstances, events, all kinds of thingsa long, long story, like a novel. But one day I was alone in meditation (I have never had very profound meditations, only concentrations of consciousness Mother makes an abrupt gesture showing a sudden ingathering of the entire being); and I was seeing. You know that I had taken on the conversion of the Lord of Falsehood: I tried to do it through an emanation incarnated in a physical being [Richard]7, and the greatest effort was made during those four years in Japan. The four years were coming to an end with an absolute inner certainty that there was nothing to be done that it was impossible, impossible to do it this way. There was nothing to be done. And I was intensely concentrated, asking the Lord, Well, I made You a vow to do this, I had said, Even if its necessary to descend into hell, I will descend into hell to do it. Now tell me, what must I do?The Power was plainly there: suddenly everything in me became still; the whole external being was completely immobilized and I had a vision of the Supreme more beautiful than that of the Gita. A vision of the Supreme.8 And this vision literally gathered me into its arms; it turned towards the West, towards India, and offered meand there at the other end I saw Sri Aurobindo. It was I felt it physically. I saw, sawmy eyes were closed but I saw (twice I have had this vision of the Supremeonce here, much later but this was the first time) ineffable. It was as if this Immensity had reduced itself to a rather gigantic Being who lifted me up like a wisp of straw and offered me. Not a word, nothing else, only that.
Then everything vanished.
0 1962-03-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I like the form of your expression very, very much. It contains something deep, very supple and polished at the same timelike a lovely, finely chiseled statue. There is profound inspiration and a rhythm, a harmony, which I like very much. I really enjoyed reading your first book2the kind of enjoyment that comes from discovering beautiful forms, an original way of looking at things and expressing them. I appreciated it tremendously. Immediately, spontaneously, I ranked you as a true writer.
There you have it. I didnt think it was necessary to keep telling you all these things. But its true.
0 1962-06-23, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Last night something like a big festival was being prepared, I dont know where maybe at the Ashram (a lot of Ashram people were there) but perhaps not the festival was of the whole earth, and everybody was dressed up in white lace! Of course it was profoundly ridiculous! But it was all taken very seriously, it was very important.
What did the white lace represent? It was very important! And oh, the details! They were really funny.
0 1962-08-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I never thought this would have any consequences, but it did!1 Something probably needed to be exhausted. So physically speaking, yesterday was a pretty bad dayoh, only quite externally! In fact, the body was luminously conscious, profoundly happy and joyous, to the point where all suffering becomes negligibleyou dont notice it. And so it was a real opportunity for the whole entourage to make progress. That helps.
Superficially, it [the bodys characteristic of attracting ordeals] could be called a sort of karma, but thats not what it is. Its actually like one of the pivotsnot a central one, but one of the pivots of the bodys invisible action, of its consciousness. And it is expressed by attracting certain circumstances. A whole range of things having to do with the physical body has thus become very clear and precise to meand thats what the body was made for: to go full speed ahead.
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One day (for me now, everything is part of an extremely precise play of forces) and one day I had a sort of sensation of one of those profound upheavals something very widespread and full of GREAT pain. So something in me spontaneously sprang up from the individual soul, the deep psychic being, and said, Oh! Lord, is it Your will that we have this experience again? Then everything stabilized, stopped, and there was a splendor of Light. But I received no response. Except for that splendor of Light something triumphant, you know. But it may just as well mean that no matter what happens, this will always be therewhich is obvious.
(silence)
0 1962-11-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One day, I dont remember on what occasion, I saw what had motivated the forefa thers who wrote the Vedas: it was the need for immortality; they were in quest of immortality.6 From there, I went on to Buddha and saw what had set the Buddha on his way: this kind of need for permanence, purely and simply; the vision of the impermanence of things had profoundly troubled him, and he felt the need for Permanence. His whole quest was to find the Permanent (why was he so anxious to have the Permanent?). There are a few things like that in human nature, in the deep human need. And then I saw another such need: a need for the Certitude which is security. I dont know how to explain it. Because I had the experience of it, I saw it was one of the human needs; and I understood it very intensely, for when I met Sri Aurobindo, this Certitude is what made me feel I had found the Truth I needed. And I didnt realize how DEEP this need was until he left his bodyjust then, at the moment of the transition. Then the entire physical consciousness felt its certitude and security collapse. At that moment I saw (we spoke about it with Nolini a year later and he had had exactly the same impression), I saw this was similar to Buddhas experience when he realized that everything was impermanent and so all of life collapsed in other words, Something Else HAD to be found. Well, at that moment. Id already had all my experiences, but with Sri Aurobindo, for the thirty years I lived with him (a little more than thirty years), I lived in an absolute, an absolute of securitya sense of total security, even physical, even the most material security. A sense of absolute security, because Sri Aurobindo was there. And it held me up, you know, like this (gesture of being carried): not for ONE MINUTE in those thirty years did it leave me. That was why I could do my work with a Base, really, a Base of absolutenessof eternity and absoluteness. I realized it when he left: THAT suddenly collapsed.
And then I understood that it is one of lifes needs (there are several); and its what spurs the human being to get out of his present state and find another one. These needs are (whats the word?) the seeds, the germs of evolution. They compel us to progress. The whole time Sri Aurobindo was here, as I said, individual progress was automatic: all the progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made. But I was in a state of eternity, of absoluteness, with a feeling of such security, in every circumstance. Nothing, nothing unfortunate could happen, for he was there. So when he left, all at oncea fall into a pit. And thats what projected me wholly (Mother gestures forward).
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Nobody can give you the true mantra. Its not something that is given: its something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being then it has power, because its not something that comes from outside, its your very own cry.
I saw, in my case, that my mantra has the power of immortality; whatever happens, if it is uttered, its the Supreme that has the upper hand, its no longer the lower law. And the words are irrelevant, they may not have any meaningto someone else, my mantra is meaningless, but to me its full, packed with meaning. And effective, because its my cry, the intense aspiration of my whole being.
0 1963-09-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In a very concrete way, there was the consciousness that everything is the Lord and that everything is His will, His action, His consciousness and so forth; at the same time, the perception of the world as it is (as it is, anyway as we feel it). And as there was no longer any notion of good and evil and all that, there was a sort of almost candid surprise, a very spontaneous surprise, not thought out, at reprobation, anger, disapproval, scorn for all the people who are called bad, who do evil and have bad will. It seemed so strange that one could lose ones temper because of that! Then there arose a profound Pity but a Pity that has nothing of the sense of superiority or inferiority, nothing like thatlike a sort of sorrow that there can be people who are so small and so weak in that Immensity that they are COMPELLED to be nasty and malicious, to hate, to reject, to wish evil.
The words diminish the experience very, very much. It was so a super-compassion, you know, full of a deep Love and Understanding: How can one reproach them for being the way the Lord wants them to be?
0 1965-11-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When things are put mentally, all those who have tried to explain things mentally have made an opposition, and so people imagine that one is the very opposite of the other [the True Thing and its distortion]; in that case it would be so easy to discern. But thats not at all how it is! I am now studying the way in which Matter, the body, can be in constant harmony with the divine Presence. And its so interesting: its not at all an opposition, its a tiny little microscopic distortion. For instance, there is this frequent experience (and generally people dont know why it is sonow I know): on some days or at certain times all the gestures you make are harmonious, all the things you touch seem to respond harmoniously to the will that touches them, everything works out (I am talking about the very small things of lifeof everyday life), each thing seems to be in its place or to find its place naturally: if you fold a paper, it folds itself as though spontaneously, as it should; if you look for something, you seem to spontaneously find the thing you need; you never knock against anything, never upset anythingeverything seems harmonious. And then, without any appreciable difference in the overall state of consciousness, at other times, its the exact opposite: if you want to fold a paper, you fold it the wrong way; if you want to touch some object, you drop iteverything seems disharmonized or off balance or bad-willed. You are yourself more or less in the same state. But now, with the present keen and fine observation, I see that in one case, there is a sort of inner silence in the cells, a profound quietude, which doesnt prevent movement, even rapid movement, but the movement seems to be founded on an eternal vibration; and in the other case, there is that inner precipitation (gesture of tremor), that inner vibration, that inner restlessness, that haste to go from one moment to the next, that constant hurry (why? Theres no knowing why), always, always hurrying and scurrying; and everything you do is wrong. And in the other case, with that inner serenity and peace, everything is done harmoniously, and MUCH FASTER in material time: there is no time lost.
And thats why its so difficult to know how one should be. Because in thought you can be in the same constant state, even in aspiration you can be in the same constant state, in the general goodwill, even in surrender to the Divine, it all can be the same thing, in the same stateits in here (Mother touches her body), and this makes the whole difference. I can very well conceive that there may be people in whom this opposition persists in the mind and the vital, but there its so obvious. But I am talking of something absolutely material. Some people say and think, How come? I have such goodwill, such a desire to do the right thing, and then nothing works, everything jarswhy? I am so good (!) and yet things dont respond. Or those who say, Oh, I have made my surrender, I have such goodwill, I have an aspiration, I want nothing but the Truth and the Good, and yet I am ill all the timewhy am I ill? And naturally, one small step more, and you begin to doubt the Justice that rules the world, and so on. Then you fall into a hole. But thats not it, thats not what I mean. Its much simpler and much more difficult at the same time, because it isnt blatant, it isnt evident, its not an opposition from which you can choose, its truly, totally and integrally leaving the entire responsibility to the Lord.
0 1965-12-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told you, and I told you neither to make you happy nor to comfort you, I told you because its a fact I have myself observed with curiosity and interest: we are extremely close up above in the profound intellectual understanding and in the Great Light. And this is expressed by an identity of experience in the intellectual consciousness. I am aware of your difficulties, I know them, Ive known them since the first day I saw you (and even before you came here); from that point of view there has been great progress, but it has shaken your physical health, because of that struggle. I know that you can be completely cured, but in order for you to be completely cured, your vital must be converted, and what I call to be converted isnt to surrenderto be converted is to understand. To be converted is to adhere.
(Satprem lays his head on Mothers knees)
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Although St. Paul had remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much profound spiritual knowledge ( profound rather than wide, I think)I would not swear to it that he is referring1 to the supramentalised body (physical body). Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping him and abolishing this body of death which he felt the material envelope to be. This verse like many others is capable of several interpretations and might refer to a quite supraphysical experience. The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I have never been quite sure that it meant the change in this very matter. There was a yogi some time ago in this region who taught it, but he hoped when the change was complete, to disappear in light. The Vaishnavas speak of a divine body which will replace this one when there is the complete siddhi. But, again, is this a divine physical or supraphysical body? At the same time there is no obstacle in the way of supposing that all these ideas, intuitions, experiences point to, if they do not exactly denote, the physical transformation.2
Sri Aurobindo
0 1967-06-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its profoundly ridiculous, and unhealthy, moreover.
You understand, once the thing had been seenseen and felt and lived completely they started slowing down there. I cant say things are quite all right as yet, far from it, but anyway I think the worst of the catastrophe has been averted.3
0 1967-08-26, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh! Moreover, as soon as the group was set up, they threw out the man who had started it! They did it under the pretext he was dishonest, but still he was the founder after all. He had gone to Russia, and it was in Russia that the idea of World Union came to him. So four or five of them came together to form this World Union, and fifteen days later they started quarrellinga year later they threw out the one who had founded it! Then it was the turn of S., who, at least, has some ideas. Anyway, he too was thrown out. Then they came to me to tell me their miseries! I told them, Listen, you are profoundly ridiculous: you want to preach world unity, and the first thing you do is quarrel! It shows that you arent ready. And I left it at that. Then A.B., who was very well known in Africa, recruited all kinds of people and made me see a few of them to ask me if they were able to do somethingabsolutely nothing, you know, nothing at all: old pillars of a house in ruins, nothing else.
***
0 1969-02-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body is very conscious of its infirmity and of the Grace. For instance, there are painful, difficult moments, but its per-fect-ly aware that its because of its incapacity to open, to give itself, to change. And a profound joy, VERY CALM, but very vastvast, you know, the cells feel a broadening. That goes on increasing little by little. Its only when theres a physical pain or something a little acute that the body is obliged to hang on, otherwise And even that comes from this idiotic spirit of self-preservation (Mother laughs) in the depths of any cellular consciousness it knows that. It knows it. Its an old habit. But all that, little by little (little by little, but in reality very fastvery fast), is changing.
All the groups of cells, all the cellular organizations have to do their not surrender, a complete self-abandon, in complete trust. Thats indispensable. For some, its the spontaneous, inevitable, constant movement; with others, it comes as soon as theres a difficulty; yet others need to be churned a little in order to learn. So then, the various functions are taken up in turn, in a marvelously logical order, following the bodys functioning. Its something marvelous, only the body is a poor thing, very poor thing thats very true.
0 1969-03-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This Consciousness has a great attracting power. Now people are coming from everywhere, just everywhere. The other day (yesterday or the day before, I dont know), I saw some Americans who have founded a group, I think, or a society for the union (I found it touching), the spiritual union of religions! I found it touching. Its an acknowledgment (laughing) that religions arent spiritual! And that they need a spiritual union. It was very interesting. Good people, oh, very good, and quite a not an elementary but a simplistic mentality, so it has taken that form. They came to India (because theyre also in touch with World Union), and they came because they wanted to meet me. First I said, Oh, theres no need at all. Then I was told they had come all the way to see me, so I said all right. Good people, you know, thoroughly Americangood people. Theyve found a very profound truth, but without knowing it! They speak of a SPIRITUAL union of religions, which is a declaration that religions have no spiritual life! They arent aware of that.
Its very, very active; this Consciousness is very active.
0 1969-05-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But never, never in this bodys whole, entire existence, not oncenot oncehas it felt such a total and profound sorrow as on that day Oh, something that made it (Mother has a lump in her throat). And at the end of it all, Bliss. And then, pfft! it faded away, as if to say, Not yet, not yet, the time hasnt come yet. But as if all this, which is so awful, did not exist.
After all, its probably probably only on the earth (that I dont know). It doesnt seem to be like that, because for the moon, its very concretely a sense of devastation. Anyway, theres nevertheless a very strong, very concrete sensation that whats like that, in this Falsehood, is something limited. And unreal. And that we are all in Falsehood and Unreality thats why things are as they are. And the interesting point was that that escape into Nirvana wasnt the solution, it was only a remedya remedy for a time (how can I explain? I dont know) a partial remedy. A partial and, we might almost say, momentary remedy.
0 1969-08-23, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In my vision (I cant swear its supramental, but at any rate it was much above a mental vision), I chose one man [Deshmukh], and everyone giggled, telling me it was an impossibilityit was the one thing that could make India immediately great. Immediately it gave India a place in the world, which was her true place. Everyone found it profoundly ridiculous. So then, I was asked to choose from among three candidates, and the most obviously incapable of the three was chosen as as the man who would help the most in Indias development and blossoming. There.
After that, you only have to keep quiet.
0 1969-11-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then, some really amusing things all the time, all the time, every minute. For an extremely long time it hasnt felt offended anymore, an extremely long time, but there was still a time when it would see, perceive incomprehension as a ridiculous thing or an ignorance. Now thats over. Now For a long time, every time it used to ask, Ah! What do You want me to learn? Now that too is past. Because as soon as something comes (what Sri Aurobindo called the old man), something left from the old personality, which shows up like that, the body doesnt need anything to see the truth instantly: it appears profoundly ridiculous.
***
0 1971-05-26, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres something I feel very deeply. (silence) Words words (Mother shakes her head). But to say it as simply as possible, I could say, The Lord loves Satprem. And thats something profound, profound, profound. The Lord loves Satprem. Thats all.
(Satprem puts his forehead on Mothers knees)
0 1971-10-02, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The problem is deeper, of course, as you well know. What is at stake at the end of the present mental cycle is the creation of a new man that is what we are trying to do here with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Great Forces are at work here, in a humble way. And I am happy that Supermanhood did not leave you insensitive. Indeed, its cry needs you and your capacity to grasp the profound Sense of our human crisis.
May the Force of Sri Aurobindo and Mother be with you.
0 1971-10-16, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, its a profounder change that is needed.
Oh, yes!
0 1972-03-29a, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At this crucial juncture in human evolution, Sri Aurobindo brings a luminous message to which I hope to draw your attention through this letter and the book I am taking the liberty of sending you. I think the youth of Europe have a profound need to hear a great voice that would bring them face to face with their fundamental truths; none can, better than you, touch that youth and awaken the anguished Occident.
I deeply hope, Sir, that Sri Aurobindos works will be a new source of inspiration for you.
0 1972-05-31, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Smiling) Its profoundly interesting.
(silence)
0 1972-08-05, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And all this happens within a VERY profound silence. So I cant express it.
(long silence Mother touches her hands)
0 1973-02-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am very keen on this! Its very truevery true. It may not be easy to understand, but its VERY profoundLY true.
All in us that veils or distorts or prevents the manifestation of the Divine is the falsehood.
0 1973-03-24, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I take it in the largest and most profound sense.
(silence)
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In a profound existence beyond earth's
Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Occult, profound comes all experience,
Marvel is ever new, miracle divine.
02.06 - Vansittartism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the very core of the matter. Germany stands for a philosophy of life, for a definite mode of human values. That philosophy was slowly developed, elaborated by the German mind, in various degrees and in various ways through various thinkers and theorists and moralists and statesmen, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The conception of the State as propounded even by her great philosophers as something self-existent, sacrosanct and almost divineaugust and grim, one has to addis profoundly significant of the type of the subconscient dynamic in the nation: it strangely reminds one of the state organised by the bee, the ant or the termite. Hitler has only precipitated the idea, given it a concrete, physical and dynamic form. That philosophy in its outlook has been culturally anti-Latin, religiously anti-Christian. Germany cherishes always in her heart the memory of the day when her hero Arminius routed the Roman legions of Varus. Germany stands for a mode of human consciousness that is not in line with the major current of its evolutionary growth: she harks back to something primeval, infra-rational, infra-human.
Such is the position taken up by Lord Vansittart who has given his name to the new ideology of anti-Germanism. Vansittartism (at least in its extreme variety) has very little hope for the mending of Germany, it practically asks for its ending.
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The ominous profound Initiate
Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.
02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not doubt that it is the deliberate policy of these 'vampires' to keep us Indians down eternally as their serfs and slaves. But whatever be the truth of the fact in the past, it is a pity we do not see that things have changed a good deal and are changing steadily and profoundly and inexorably. It is not, as it is so often demanded, that there has been a change of, heart, in the sense that one has become saintly, self-forgetful, self-sacrificing, altruistic. We, on our part, have not become so and it is idle to expect of others to be so. What has happened is a physical change, a change, almost a revolution in the external conditions of life in the world, in the geographical and economic conditions, for example. The geographical revolution is this that all the nations and peoples of the earth have been thrown together to intermingle, have been forced to come into close and inextricable communion with one another: all barriers of distance and physical inaccessibility have been removed and practically eliminated. The universe may be expanding, but the earth has shrunk and has become very small indeed. A signal example of the kind of blunder that one could commit in this respect was that of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who said, not knowing what he said on the eve of the present war, that Czechoslovakia was a far-off foreign country whose fate is of no concern or consequence to the British. Well, Time-Spirit must have had a hearty laughter over the wisdom of the statesman: it did not take long for the British to see that Czechoslovakia is dangerously near, indeed, it touches the very frontier of the British Isles. We have flown over the mighty "humps" that separated countries and continents and levelled them and made of the earth one even continuous plain, as it were. Neither the Poles nor the peaks of the Himalayas can hide any longer their millennial secrets from man's newly acquired Argus eye. The span and accuracy of our flying capacity have left no corner of the earth to lie in quiet and splendid isolation.
The geographical revolution has led inevitably to the economic revolution which is not less momentous, pregnant with prophecies of brave new things. We all know that the modern world was ushered in with the industrial revolution. As a result of this new dispensation, world and society gradually divided into two camps: on one side, the industrialists and on the other the agriculturists, or, in a general way, the possessors of raw materials. The Imperialists formed the first group, while the latter, dominated by these, belonged to the Colonies. The "backward" countries and people who could not take to industry, but continued the old system became a helpless prey to the industrial nations. Africa and Asia and the South American countries came under the domination of European nations, rather the West European Nations: they became the suppliers of raw materials and also the market for finished products. Also within the same country occupying the imperial status, there came a division, a class division, as it is called. A few industrial magnates or trusts (France had its famous Two-Hundred Families) monopolised all the wealth, became the top-dog, the "Haves", the others were mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, serfs and slaves, the "Have-Nots". Exploitation was-the motto of the age. The "exploiters" and the "exploited", this trenchant duality was the whole truth of the social scheme and that summed up the entire malady of the collective life. Then came the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution which brought to a head the great crisis and initiated the change-over to new conditions. The French Revolution called up from the rear of social ranks and set in front the Third Estate and gradually formed and crystallised, with the aid of the Industrial Revolution, what is known as the Bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution went a step farther. It dislodged the bourgeoisie and installed the Fourth Estate, the proletariate, as the head and front of society, its centre of power and governmental authority. In the meantime there was developing in the bourgeois society, too, a kind of socialism which aimed at the uplift and remoulding of the working class into a total social power. But the process could not, go far enough. The Industrial League, no doubt, began to release some of its monopolies, delegate some of its power and authority to the Proletariate and sought an armistice and entente; but still it is they who wielded the real power and gave to society the tone and impress of their characteristic authority. The Russian experiment made a bold departure and attempted to build up a new society from the very bottom: the manual labourers, they who produce with the sweat of their brow and make a society living and prosperous must also be its rulers. Now whatever the success or failure in regard to the perfect ideal, the thing achieved is solid; certain forces have been released that are working inexorably in and through even contrary appearances, they have come to stay and cannot be negatived. The urge, for example, towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and wealth-producing implements; an even balancing of economic values has been growing and gathering strength: it has become an asset of the body social. Instead of an unfettered competition between rival agencies, the mad drive for a jealous and closely guarded appropriation (rather, mis-appropriation) by private cartels, there has arisen an inevitable need for a unitary or co-operative control under a common direction, whether it be that of the state or some other body equally representing the common interest. In other words, the principle of co-operation has now become a living reality, a thing of practical politics. All effort towards progress and amelioration, cure of social ills and regaining of health and strength must lie in that direction: anything going the contrary way shall perforce be out of tune with the Time-Spirit and can cause only confusion, bring in stagnation or even regression.
02.13 - Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And both had the vision of a greater Tomorrow for their Motherl and and that was why both regarded her freedom as the basic necessity for the recovery of her greatness. How the inspired songs and speeches of Rabindranath and the flaming utterances of Sri Aurobindo created a psychological revolution almost overnight in the mind and heart of the people during the Swadeshi days forms a glorious chapter in the history of India's freedom movement. profoundly touched by Sri Aurobindo's soul-stirring lead to the country, Rabindranath wrote a memorable poem, addressing Sri Aurobindo, which is still enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen. Rabindranath himself called on Sri Aurobindo and read out to him his heart's homage. We remember with thrill the majestic opening lines:
Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!
02.14 - The World-Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To reach the last profound of the world's heart,
And from that heart there surged a wordless call
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow beingsmen and animals, the sentient or the insentient, the entire creation in factis one of identity in the One Self. And therefore he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantist was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the I son or anybody or anything in the world not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or thing but for the sake of the self, for the sake of oneself that is in the object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Needless to say that these tests and ordeals are mere externals; at any rate, they have no place in our sadhana. Such or similar virtues many people possess or may possess, but that is no indication that they have an opening to the true spiritual life, to the life divine that we seek. Just as accomplishments on the mental plane,keen intellect, wide studies, profound scholarship even in the scriptures do not entitle a man to the possession of the spirit, even so capacities on the vital plane,mere self-control, patience and forbearance or endurance and perseverance do not create a claim to spiritual realisation, let alone physical austerities. In conformity with the Upanishadic standard, one may not be an unworthy son or an unworthy disciple, one may be strong, courageous, patient, calm, self-possessed, one may even be a consummate master of the senses and be endowed with other great virtues. Yet all this is no assurance of one's success in spiritual sadhana. Even one may be, after Shankara, a mumuksu, that is to say, have an ardent yearning for liberation. Still it is doubtful if that alone can give him liberation into the divine life.
What then is the indispensable and unfailing requisite? What is it that gives you the right of entrance into the divine life? What is the element, the factor in you that acts as the open sesame, as a magic solvent?
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow-beingsmen and animals, the sentient and the insentient, the entire creation, in factis one of identity in the One Self. And, therefore, he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantin was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren, but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world, not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or that thing, but for the sake of the self, for the sake of one's own self that is in the object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.09 - Art and Katharsis, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood that these seem to be sublimatedas if by a process of oxygenationto a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understandsee and experience the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like the Creator could contemplate all and declare it all as good. Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to envisage and embody the summum bonum that accompanies a summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have this revelatory vision of the SeerRishi but a poet is a poet in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more or less either a moralist or a mere sthete.
Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senseswhen they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute natureeven a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the raceits soul of lyric fervour and grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner heart that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagores art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world of gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.
I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tagore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The intermediary faculty the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousness pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realitiesto take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness has a fourfold potential. The first is the normal consciousness, which is predominantly mental; it is the sphere comprising movements of which man is usually and habitually aware. It is what the Upanishad names Jgrat or jgaritasthna and characterises as bahipraja: it is the waking state and has cognition only of external things. In other words, the consciousness here is wholly objectivised, externalisedextrovert: it is also a strongly individualised formation, the consciousness is hedged in, isolated and contoured by a protective ring, as it were, of a characteristically separative personality; it is a surface formation, a web made out of day-to-day sensations and thoughts, perceptions and memories, impressions and associations. It is a system of outward actions and reactions against or in the midst of one's actual environment. The second potential is that of the Inner Consciousness: its characteristic is that the consciousness here is no longer trenchantly separative and individual, narrowly and rigidly egoistic. It feels and sees itself as part of or one with the world consciousness. It looks upon its individuality as only a wave of the universal movement. It is also sometimes called the subliminal consciousness; for it plays below or behind the normal surface range of consciousness. It is made up of the residuary powers of the normal consciousness, the abiding vibrations and stresses that settle down and remain in the background and are not immediately required or utilised for life purposes: also it contacts directly energies and movements that well out of the universal life. The phenomena of clairvoyance and clairaudience, the knowledge of the past and the future and of other worlds and persons and beings, certain more dynamic movements such as distant influence and guidance and controlling without any external means, well known in all yogic disciplines, are various manifestations of the power of this Inner Consciousness. But there is not only an outward and an inner consciousness; there is also a deeper or nether consciousness. This is the great field that has been and is being explored by modern psychologists. It is called the subconscious, sometimes also the unconscious: but really it should be named the inconscient, for it is not altogether devoid of consciousness, but is conscious in its own way the consciousness is involved or lost within itself or lies buried. It comprises those movements and impulsions, inclinations and dispositions that have no rational basis, on the contrary, have an irrational basis; they are not acquired or developed by the individual in his normal course of life experience, they are ingrained, lie imbedded in man's nature and are native to his original biological and physical make-up. As the human embryo recapitulates in the womb the whole history of man's animal evolution, even so the normal man, even the most civilised and apparently the farthest from his ancient moorings and sources, enshrines in his cells, in a miraculously living manner, the memory of vast geological epochs, the great struggles and convulsions through which earth and its inhabitants have passed, the basic urges of the crude life force, its hopes, fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant worldeven perhaps to the mineral worldout of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the original consciousness. It was a collectivea racial and an aboriginal consciousness. The same lies chromosomic, one can almost say, in the constitution of the individual man of today. This region of the unconscious (or the inconscient) is a veritable field of force: it lies at the root of all surface dynamisms. The surface consciousness, jgrat, is a very small portion of the whole, it is only the tip of the pyramid or an iceberg, the major portion lies submerged beyond our normal view. In reflex movements, in sudden unthinking outbursts, in dreams and day-dreams, this undercurrent is silhouetted and made visible and recognisable. Even otherwise, they exercise a profound influence upon all our conscious movements. This underground consciousness is the repository of the most dark and unenlightened elements that grew and flourished in the slime of man's original habitat. They are small, ugly, violent, anti-social, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest applicationHunger that is Death.
But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he is also a child of the White Mother (ka and vet). Or again, if Earth is our mother, the Heaven is our fatherdyaur me pit mat pthiv iyam. In other words, consciousness extends not in depth alone, but in height alsoit is vertically extended, infinite both ways. As there is a sub-consciousness or unconsciousness, so also there is at the other end super-consciousness.
--
We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Superconsciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhhitam gahvaretham,is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purifies and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Superconscient and the Subsconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality. Indeed, that is the mystic alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.
We can picture the whole phenomenon in another way and say in the devotional language of the Mystics that the Inmost Consciousness is the Divine Child, the Superconscient is the Divine Father and the Inferior Consciousness is the Great Mother (Magna Mater): the Inner and the Outer Consciousness are the field of play and the instrument of action as well of this Divine Trinity.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
05.01 - At the Origin of Ignorance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What seemed, however, to be nothing more than an accident is pregnant nevertheless with a profound meaning and significance. Indeed God has not created the world in jest. Spirit became Matter, that is to say, an apparent negation of the Spirit, to demonstrate that the negation is a way of affirmation, a more integral way of affirmation of the Spirit. Matter has been brought out to express another poise of the spirit, spirit concretised and embodied.
***
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Once in its place of rest the soul enjoys profound peace and delight and is in a kind of luminous sleep. There it assimilates all the experiences of its last life, that is to say, imbibes out of them all the substance that goes to increase and streng then its consciousness, the sap that lends itself to the growth of the build and stature of the being. These experiences are meant to bring the soul nearereach life being one step nearerto the fullness of its union with the Divine Consciousness out of which it came originally upon earth as a mere spark, a parcel yet apart. This process may be short or long according to the nature of assimilation undertaken. Here also the being prepares for the impending birth, that is to say, gathers all the elements that will be required for the play of the consciousness in that life. A broad planning too is made here, a scheme in outline of the kind of experiences that one will need for the particular growth of consciousness envisaged. Some forces of consciousness, out of the stock developed and assembled by the being, are kept back, in reserve, others are brought forward for immediate use in the life to be lived next. All this, however, is not the deliberate rational process of the mind, it is something spontaneous, involved, a luminous brooding and incubation, something like the trance of Brahman within which the seed of creation is about to germinate.
The psychic being is a packet of gathered power, a charged battery, as it were; when it comes down upon earth, it calls round itself elements of mind and vital and even subtle physical needed for the purpose of the particular life experience, and even those that would go to constitute the physical body. The psychic being usually picks up these elements of mind and life and body out of the universal store-house of earth's atmosphere as it needs them, in the same way as it returns them there on the journey back after death. But as I have already said, there are beings who have developed well-formed personalities of mind and life and even of the physical consciousness. These formations are not mere loose accretions, temporary arrangements for a life experience, but are welded, organised, given a more or less permanent shape, as the proper instrument of the psychic being, as its own expression. In such cases, the outer personality too continues to exist as an essential mode or vibration in and with the psychic consciousness itself and when the soul descends upon earth, is in contact with the earth's atmosphere, it projects out of I itself the external personality and formation. This does not I mean certainly that the personality remains something fixed and rigid, but that it has attained an essential fullness of form and yet retains the capacity for further change and growth through further growth of the psychic being in other life experiences.
--
The souls group themselves into natural types according to the fundamental mode of consciousness and its dynamism. And they form a hierarchy: they exist and function in an organisation, the type and pattern of which is the pyramid. At the apex is the One Supreme, at the base the infinity of individual and disparate souls, earthly sparks, that are emanations, derivations, scattered condensations, parts and parcels of that One Supreme. In between, from the top towards the bottom, lie in a graded scale formations more and more specialised, particularised and concretised: as we rise we meet the larger, vaster more comprehensive forms of the same entities till we arrive at the typal and original, the source being. Thus we can view a soul along its line of emanation from the central source as a series of beings, the higher enclosing and encompassing the lower. Not only so, a higher entity can have several lower emanations and each of these again can emanate several others. The number of emanations multiply as one goes down and they decrease as one goes up. We can understand now what is meant when we speak of kindred souls. When there is an inexplicable natural affinity or similarity between two souls, it happens in such a case that the souls are emanations of the same Over-Soul. And it happens also sometimes that the guardian angel or daemon whom one may contact is none other than one's own Over-Soul. The term Over-Soul takes thus a literal and a profound significance.
We may illustrate here a little. At the apex of the pyramid of existence is the Divine, the Supreme Person, the Purushottama. Even there as He begins to lean and look dawn, He expresses himself at the very outset as the dual personality of Ishwara and Shakti (the Divine Father and the Divine Mother)sa dvityam aicchat, as the Upanishad says. That is still the Divine in His highest transcendent status, partpara. Next, this dual or biune or divalent reality shows itself or throws itself further out in a fourfold valency of the dynamic truth consciousness, creating and leading the cosmic evolution. The Four Aspects of Ishwara, forming the male or purua line, are the great names: Mahavira, Balarama, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. And the corresponding four aspects of Ishwari form the other great quaternary: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. They embody the four major attri butes of the Divine in his relation to the created universe: Knowledge, Power, Love and skill in work. They also represent thus a divine fourfold order. The first embodies the Brahmin quality of large wisdom, wide comprehension, a vast consciousness; the second has the Kshatriya quality of force, dynamism, concentration and drive of energy; the third possesses the Vaishya quality of harmony, beauty, mutuality and the fourth has the Shudra quality of perfect execution, thoroughness in detailed working, order and arrangement.
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Is stronger than Reason, profounder than the Pit,
And the malignancy of hostile Powers
07.07 - The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the hush of the profound and intimate night
She turned to the face of a veiled voiceless Truth
08.17 - Psychological Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, there is a movement which one can have and constantly along with devotion, as complementary to ita sense of gratitude, that the Divine exists and one feels a kind of gratefulness, born of wonder, which fills you truly with a sublime joy; the very fact that the Divine exists, that there is something in the universe which is the Divine, that it is not merely a monstrosity that we see here below, brings a flow of unspeakable gladness in you. Every time the least thing puts you in contact with this sublime reality of the Divine's existence, whether directly or indirectly, your heart is filled with a feeling so intense, so marvellous, the feeling precisely of a profound gratitude which has of all things the sweetest savour, that no other joy can bring. So I say devotion by itself is incomplete, it must have gratitude as its companion.
We come to the next term. I spoke to you once of courage; I said courage means the taste for adventure, the supreme adventure. This taste for the supreme adventure is Aspirationaspiration that seizes you wholly and throws you without calculation or reserve, without the possibility of withdrawal, into the great adventure of the discovery of the Divine, the great adventure of meeting the Divine and the still greater adventure of realising the Divine. It means plunging into an unknown venture without looking backward, without asking even for a moment what is going to happen for if you ask where you are going to fall, you never start, you remain fixed where you are, both your feet firmly rooted on the spot, fearing lest you lose your balance. That is why I call the thing courage. But truly it is aspiration. The two go together. True aspiration is something full of courage.
09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Radha consciousness is essentially the way in which the individual answers to the divine call. Sri Aurobindo describes it as the capacity to find Ananda in all things through identification with the one divine Presence and through total self-giving to this Presence. That has the power of changing everything into perpetual ecstasy. Instead of seeing things in their apparent discord, you see the Presence alone, the Will and the Grace in all things. And every event, every element, every circumstance, every form changes into a way, a detail through which you can approach more intimately and more profoundly the Divine. The discordances disappear, the uglinesses vanish, there remains only the splendour of the divine presence in the Love that radiates in all things.
III
10.01 - The Dream Twilight of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Invents creation's paradox profound;
Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter's forms,
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound
Of a happy Nothingness and worldless Calm,
10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the voice that speaks to night's profound,
It is the thunder and the flaming call.
1.008 - The Principle of Self-Affirmation, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The status that one occupies in human society is not the true nature of that person. The status need not necessarily be a social imposition it can be a psychological circumstance also, and it can even be biological. All these keep us in a state of subconscious tension. If very deeply studied, psychoanalytically, we will find that every human being is a patient not psychologically healthy, at least from a very profound point of view a patient in the sense that there is something external grown as an accretion upon one's true nature which has covered up and smothered one's own freedom of existence. All these various types of fungii that have grown around us in the form of the biological, psychological and social relationships, keep us in a fool's paradise a fool's paradise in the sense that we live in a world which is totally false, and which is not true or compatible with our real nature.
The practice of yoga is very cautious about all these internal structural devices, which have been manufactured by nature to keep the individual under subjugation by brainwashing him from birth until death and never allowing him to think of what these devices are. If we want to subordinate a person and keep that person under subjection always, we have to brainwash that person every day by telling him something contrary to what he is, repeating it every day every moment in every thought, every speech and every action so that there is a false personality grown around that person and he becomes our servant. This has happened to everyone, and this trick seems to be played by the vast diversified nature itself, so that everyone is a servant of nature rather than a master. This is the source of sorrow.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The solar Logos likewise does the same during stated cycles, which are not the cycles succeeding those which we term solar pralaya, but lesser cycles succeeding the 'days of Brahma' or periods of lesser activity, periodically viewed. All these are governed by karma, and just as the true Man himself applies the law of karma to his vehicles, and in his tiny system is the correspondence to that fourth group of karmic entities whom we call the Lipika Lords; He applies the law to his threefold lower nature. The fourth group of extra-cosmic Entities Who have Their place subsidiary to the three cosmic Logoi Who are the threefold sumtotal of the logoic nature, can pass the bounds of the solar ring-pass-not in Their stated cycles. This is a profound mystery and its complexity is increased by the recollection that the fourth Creative Hierarchy of human Monads, and the Lipika Lords in Their three groups (the first [112] group, the second, and the four Maharajahs, making the totality of the threefold karmic rulers who stand between the solar Logos and the seven planetary Logoi), are more closely allied than the other Hierarchies, and their destinies are intimately interwoven.
A further link in this chain which is offered for consideration lies in the fact that the four rays of mind (which concern the karma of the four planetary Logoi) in their totality hold in their keeping the present evolutionary process for Man, viewing him as the Thinker. These four, with the karmic four, work in the closest co-operation. Therefore, we have the following groups interacting:
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
I would point out primarily and emphasize the fact that the motion we are considering is that due to the fire latent in matter itself, a motion that is the prime characteristic and basic quality of the Primordial Ray of Active Intelligence. To express it otherwise: it is the outstanding faculty of the third Logos, of Brahma [142] viewed as the Creator, and this faculty is the product or result of an earlier manifestation. Each of the three Logoi, when in manifestation and thus personified, is exemplifying some one quality which predominates over the others. Each, more or less, exemplifies all, but each demonstrates one of the three aspects so profoundly as to be recognised as that aspect itself. In much the same way, for instance, the different incarnating jivas carry a vibration which is their main measure, though they may also have lesser vibrations that are subsidiary to them. Let us get this clear, for the truth embodied is fundamental.
1. The threefold goal,
--
This subject of the first Logos, manifesting only in connection with the other two in the system, is a profound mystery, which is not fully understood by even those who have taken the sixth Initiation.
The first Logos embodies the "will to live" and it was through His instrumentality that the Manasaputras came into objective existence in relation to the human and deva hierarchies. In this system, the blending of the Divine Ray of Wisdom and the Primordial Ray of intelligent matter forms the great dual evolution; back of both these cosmic Entities stands another Entity Who is the embodiment of Will, and Who is the utiliser of formsthough not the forms of any other than the Greater Building devas and the human hierarchies in time and space. He is the animating principle; the will-to-live aspect of the seven Hierarchies. Nevertheless these seven Hierarchies are (as says H. P. B.) the sevenfold ray of wisdom, the dragon in its seven forms. [lxviii]66, [lxix]67, [lxx]68 This is a [147] deep mystery, and only a clue to it all can be found at this time by man in the contemplation of his own nature in the three worlds of his manifestation. Just as our Logos is seeking objectivity through His solar system in its threefold form of which the present is the second, so man seeks objectivity through his three bodiesphysical, astral and mental. At this time he is polarised in his astral body, or in his second aspect in like manner as the undifferentiated Logos is polarised in His second aspect. In time and space as we now conceive it, the sum total of jivas are governed by feeling, emotion, and desire, and not by the will, yet at the same time the will aspect governs manifestation, for the Ego who is the source of personality shows in manifestation the will to love.
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
than I was. Their beliefs and modes of being seemed merely to disguise frequent doubt and profound
disquietude. More disturbingly, on the more general plane, something truly insane was taking place. The
--
I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly
comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker and that, so rendered, can be experienced as
fascinating, profound and necessary. I learned why people wage war why the desire to maintain, protect
and expand the domain of belief motivates even the most incomprehensible acts of group-fostered
1.00 - Preliminary Remarks, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
To the one love of the profound.
Fifth, let the thought, divinely free
1.00 - PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
The awful Night's intense profound:
The ocean-tides in foam are breaking,
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this
of the body of Brahma. ... We read always our mentality
--
and Plato and form the profounder part of Neoplatonism
and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences
--
still profoundly influenced. Of the wisdom traditions and
the oriental spiritualities, with their countless generations
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Fulfilling the profound need for unity which pervades the
world, and crowning it with renewed faith in Christ the Physical
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Deus absconditus. He was able to bridge the profound and
agonizing contradiction on the one hand by means of the Chris-
1.01f - Introduction, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
Practicing profound meditations
And obtaining the ve transcendent powers.
--
Dharma that was good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. It was profound in meaning, elegant in speech, and endowed with the character of the pure path of discipline and integrity.
To those seeking for the rvaka vehicle he taught the Dharma with respect to the Four Noble Truths, causing them to overcome birth, old age, illness, and death and to attain nirvana. He taught the Dharma with respect to dependent origination to the pratyekabuddhas; and to the bodhisattvas he taught the Dharma with respect to the six perfections (pramits), causing them to attain highest, complete enlightenment and perfect all-knowledge
--
Of the profound Dharma to the great assembly.
There were innumerable rvakas
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The preoccupation of the Mystics was with self-knowledge and a profounder world-knowledge; they found out that in man there was a deeper self and inner being behind the surface of the outward physical man, which it was his highest business to discover and know. "Know thyself" was their great precept, just as in India to know the Self, the Atman became the great spiritual need, the highest thing for the human being. They found also a Truth, a Reality behind the outward aspects of the universe and to discover, follow, realise this Truth was their great aspiration. They discovered secrets and powers of Nature which were not those of the physical world but which could bring occult mastery over the physical world and physical things and to systematise this occult knowledge and power was also one of their strong preoccupations. But all this could only be safely done by a difficult and careful training, discipline, purification of the nature; it could not be done by the ordinary man. If men entered into these things without a severe test and training it would be dangerous to themselves and others; this knowledge, these powers could be misused, misinterpreted, turned from truth to falsehood, from good to evil. A strict secrecy was therefore maintained, the knowledge handed down behind a veil from master to disciple. A veil of symbols was created behind which these mysteries could shelter, formulas of speech also which could be understood by the initiated but were either not known by others or were taken by them in an outward sense which carefully covered their true meaning and secret. This was the substance of Mysticism everywhere.
It has been the tradition in India from the earliest times that the Rishis, the poet-seers of the Veda, were men of this type, men with a great spiritual and occult knowledge not shared by ordinary human beings, men who handed down this knowledge and their powers by a secret initiation to their descendants and chosen disciples. It is a gratuitous assumption to suppose that this tradition was wholly unfounded, a superstition that arose suddenly or slowly formed in a void, with nothing whatever to support it; some foundation there must have been however small or however swelled by legend and the accretions of centuries. But if it is true, then inevitably the poet-seers must have expressed something of their secret knowledge, their mystic lore in their writings and such an element must be present, however well-concealed by an occult language or behind a technique of symbols, and if it is there it must be to some extent discoverable.
--
mentioned; for it shows not only the profound mystic symbolism
of the Vedic poets, but also how the writers of the Upanishads
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Zohar is the next major development. This book combining, absorbing, and synthesizing the different features and doctrines of the previous schools, made its dd but, creating a profound sensation in theological and philosophical circles by reason of its speculations concerning
God, the doctrine of Emanations, the evolution of the
1.01 - Introduction, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
What we see is not the universe. What we see is our personal universe, the world which we fashion for the use of our needs, in the measure of our means, by the play of our faculties, a symbolic, schematic universe which our sense-perceptions cut out upon the infinite, profound, moving and living reality.
That which we call phenomenon is only the relation between the veritable reality and our modes of subjective perception.
--
This world of phenomena which we call the universe, is only the apparent figure, the image in us of the real world; it is the myth which covers a truth too profound for us. All philosophy consists in the discovery of its hidden sense, and it is the more and more veridical interpretation of it that we call knowledge. May its illumination render the human mind master of the shadow and the mystery and open to us the paths of the unknown!
But how shall we discover the paths that lead to an unknown? And how shall we discover that unknown itself if we do not first know the paths? Therefore these two, the way and its goal, must manifest themselves together and each must reveal the other.
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Maitreya said, Master! I have been instructed by you in the whole of the Vedas, and in the institutes of law and of sacred science: through your favour, other men, even though they be my foes, cannot accuse me of having been remiss in the acquirement of knowledge. I am now desirous, oh thou who art profound in piety! to hear from thee, how this world was, and how in future it will be? what is its substance, oh Brahman, and whence proceeded animate and inanimate things? into what has it been resolved, and into what will its dissolution again occur? how were the elements manifested? whence proceeded the gods and other beings? what are the situation and extent of the oceans and the mountains, the earth, the sun, and the planets? what are the families of the gods and others, the Menus, the periods called Manvantaras, those termed Kalpas, and their subdivisions, and the four ages: the events that happen at the close of a Kalpa, and the terminations of the several ages[11]: the histories, oh great Muni, of the gods, the sages, and kings; and how the Vedas were divided into branches (or schools), after they had been arranged by Vyāsa: the duties of the Brahmans, and the other tribes, as well as of those who pass through the different orders of life? All these things I wish to hear from you, grandson of Vaśiṣṭha. Incline thy thoughts benevolently towards me, that I may, through thy favour, be informed of all I desire to know. Parāśara replied, Well inquired, pious Maitreya. You recall to my recollection that which was of old narrated by my father's father, Vaśiṣṭha. I had heard that my father had been devoured by a Rākṣas employed by Visvāmitra: violent anger seized me, and I commenced a sacrifice for the destruction of the Rākṣasas: hundreds of them were reduced to ashes by the rite, when, as they were about to be entirely extirpated, my grandfather Vaśiṣṭha thus spake to me: Enough, my child; let thy wrath be appeased: the Rākṣasas are not culpable: thy father's death was the work of destiny. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains by arduous exertions, of fame, and of devout austerities; and prevents the attainment of heaven or of emancipation. The chief sages always shun wrath: he not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of these unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed. Mercy is the might of the righteous[12].
Being thus admonished by my venerable grandsire, I immediately desisted from the rite, in obedience to his injunctions, and Vaśiṣṭha, the most excellent of sages, was content with me. Then arrived Pulastya, the son of Brahmā[13], who was received by my grandfather with the customary marks of respect. The illustrious brother of Pulaha said to me; Since, in the violence of animosity, you have listened to the words of your progenitor, and have exercised clemency, therefore you shall become learned in every science: since you have forborne, even though incensed, to destroy my posterity, I will bestow upon you another boon, and, you shall become the author of a summary of the Purāṇas[14]; you shall know the true nature of the deities, as it really is; and, whether engaged in religious rites, or abstaining from their performance[15], your understanding, through my favour, shall be perfect, and exempt from). doubts. Then my grandsire Vaśiṣṭha added; Whatever has been said to thee by Pulastya, shall assuredly come to pass.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories,
why did they work? Why were they remembered? Our great rationalist ideologies, after all fascist, say, or
--
with that power, however, is an equally profound existential uncertainty, shallowness and confusion. Our
constant cross-cultural interchanges and our capacity for critical reasoning has undermined our faith in the
--
regarded as paramount in importance. But myth also presents information that is far more profound
almost unutterably so, once (I would argue) properly understood. We all produce models of what is, and
1.01 - MASTER AND DISCIPLE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
It was Sunday afternoon when M. came on his third visit to the Master. He had been profoundly impressed by his first two visits to this wonderful man. He had been thinking of the Master constantly, and of the utterly simple way he explained the deep truths of the spiritual life. Never before had he met such a man.
Sri Ramakrishna was sitting on the small couch. The room was filled with devotees,3
1.01 - MAXIMS AND MISSILES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
Man thinks woman profound--why? Because he can never fathom her depths.
Woman is not even shallow.
1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian system and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between gods and men, - a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human mind; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative and symbolic given to the word "sacrifice" and the conception of the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equally the idea of action according to the Shastra, the fourfold order of society, the allusion to the relative position of the four orders or the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and women seem at first sight local and temporal, and, if they are too much pressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of the teaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth and limit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behind to the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporal institution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true and the spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal. By Shastra we perceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by humanity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the natural unregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in the satisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. We see too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concrete form of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form; it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
--
The philosophical system of the Gita, its arrangement of truth, is not that part of its teaching which is the most vital, profound, eternally durable; but most of the material of which the system is composed, the principal ideas suggestive and penetrating which are woven into its complex harmony, are eternally valuable and valid; for they are not merely the luminous ideas or
Essays on the Gita
--
There have been other syntheses in the long history of Indian thought. We start with the Vedic synthesis of the psychological being of man in its highest flights and widest rangings of divine knowledge, power, joy, life and glory with the cosmic existence of the gods, pursued behind the symbols of the material universe into those superior planes which are hidden from the physical sense and the material mentality. The crown of this synthesis was in the experience of the Vedic Rishis something divine, transcendent and blissful in whose unity the increasing soul of man and the eternal divine fullness of the cosmic godheads meet perfectly and fulfil themselves. The Upanishads take up this crowning experience of the earlier seers and make it their starting-point for a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge; they draw together into a great harmony all that had been seen and experienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternal throughout a great and fruitful period of spiritual seeking. The
Gita starts from this Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means and powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.
There is yet another, the Tantric,1 which though less subtle and spiritually profound, is even more bold and forceful than the synthesis of the Gita, - for it seizes even upon the obstacles to the spiritual life and compels them to become the means for a richer spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole
All the Puranic tradition, it must be remembered, draws the richness of its contents from the Tantra.
1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
On this profound cause, various factors are grafted
such as circumstances of existence but also some
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
All this sheds some lightdim, it is true, and merely inferentialon the problem of the perennialness of the Perennial Philosophy. In India the scriptures were regarded, not as revelations made at some given moment of history, but as eternal gospels, existent from everlasting to everlasting, inasmuch as coeval with man, or for that matter with any other kind of corporeal or incorporeal being possessed of reason. A similar point of view is expressed by Aristotle, who regards the fundamental truths of religion as everlasting and indestructible. There have been ascents and falls, periods (literally roads around or cycles) of progress and regress; but the great fact of God as the First Mover of a universe which partakes of His divinity has always been recognized. In the light of what we know about prehistoric man (and what we know amounts to nothing more than a few chipped stones, some paintings, drawings and sculptures) and of what we may legitimately infer from other, better documented fields of knowledge, what are we to think of these traditional doctrines? My own view is that they may be true. We know that born contemplatives in the realm both of analytic and of integral thought have turned up in fair numbers and at frequent intervals during recorded history. There is therefore every reason to suppose that they turned up before history was recorded. That many of these people died young or were unable to exercise their talents is certain. But a few of them must have survived. In this context it is highly significant that, among many contemporary primitives, two thought-patterns are foundan exoteric pattern for the unphilosophic many and an esoteric pattern (often monotheistic, with a belief in a God not merely of power, but of goodness and wisdom) for the initiated few. There is no reason to suppose that circumstances were any harder for prehistoric men than they are for many contemporary savages. But if an esoteric monotheism of the kind that seems to come natural to the born thinker is possible in modern savage societies, the majority of whose members accept the sort of polytheistic philosophy that seems to come natural to men of action, a similar esoteric doctrine might have been current in prehistoric societies. True, the modern esoteric doctrines may have been derived from higher cultures. But the significant fact remains that, if so derived, they yet had a meaning for certain members of the primitive society and were considered valuable enough to be carefully preserved. We have seen that many thoughts are unthinkable apart from an appropriate vocabulary and frame of reference. But the fundamental ideas of the Perennial Philosophy can be formulated in a very simple vocabulary, and the experiences to which the ideas refer can and indeed must be had immediately and apart from any vocabulary whatsoever. Strange openings and theophanies are granted to quite small children, who are often profoundly and permanently affected by these experiences. We have no reason to suppose that what happens now to persons with small vocabularies did not happen in remote antiquity. In the modern world (as Vaughan and Traherne and Wordsworth, among others, have told us) the child tends to grow out of his direct awareness of the one Ground of things; for the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral thinking, whether on the psychic or the spiritual level. Psychic preoccupations may be and often are a major obstacle in the way of genuine spirituality. In primitive societies now (and, presumably, in the remote past) there is much preoccupation with, and a widespread talent for, psychic thinking. But a few people may have worked their way through psychic into genuinely spiritual experiencejust as, even in modern industrialized societies, a few people work their way out of the prevailing preoccupation with matter and through the prevailing habits of analytical thought into the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things.
Such, then, very briefly are the reasons for supposing that the historical traditions of oriental and our own classical antiquity may be true. It is interesting to find that at least one distinguished contemporary ethnologist is in agreement with Aristotle and the Vedantists. Orthodox ethnology, writes Dr. Paul Radin in his Primitive Man as Philosopher, has been nothing but an enthusiastic and quite uncritical attempt to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution to the facts of social experience. And he adds that no progress in ethnology will be achieved until scholars rid themselves once and for all of the curious notion that everything possesses a history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man, as a social being, as specific physiological reactions are ultimate for him, as a biological being. Among these ultimate concepts, in Dr. Radins view, is that of monotheism. Such monotheism is often no more than the recognition of a single dark and numinous Power ruling the world. But it may sometimes be genuinely ethical and spiritual.
1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
ography. That which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundly
familiar to the unconsciousthough unknown, surprising, and
--
beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of
strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable tor
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Recently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a first psychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an original intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classified and organised phenomena much more successfully than it explained them. Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth while following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience.
The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving. But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the Western thinkers own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if we examine their intrinsic sense and value, may yet throw some light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be most useful to investigate.
--
If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig Veda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Sury, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that figure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things. This symbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.
We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe. Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice,even as this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea,to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship.
Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of the fourfold order, caturvara, miscalled the system of the four castes,for caste is a conventional, vara a symbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;1 but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and looked always first and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears in the Purushasukta of the Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Sury, would have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefa thers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in Gods house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creators body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
--
For the typal passes naturally into the conventional stage. The conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order,birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom,each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions and its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem to have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed itself, its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and education and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a hereditary groove. Thus the son of a Brahmin came always to be looked upon conventionally as a Brahmin; birth and profession were together the double bond of the hereditary convention at the time when it was most firm and faithful to its own character. This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance. Once the very basis of the system, it came now to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by the actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to be indispensable, it came inevitably to be dispensed with except as an ornamental fiction. Finally, even the economic basis began to disintegrate; birth, family custom and remnants, deformations, new accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual, the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old society. In the full economic period of caste the priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the Brahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under the name of the Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name of the Shudra. When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased decrepitude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham and must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society or else fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India.
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hierarchies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid faade. So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised, not accomplished,4 but the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention.
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:For the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, -- if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the written Truth, -- sabdabrahmativartate -- beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, -- srotaryasya srutasya ca. For he is not the Sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a Sadhaka of the Infinite.
8:Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
--
15:Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect way with the workings of the divine Force. It persists in applying to experience on a supernormal plane the ordinary terms of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the world. In the world we act with the sense of egoism; we claim the universal forces that work in us as our own; we claim as the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selective, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this frame of mind, life and body. Enlightenment brings to us the knowledge that the ego is only an instrument; we begin to perceive and feel that these things are our own in the sense that they belong to our supreme and integral Self, one with the Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. Our limitations and distortions are our contri bution to the working; the true power in it is the Divine's. When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant's groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
16:But still, in the practical development, each of the three stages has its necessity and utility and must be given its time or its place. It will not do, it cannot be safe or effective to begin with the last and highest alone. It would not be the right course, either, to leap prematurely from one to another. For even if from the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there are elements of the nature which long prevent the recognition from becoming realisation. But without realisation our mental belief cannot become a dynamic reality; it is still only a figure of knowledge, not a living truth, an idea, not yet a power. And even if realisation has begun, it may be dangerous to imagine or to assume too soon that we are altogether in the hands of the Supreme or are acting as his instrument. That assumption may introduce a calamitous falsity; it may produce a helpless inertia or, magnifying the movements of the ego with the Divine Name, it may disastrously distort and ruin the whole course of the Yoga. There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.
3:For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body. The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.
1.01 - The Science of Living, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything
from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
The profoundly ' atomic ' l character of the universe is visible in
everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts
1.01 - The Unexpected, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Breaking the profound silence the emergency bell rang from the Mother's room. Purani rushed up and found the Mother at the top of the staircase. She said, "Sri Aurobindo has fallen down. Go and fetch Dr. Manilal." Fortunately, he had come for the Darshan from Gujarat. Soon he arrived and saw that Sri Aurobindo was lying on the floor in his bedroom. On his way to the bathroom he had stumbled over a tiger skin. The doctor made a preliminary examination and suspected a fracture of the right thigh bone; he asked the Mother to send for assistants. It appears that Sri Aurobindo while passing from his sitting-room to the bathroom (probably revolving some lines of Savitri) fell with his right knee striking the head of a tiger. Perhaps there was jubilation among the adverse forces crying, "Our enemy has fallen!" Sri Aurobindo, however, remained unperturbed and tried to get up. Failing to do so he lay down quietly expecting that the Mother would come in soon. As was natural, the Mother in her turn received a strong vibration in her sleep which made her feel that something had gone wrong with Sri Aurobindo. She came in immediately and found him lying on the floor. Her intuition and good general knowledge of medical science made her suspect a fracture. She rang the emergency bell.
When we other doctors came up, we saw Dr. Manilal examining Sri Aurobindo's injured leg. The Mother was sitting by Sri Aurobindo's side, fanning him gently. I could not believe what I saw: on the one hand Sri Aurobindo lying helplessly, on the other, a deep divine sorrow on the Mother's face. But I soon regained my composure and helped the doctor in the examination. My medical eye could not help taking in at a glance Sri Aurobindo's entire body and appreciating the robust manly frame. His right knee was flexed, his face bore a perplexed smile as if he did not know what was wrong with him; the chest was bare, well-developed and the finely pressed snow-white dhoti drawn up contrasted with the shining golden thighs, round and marble-smooth, reminiscent of Yeats's line, "World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras". A sudden fugitive vision of the Golden Purusha of the Vedas!
10.23 - Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Each day, each moment, must be an occasion for a new and completer consecration; and not one of those enthusiastic and trepidant consecrations, overactive, full of the illusion of the work, but a profound and silent consecration which need not be apparent, but which penetrates and transfigures every action. Our mind, solitary and at peace, must rest always in Thee, and from this pure summit it must have the exact perception of realities, of the sole and eternal Reality, behind unstable fugitive appearances.
It is always good to look within ourselves from time to time and see that we are nothing and can do nothing, but we must then turn our look towards Thee, knowing that Thou art all and that Thou canst do all.
1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
To understand entirely the place and function of Surya we must enter a little more profoundly into the Vedic conception of the seven worlds and the principles of consciousness they represent.
All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements. For what we call a state is only the organisation of a complex movement. This hierarchy is composed by a descending or involutive and an ascending or evolutive movement of which Spirit and Matter
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
planning. profound promises or satisfactions, by contrast, validate our global conceptualizations indicate
that our emotions are likely to stay regulated, on the path we have chosen. Trivial threats or punishments
--
slows us down, we run a bit faster, once it shuts off, than we might have otherwise. profound threats and
punishments (read: trauma) have a qualitatively different nature. profound threats or punishments
undermine our ability to believe that our conceptualizations of the present are valid and that our goals are
--
The meaning of things depends to a profound and ultimately undeterminable degree upon the relationship
of those things to the goal we currently have in mind. Meaning shifts when goals change. Such change
--
can have such profound vicarious effects on us. The mere fact that something is desired, however, does
not necessarily mean that its attainment will sustain life (as a true satisfaction might) or that pure regard
--
homunculus, because it is in some profound way representative of our essential nature, as it finds
expression in emotion and behavior.
--
is no less profound for that).
Creative Exploration
--
some profound manner, all the other elements: that a story, like the world itself, might be read (and read
correctly) at multiple and multiply informative levels of analysis. This gives good stories their
--
but the differences stand out profoundly.
To ask the question what is it that two or more discriminable beings or things or situations might
--
decay, endemic to all structures. Osiris, although great, was nave in some profound sense blind, at least,
to the existence of immortal evil. This blindness, and its resultant incaution, brings about (or at least
--
pieces, and makes herself pregnant, with the use of his dismembered phallus. This story makes a profound
110
--
greater depths and more profound heights. The unknown as Nature appears as paradoxical formidable
overwhelming power, applied simultaneously in one direction and its opposite. Hunger, the will to selfpreservation, drives living creatures to devour each other rapaciously, and the hunters have no mercy for
--
image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way
life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction. That is why this Terrible Mother is
--
exploratory) produces more profound and unsettling mismatch. This is more stressful (and more
promising), and necessitates more radical update of modelling necessitates exploration-guided
--
Strong ideas produce profound displays of faith or, alternatively put: unshakeable displays of faith
are indicative of the strength of an idea. The strength of an integrative idea, or its pre-abstract procedural
1.02 - Meeting the Master - Authors second meeting, March 1921, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
I bowed down to him. When I got up to look at his face, I found he had already gone to the entrance of his room and, through the one door, I saw him turning his face towards me with a smile. I felt a great elation when I boarded the train: for, here was a guide who had already attained the Divine Consciousness, was conscious about it, and yet whose detachment and discrimination were so perfect, whose sincerity so profound, that he knew what had still to be attained and could go on unobtrusively doing his hard work for mankind. External forms had a secondary place in his scale of values. In an effort so great is embodied some divine inspiration; to be called to such an ideal was itself the greatest good fortune.
The freedom of India, about which he had assured me, came, and I was fortunate to live to see it arrive on his own auspicious birthday, the 15th of August 1947.I had been out and now it was to Pondicherry that I was returning.
1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
In the books of former prophets it is written, "Know thine own soul, and thou shalt know thy Lord," and we have received it in a tradition, that "He who knows himself, already knows his Lord." This is a convincing argument that the soul is like a clean mirror, into which whenever a person looks, he may there see God. If you say, however, that there are many who have studied themselves, and have learned that they are creatures, and still they do not know their Lord, I reply, that to pass from the knowledge of the soul to the knowledge of God, and to demonstrate the latter [42] from the former, may be accomplished by two methods. The first method is most deep and profound. The most exalted in wisdom and the most penetrating among men are far from understanding it, even when they apply themselves to it, both with science, practice and a pure life. How then should those ignorant persons understand it, who are utterly destitute of a knowledge of external things! Let us, therefore, pass to the second method and explain that: for he who possesses a discriminating mind, even if he were blind, is capable of understanding it.
Know, therefore, that man from his own existence knows the existence of a Creator; from his own attributes, he knows the attributes of his maker; from the control which he has over his own kingdom, he knows the control that God exercises over all the world. The reason of this is, that when a man looks at himself, beginning at the time when there was no trace or notion of his existence, and contemplates his creation with attention, he sees that he had his origin from a drop of water. He had neither mind nor understanding: and neither fat, flesh nor bones. Afterwards by divine operation and sovereign power, most strange and wonderful internal changes took place, and strong organs, passions, affections, and agreeable qualities rose up all adorned with beauty. When man comes to look upon his organs and members, whether upon the external, as the hand, the foot, the eye, the tongue and the mouth, or upon the internal organs, as the liver, the stomach and the spleen, he sees that each is the result of a special wisdom, that each one has been created for some peculiar ue, and that each one is in its place and perfect. After a man has observed these things, he knows that the Creator has power to do what he pleases with all things, that his knowledge includes and embraces in perfection whatever is to be known of creatures [43] either externally or internally, and that his power and wisdom pervade every organ and particle.
1.02 - Skillful Means, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
At that time the Bhagavat arose tranquilly with insight out of samdhi and addressed riputra: profound and immeasurable is the wisdom of the buddhas. The gate to their wisdom is hard to enter and difficult to understand.
None of the rvakas and pratyekabuddhas may be capable of understanding it. Why is this? The buddhas have closely attended innumerable hundreds of thousands of myriads of kois of other buddhas. They have exhaustively carried out practices with courage and persistence under uncountable numbers of buddhas, their names becoming universally renowned. They have perfected this profound and unprecedented Dharma, and their intention in adapting their explanations to what is appropriate is difficult to understand.
O riputra! After attaining buddhahood I expounded the teaching extensively with various explanations and illustrations, and with skillful means (upya) led sentient beings to rid themselves of their attachments.
--
O riputra! The wisdom and insight of the Tathgatas is extensive, profound, immeasurable, and unhindered. They are possessed of power, fearlessness, meditation, liberation, and samdhi that is profound and endless.
They have completely attained this unprecedented Dharma.
--
And the Dharma, which is profound and excellent,
Hard to perceive and difficult to understand.
--
I have already attained the profound and subtle Dharma
That is incorruptible
--
At that time it occurred to the great assembly of twelve hundred rvakas, arhats free from corruption, beginning with jtakauinya, and the other monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen who had set out to become rvakas and pratyekabuddhas: Why has the Bhagavat just now so earnestly praised skillful means? For what reason has he declared that the Dharma that the buddhas have attained is very profound and difficult to understand? Why has he said that their intention in adapting their teaching to what is appropriate is so difficult to comprehend that all the rvakas and pratyekabuddhas are not able to understand it?
As long as the Buddha taught the meaning of the single liberation we thought we had attained that Dharma and achieved nirvana. But now we do not understand what he means.
--
the unique skillful means of the buddhas and the profound and subtle Dharma that is difficult to understand? Never before have I heard such a thing from the Buddha. Now Bhagavat, I entreat you to explain this because the fourfold assemblies are confused. O Bhagavat! Why have you so earnestly praised the Dharma that is profound, subtle, and difficult to understand?
Thereupon riputra, wanting to further explain what he meant, spoke these verses:
--
Who have not practiced the profound path
In the presence of innumerable buddhas
--
And who have practiced the profound path
Under immeasurable buddhas.
--
With profound thoughts
And practice pure conduct.
--
That when I heard this profound
And beautiful roar of the Noble Lions,
1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
from a profound, communicative sense of the developments al-
ready achieved or awaited by Nature. Every lesson he gives should
1.02 - Taras Tantra, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
by a profound bond to Tara. This bond seems related
to his coming to Tibet. His relationship to the deity
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, the West in its triumphant conquest of the world has awakened the slumbering East and has produced in its midst an increasing struggle between an imported Western individual ism and the old conventional principle of society. The latter is here rapidly, there slowly breaking down, but something quite different from Western individualism may very well take its place. Some opine, indeed, that Asia will reproduce Europes Age of Reason with all its materialism and secularist individualism while Europe itself is pushing onward into new forms and ideas; but this is in the last degree improbable. On the contrary, the signs are that the individualistic period in the East will be neither of long duration nor predominantly rationalistic and secularist in its character. If then the East, as the result of its awakening, follows its own bent and evolves a novel social tendency and culture, that is bound to have an enormous effect on the direction of the worlds civilisation; we can measure its probable influence by the profound results of the first reflux of the ideas even of the unawakened East upon Europe. Whatever that effect may be, it will not be in favour of any re-ordering of society on the lines of the still current tendency towards a mechanical economism which has not ceased to dominate mind and life in the Occident. The influence of the East is likely to be rather in the direction of subjectivism and practical spirituality, a greater opening of our physical existence to the realisation of ideals other than the strong but limited aims suggested by the life and the body in their own gross nature.
But, most important of all, the individualistic age of Europe has in its discovery of the individual fixed among the idea-forces of the future two of a master potency which cannot be entirely eliminated by any temporary reaction. The first of these, now universally accepted, is the democratic conception of the right of all individuals as members of the society to the full life and the full development of which they are individually capable. It is no longer possible that we should accept as an ideal any arrangement by which certain classes of society should arrogate development and full social fruition to themselves while assigning a bare and barren function of service alone to others. It is now fixed that social development and well-being mean the development and well-being of all the individuals in the society and not merely a flourishing of the community in the mass which resolves itself really into the splendour and power of one or two classes. This conception has been accepted in full by all progressive nations and is the basis of the present socialistic tendency of the world. But in addition there is this deeper truth which individualism has discovered, that the individual is not merely a social unit; his existence, his right and claim to live and grow are not founded solely on his social work and function. He is not merely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something in himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.2 He demands freedom, space, initiative for his soul, for his nature, for that puissant and tremendous thing which society so much distrusts and has laboured in the past either to suppress altogether or to relegate to the purely spiritual field, an individual thought, will and conscience. If he is to merge these eventually, it cannot be into the dominating thought, will and conscience of others, but into something beyond into which he and all must be both allowed and helped freely to grow. That is an idea, a truth which, intellectually recognised and given its full exterior and superficial significance by Europe, agrees at its root with the profoundest and highest spiritual conceptions of Asia and has a large part to play in the moulding of the future.
We already see a violent though incomplete beginning of this line of social evolution in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia. The trend is for more and more nations to accept this beginning of a new order, and the resistance of the old order is more passive than activeit lacks the fire, enthusiasm and self-confidence which animates the innovating Idea.
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HE PECULIARITY of the Gita among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand apart as a work by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is given as an episode in an epic history of nations and their wars and men and their deeds and arises out of a critical moment in the soul of one of its leading personages face to face with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or no, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later composition inserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in order to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds against this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrinsic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. But even if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author has not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into the vast web of the larger poem, but is careful again and again to remind us of the situation from which the teaching has arisen; he returns to it prominently, not only at the end, but in the middle of his profoundest philosophical disquisitions. We must accept the insistence of the author and give its full importance to this recurrent preoccupation of the Teacher and the disciple.
The teaching of the Gita must therefore be regarded not merely in the light of a general spiritual philosophy or ethical doctrine, but as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethics and spirituality to human life. For what that crisis stands, what is the significance of the battle of Kurukshetra and its effect on
--
Very obviously a great body of the profoundest teaching cannot be built round an ordinary occurrence which has no gulfs of deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficial and outward aspects and can be governed well enough by the ordinary everyday standards of thought and action. There are indeed three things in the Gita which are spiritually significant, almost symbolic, typical of the profoundest relations and problems of the spiritual life and of human existence at its roots; they are the divine personality of the Teacher, his characteristic relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching. The teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple is the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the
Avatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the secret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known only to the incarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind the veil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the violent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when the anguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparent movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct.
--
Kurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. In the Mahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historical character and the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood must therefore have been well established by the time - apparently from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. - when the old story and poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its present form. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legend of the Avatar's early life in Vrindavan which, as developed by the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of
India. We have also in the Harivansha an account of the life of
1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
perhaps because his being combined the finest Western tradition and the profound spiritual yearning of the East. East and West, he said,
have two ways of looking at life which are opposite sides of one reality. Between the pragmatic truth on which the vital thought of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all the dance of God in Nature, puts so vehement and exclusive a stress and the eternal immutable Truth to which the Indian mind enamoured of calm and poise loves to turn with an equal passion for an exclusive finding,
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
One of the greatest favours bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly that it cannot comprehend God at all. These souls are herein somewhat like the saints in heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so clearly as do these others how greatly He transcends their vision.
St. John of the Cross
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
values reached by atomic movements it profoundly modifies the
mass of bodies. Among ' normal ' chemical elements, stability
1.036 - The Rise of Obstacles in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
But there is a great and solacing admonition given by Sage Patanjali here in this sutra, a very beautiful phrase that says continued practice shall result in the revelation of the inner consciousness pratyakcetana adhigamah. 'Adhigamah' is a term that has many meanings. It means knowledge, or it may mean acquisition, attaining, contacting, facing, realising, entering all of these meanings are hidden in this peculiar phrase, adhigamah. Tata pratyakcetana adhigama then comes the revelation of the inner consciousness. The word 'pratyak' may be translated as inner, or the introverted one. Though this is a literal translation of the term 'pratyak', its connotation is more profound. We come in contact with, attain to, and enter into a new type of consciousness altogether, different from the one with which we have been acquainted and which we have been befriending as the sole endowment of perception and knowledge in empirical life. A new type of knowledge will be the result of this practice.
What is this new type of knowledge? A third eye will open. The physical eyes would not be essential at that time, because whatever knowledge is gained through the perception of the senses would be inadequate to the purpose. The knowledge that we have to acquire through yoga is not a sensory knowledge it not a psychological cognition. It is an insight into the Truth of things. This insight is pratyakcetana adhigamah, where we begin to recognise what is in front of us. Up to that time we have not been able to recognise anything. We are not able to know what is in front of us when we are looking at things with our eyes, because the eyes, the senses, do not give us the truth of things - only a camouflage is presented before us. All that we see with our eyes is a camouflage, because the essence of things is covered over by a relational form in which alone the object is presented, and through which alone the cognition of the object is made possible. But, this form is lifted when there is pratyakcetana adhigamah, or inner attainment. The veil that covers the object is removed, and we see what is really there inside.
1.03 - A Parable, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
This Dharma is extremely profound;
Only a few will be able to believe it.
--
Such a profound and supreme teaching.
When the Bhagavat taught this Dharma
--
Those beings who accept the Dharma of the Buddha Bhagavat, who are diligent and persevere in seeking the wisdom of the Self-generated One and enjoy tranquility for themselves, who profoundly know the causes of and reasons for existence, are all practicing the pratyekabuddha vehicle.
They are just like those children who left the burning house seeking the cart yoked to a deer.
--
Only to the profoundly wise.
Those of supercial awareness who hear it
1.03 - A Sapphire Tale, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Among them, as friends and guides, were four philosophers, whose entire life was spent in profound study and luminous contemplations, to widen constantly the field of human knowledge and one by one to lift the veils from what is still a mystery.
All were content, for they knew no bitter rivalries and could each devote themselves to the occupation or the study that pleased him. Since they were happy they had no need for many laws, and their Code was only this: a very simple counsel to all, "Be yourself", and for all a single law to be strictly observed, the law of Charity, whose highest part is Justice, the charity which will permit no wastage and which will hinder no one in his free evolution. In this way, very naturally, everyone works at once for himself and for the collectivity.
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
deity to leave a profound and beneficial imprint on us
through deity meditation, mantra recitation, and other
--
this terma Tara's profound Drop, "drop" meaning here
that which collects the essential in a concise form.
--
These three levels form a profound succession that
is easy to follow and easily may form the practice of
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The biographies of the saints testify unequivocally to the fact that spiritual training leads to a transcendence of personality, not merely in the special circumstances of battle, but in all circumstances and in relation to all creatures, so that the saint loves his enemies or, if he is a Buddhist, does not even recognize the existence of enemies, but treats all sentient beings, sub-human as well as human, with the same compassion and disinterested good will. Those who win through to the unitive knowledge of God set out upon their course from the most diverse starting points. One is a man, another a woman; one a born active, another a born contemplative. No two of them inherit the same temperament and physical constitution, and their lives are passed in material, moral and intellectual environments that are profoundly dissimilar. Nevertheless, insofar as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect, they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual Ground. Of even plain average people it may be said that their name is Legionmuch more so of exceptionally complex personalities, who identify themselves with a wide diversity of moods, cravings and opinions. Saints, on the contrary, are neither double-minded nor half-hearted, but single and, however great their intellectual gifts, profoundly simple. The multiplicity of Legion has given place to one-pointedness not to any of those evil one-pointednesses of ambition or covetousness, or lust for power and fame, not even to any of the nobler, but still all too human one-pointednesses of art, scholarship and science, regarded as ends in themselves, but to the supreme, more than human one-pointedness that is the very being of those souls who consciously and consistently pursue mans final end, the knowledge of eternal Reality. In one of the Pali scriptures there is a significant anecdote about the Brahman Drona who, seeing the Blessed One sitting at the foot of a tree, asked him, Are you a deva? And the Exalted One answered, I am not. Are you a gandharva? I am not, Are you a yaksha? I am not. Are you a man? I am not a man. On the Brahman asking what he might be, the Blessed One replied, Those evil influences, those cravings, whose non-destruction would have individualized me as a deva, a gandharva, a yaksha (three types of supernatural being), or a man, I have completely annihilated. Know therefore that I am Buddha.
Here we may remark in passing that it is only the one-pointed, who are truly capable of worshipping one God. Monotheism as a theory can be entertained even by a person whose name is Legion. But when it comes to passing from theory to practice, from discursive knowledge about to immediate acquaintance with the one God, there cannot be monotheism except where there is singleness of heart. Knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Where the knower is poly-psychic the universe he knows by immediate experience is polytheistic. The Buddha declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality. All he would talk about was Nirvana, which is the name of the experience that comes to the totally selfless and one-pointed. To this same experience others have given the name of union with Brahman, with Al Haqq, with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object and (since in contemplation the knower, the known and the knowledge are all one) at the same time the subject and substance of that experience.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense
developments, for they have the appearance of a kind of
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must not be mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual equality which the Gita teaches. There is an equality of disappointed resignation, an equality of pride, an equality of hardness and indifference: all these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but they are at most early soul-phases only or imperfect mental preparations for our entry into the true and absolute self-existent wide evenness of the spirit.
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.
1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This he may attempt to do for a time by the power of the critical and analytic reason which has already carried him so far; but not for very long. For in his study of himself and the world he cannot but come face to face with the soul in himself and the soul in the world and find it to be an entity so profound, so complex, so full of hidden secrets and powers that his intellectual reason betrays itself as an insufficient light and a fumbling seeker: it is successfully analytical only of superficialities and of what lies just behind the superficies. The need of a deeper knowledge must then turn him to the discovery of new powers and means within himself. He finds that he can only know himself entirely by becoming actively self-conscious and not merely self-critical, by more and more living in his soul and acting out of it rather than floundering on surfaces, by putting himself into conscious harmony with that which lies behind his superficial mentality and psychology and by enlightening his reason and making dynamic his action through this deeper light and power to which he thus opens. In this process the rationalistic ideal begins to subject itself to the ideal of intuitional knowledge and a deeper self awareness; the utilitarian standard gives way to the aspiration towards self-consciousness and self-realisation; the rule of living according to the manifest laws of physical Nature is replaced by the effort towards living according to the veiled Law and Will and Power active in the life of the world and in the inner and outer life of humanity.
All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and ill-developed form, are manifest now in the world and are growing from day to day with a significant rapidity. And their emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the ratio-nalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society. The change began by a rapid turning of the current of thought into large and profound movements contradictory of the old intellectual standards, a swift breaking of the old tables. The materialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from Nietzsches theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy which is pluralistic because it has its eye fixed on life rather than on the soul and pragmatic because it seeks to interpret being in the terms of force and action rather than of light and knowledge. These tendencies of thought, which had until yesterday a profound influence on the life and thought of Europe prior to the outbreak of the great War, especially in France and Germany, were not a mere superficial recoil from intellectualism to life and action,although in their application by lesser minds they often assumed that aspect; they were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the Life-Soul of the universe and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created by the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there had begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware of its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even lays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit.
The art, music and literature of the world, always a sure index of the vital tendencies of the age, have also undergone a profound revolution in the direction of an ever-deepening sub jectivism. The great objective art and literature of the past no longer commands the mind of the new age. The first tendency was, as in thought so in literature, an increasing psychological vitalism which sought to represent penetratingly the most subtle psychological impulses and tendencies of man as they started to the surface in his emotional, aesthetic and vitalistic cravings and activities. Composed with great skill and subtlety but without any real insight into the law of mans being, these creations seldom got behind the reverse side of our surface emotions, sensations and actions which they minutely analysed in their details but without any wide or profound light of knowledge; they were perhaps more immediately interesting but ordinarily inferior as art to the old literature which at least seized firmly and with a large and powerful mastery on its province. Often they described the malady of Life rather than its health and power, or the riot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotent and unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression and self-possession. But to this movement which reached its highest creative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a more truly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional, psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficial vitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the objective mind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philo sophic Intuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the touch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much of it was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued, rudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure of the human mind from its old moorings and pointed the direction in which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery, the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring about the creation of a new world without in life and society. Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towards a subjective search into what may be called the hidden inside of things and away from the rational and objective canon or motive.
Already in the practical dealing with life there are advanced progressive tendencies which take their inspiration from this profounder subjectivism. Nothing indeed has yet been firmly accomplished, all is as yet tentative initiation and the first feeling out towards a material shape for this new spirit. The dominant activities of the world, the great recent events such as the enormous clash of nations in Europe and the stirrings and changes within the nations which preceded and followed it, were rather the result of a confused half struggle half effort at accommodation between the old intellectual and materialistic and the new still superficial subjective and vitalistic impulses in the West. The latter unenlightened by a true inner growth of the soul were necessarily impelled to seize upon the former and utilise them for their unbridled demand upon life; the world was moving towards a monstrously perfect organisation of the Will-to-live and the Will-to-power and it was this that threw itself out in the clash of War and has now found or is finding new forms of life for itself which show better its governing idea and motive. The Asuric or even Rakshasic character of the recent world-collision was due to this formidable combination of a falsely enlightened vitalistic motive-power with a great force of servile intelligence and reasoning contrivance subjected to it as instrument and the genius of an accomplished materialistic Science as its Djinn, its giant worker of huge, gross and soulless miracles. The War was the bursting of the explosive force so created and, even though it strewed the world with ruins, its after results may well have prepared the collapse, as they have certainly produced a disintegrating chaos or at least poignant disorder, of the monstrous combination which produced it, and by that salutary ruin are emptying the field of human life of the principal obstacles to a truer development towards a higher goal.
Behind it all the hope of the race lies in those infant and as yet subordinate tendencies which carry in them the seed of a new subjective and psychic dealing of man with his own being, with his fellow-men and with the ordering of his individual and social life. The characteristic note of these tendencies may be seen in the new ideas about the education and upbringing of the child that became strongly current in the pre-war era. Formerly, education was merely a mechanical forcing of the childs nature into arbitrary grooves of training and knowledge in which his individual subjectivity was the last thing considered, and his family upbringing was a constant repression and compulsory shaping of his habits, his thoughts, his character into the mould fixed for them by the conventional ideas or individual interests and ideals of the teachers and parents. The discovery that education must be a bringing out of the childs own intellectual and moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of the child-nature was a step forward towards a more healthy because a more subjective system; but it still fell short because it still regarded him as an object to be handled and moulded by the teacher, to be educated. But at least there was a glimmering of the realisation that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material. It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as the leader of the march set in our front, will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception. These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing. The closer touch attempted with the psychical entity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object of education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live according to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being. That was the knowledge which the ancients sought to express through religious and social symbolism, and subjectivism is a road of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening mans inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight and self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social and collective self-expression.
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
much more suggestive and profound.
Let me cite a single instance, the most recent, of this sort of
1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
They are those, as we might say, of the practical or the pragmatic man, the emotional, sensational, moral and intelligent human being not habituated to profound and original reflection or any sounding of the depths, accustomed rather to high but fixed standards of thought and action and a confident treading through all vicissitudes and difficulties, who now finds all his standards failing him and all the basis of his confidence in himself and his life shorn away from under him at a single stroke. That is the nature of the crisis which he undergoes.
Arjuna is, in the language of the Gita, a man subject to the action of the three gunas or modes of the Nature-Force and habituated to move unquestioningly in that field, like the generality of men. He justifies his name only in being so far pure and sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and impulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblest
--
It is typical again of the pragmatic man that it is through his sensations that he awakens to the meaning of his action. He has asked his friend and charioteer to place him between the two armies, not with any profounder idea, but with the proud intention of viewing and looking in the face these myriads of the champions of unrighteousness whom he has to meet and conquer and slay "in this holiday of fight" so that the right may prevail.
It is as he gazes that the revelation of the meaning of a civil and domestic war comes home to him, a war in which not only men of the same race, the same nation, the same clan, but those of the same family and household stand upon opposite sides. All whom the social man holds most dear and sacred, he must meet as enemies and slay, - the worshipped teacher and preceptor, the old friend, comrade and companion in arms, grandsires, uncles, those who stood in the relation to him of father, of son, of grandson, connections by blood and connections by marriage,
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
to cope with. And on top of all this there arises a profound
doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature's
1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
They are far from being the affirmations for which we take them; they are only negations which mark the most distant limits of our comprehension, the boundaries of our mental horizon. They are the halting-place of our search, not its point of arrival; they are the subterfuge by which we suppress the problem which we have failed to resolve. Far from elucidating the mystery, they render it yet more profound if we try to give to the words we use a positive significance. For if the notion of an Absolute, an Infinite, an Eternal beyond Time were not in itself negative, it would still be a negation when set against the relativities of Time and Space.
But it is not in a negation that we shall discover the positive relation of cause, nor is it in the antinomy of opposites that we can find the secret of the Beginning.
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
"There was a servant in ancient China who worked in the kitchen of a temple in the far western regions of the country. The temple was filled with monks engaged in the rigors of training. All the time the servant wasn't engaged in his main job preparing meals for the brotherhood, he spent doing zazen. One day, he suddenly entered a profound samadhi, and since he showed no sign of coming out of it, the head priest of the temple directed the senior monk in charge of the training hall to keep an eye on him. When the servant finally got up from his zazen cushion three days later, he had penetrated the heart and marrow of the Dharma, and had attained an ability to clearly see the karma of his previous lives. He went to the head priest and began setting forth the realization he had attained, but before he had finished, the head priest suddenly put his hands over his ears. 'Stop! Stop!' he said.
'The rest is something I have yet to experience. If you explain it to me, I'm afraid it might obstruct my own entrance into enlightenment.'
--
I sighed and replied, "The ocean of true reality is boundless and profoundly deep. The Buddha
Way is immeasurably vast. Some priests do nothing but seek fame and success until their dying day, never showing the slightest interest in the path of Zen or the Buddha's Dharma. Others become enthralled in literary pursuits or become addicted to sake or women, oblivious of the hell fires
--
"As the priest Nan-t'ang declared, 'You must see your self-nature as clearly as if you are looking at it in the palm of your hand, so that each and every thing becomes perfectly and unmistakably your own wondrously profound field of Dharma truth.'y It is a matter demanding the greatest care. For this reason, the Zen school declares: 'Clarifying your self but not the things before your eyes gets you only half, and clarifying the things before your eyes but not your self gets you only half as well. You must know that if you press on, the time will come when it will all be yours.'z It also says, 'If students of the Way want to confirm whether they have truly entered realization, they must examine their mind
34
--
"You may feel as though you are clinging perilously to a steel barrier towering before you, as though you are gagging on a soup of wood shavings, as though you are grasping at clouds of green smoke, or probing a sea of red mist. When all your skills have been used up, all your verbal resources and reason utterly exhausted, if you do not falter or attempt to understand and just keep boring steadily inward, you will experience the profound joy of knowing for yourself whether the water is cold or warm. The practice of Zen requires you to just press forward with continuous, unwavering effort. If you only exert yourself every other day, like a person experiencing a periodic malarial fit, you will never reach enlightenment, not even with the passage of endless kalpas.
"There is a sea beach only several hundred paces from my native village of Hara. Suppose someone is troubled because he doesn't know the taste of seawater, and decides to sample some. He sets out down to the beach, but stops and comes backs before he has gone even a hundred steps. He starts out again, this time returning after taking only ten steps. He will never know the taste of seawater that way, will he? Yet if he keeps going straight ahead and he doesn't turn back, even if he lives far inland in a landlocked province such as Shinano, Kai, Hida, or Mino, he will eventually reach the ocean. By dipping his finger in the ocean and licking it, he will know instantly the taste of seawater the world over, because it has the same taste everywhere, in India, in China, in the southern or northern seas.
1.040 - Re-Educating the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Likewise, by introducing a common background of a type of organisation in the midst of variegated ideas, the mind can be brought within the circumference of a given purpose. This practice should be continued for long time, until it becomes possible to reduce the size of the circumference. The ideas become less and less in number, so that we will be able to get on with only a few thoughts throughout our day. There is no need to think a hundred thoughts, because it is not the number of thoughts that is important, but their quality. We may be thinking of a million things in a shallow manner, which may not lead to success; but we may be thinking of only a few things in a very deep and profound way, and that type of thinking will be more beneficial in the long run, as we know very well.
So we can take any object for our concentration, but be we should be sure that the thoughts are not distracting, and that they are not so many in number as to diminish the power of thought. If we think of many things at the same time, the force of thought gets diminished due to the diversification of the channel of the movement of mental force. In dharana or concentration there is a twofold activity taking place the idea that certain notions should be entertained in the mind, and also a simultaneous idea that certain notions should not be allowed into the mind. There is a double activity going on in our minds at this time. We have a feeling inside that, "I should not allow certain thoughts inside the mind." And yet, the very idea that we should not allow certain thoughts inside the mind is itself an idea of those objects. "I should not think of my enemy," but the moment we have that idea, we have already thought of the enemy. So even the idea to repel an extraneous thought is an idea of that thought, the particular object.
1.045 - Piercing the Structure of the Object, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
But Patanjali says that mere thinking and analysis will not do it requires direct meditation. While analytical techniques are good enough for the purpose of bringing about logical convictions in the mind, direct experience of the reality behind the objects would be possible only by meditation, which is not merely an analytical technique undertaken, but a profound attempt at piercing through the structure of the object by repeatedly hitting upon it by the use of a single technique which is practised regularly every day, so that when the object is bombarded in this manner by a repeated process of meditation, adopting a single technique, without remission of effort the object gives way. The complex structure of the object, which appeared to be a compact substance, is revealed before the mind as made up of bits of matter and little tiny processes of force which can be disintegrated by the power of meditation. The object can be dismembered, and we will find that afterwards there is no object at all.
When we dissect an object into its components, the object ceases to be there; we have only the components. The appearance of a single, compact object before the mind is due to a misconception that has arisen in the mind. We dealt with this subject earlier, when we discussed some aspects of Buddhist psychology and certain other relevant subjects in this connection. The belief in the solidity of an object, and the conviction that the object is completely outside one's consciousness, almost go together. They move hand in hand, and it is this difficulty that comes as a tremendous and serious obstacle in meditation.
1.04 - BOOK THE FOURTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
But she a-while profoundly seem'd to muse,
Perplex'd amid variety to chuse:
--
Thrice from three grizly throats he howl'd profound,
Then suppliant couch'd, and stretch'd along the ground.
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 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound
a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in
--
been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own
helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
12:Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
13:If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony - and on what other can harmony be founded? - the various conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them representing a truth beyond conception, must be understood as far as possible in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual Maya. If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, - a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil, - an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure.
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
be, the greater is the likelihood that it represents a profound and
majestic process of movement. We know now that the vast system
--
fective a profound force of mutual attraction, deeper and more
powerful than the surface-repulsion which causes them to diverge.
--
the two profoundly separated categories of:
a Those whose hopes are directed toward a spiritual state or
--
Such in my view is the nature of the crisis, more profound than
any economic, political or social struggle, through which we are
1.04 - Te Shan Carrying His Bundle, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
there and observes the outcome. If he did not profoundly dis
cern the 'oncoming wind,' how could he have been like this?
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
understand that everyone will be profoundly impressed with the utter
futility of this sort of dilettantism. Do not forget, however, that we are
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
their effect at different levels, as we have seen. The most profound threats undermine the stability of the
personalities that encompass the largest number of people, have the deepest historical roots, are most
--
the largest possible span of time and space). We seem aware, in some sense, of the danger of profound
anomalies perhaps because a substantial amount of negative emotion and abstract cognitive consideration
--
highest levels of order are clearly the most profound, and are likely to engender the most thorough
reactions. Observation of response to such threats may be complicated, however, by the problem of time
--
fact that threats posed to the highest levels of order are the most profound is complicated, to say it
another way, by the implicitness of those levels, and their invisibility. Furthermore, the structures
--
refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war
they are should come to an end.391
--
procedure are (and should be) capable of producing profound effects upon episodic and semantic
representation. This increased flexibility the result of a tremendously complex and lengthy historical
--
were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly,
that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them. Before I could be
--
of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty. Their psychopathology a term ridiculous in this
context was generated as a consequence of the revolutionary nature of their personal experience (their
--
Those who undergo a second initiation suffer more deeply and profoundly from life than their peers; are, in
Jungs phrase, the most complex and differentiated minds of their age.425 These creative individuals
--
before it proves redemptive. It is very easy to view the hero as the most profound danger to the state, in
consequence and this would in fact be true if the absolute stasis of the state did not constitute a more
--
Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the
Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The great determining force has been the example and the aggression of Germany; the example, because no other nation has so self-consciously, so methodically, so intelligently, and from the external point of view so successfully sought to find, to dynamise, to live itself and make the most of its own power of being; its aggression, because the very nature and declared watchwords of the attack have tended to arouse a defensive self-consciousness in the assailed and forced them to perceive what was the source of this tremendous strength and to perceive too that they themselves must seek consciously an answering strength in the same deeper sources. Germany was for the time the most remarkable present instance of a nation preparing for the subjective stage because it had, in the first place, a certain kind of visionunfortunately intellectual rather than illuminated and the courage to follow itunfortunately again a vital and intellectual rather than a spiritual hardihood,and, secondly, being master of its destinies, was able to order its own life so as to express its self-vision. We must not be misled by appearances into thinking that the strength of Germany was created by Bismarck or directed by the Kaiser Wilhelm II. Rather the appearance of Bismarck was in many respects a misfortune for the growing nation because his rude and powerful hand precipitated its subjectivity into form and action at too early a stage; a longer period of incubation might have produced results less disastrous to itself, if less violently stimulative to humanity. The real source of this great subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germanys statesmen and soldiers for the most part poor enough types of men but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music, is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of a subjective age.
This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organisers. It was the industry, the conscientious diligence, the fidelity to ideas, the honest and painstaking spirit of work for which the nation has been long famous. A people may be highly gifted in the subjective capacities, and yet if it neglects to cultivate this lower side of our complex nature, it will fail to build that bridge between the idea and imagination and the world of facts, between the vision and the force, which makes realisation possible; its higher powers may become a joy and inspiration to the world, but it will never take possession of its own world until it has learned the humbler lesson. In Germany the bridge was there, though it ran mostly through a dark tunnel with a gulf underneath; for there was no pure transmission from the subjective mind of the thinkers and singers to the objective mind of the scholars and organisers. The misapplication by Treitschke of the teaching of Nietzsche to national and international uses which would have profoundly disgusted the philosopher himself, is an example of this obscure transmission. But still a transmission there was. For more than a half-century Germany turned a deep eye of subjective introspection on herself and things and ideas in search of the truth of her own being and of the world, and for another half-century a patient eye of scientific research on the objective means for organising what she had or thought she had gained. And something was done, something indeed powerful and enormous, but also in certain directions, not in all, misshapen and disconcerting. Unfortunately, those directions were precisely the very central lines on which to go wrong is to miss the goal.
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 First Circle, Limbo Virtuous Pagans and the Unbaptized. The Four Poets, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. The Noble Castle of Philosophy., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous,
So that by fixing on its depths my sight
1.04 - The Future of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
The profound cleavage in every kind of social group
(families, countries, professions, creeds) which during the
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The immediate or at any rate the earliest known successors of the Rishis, the compilers of the Brahmanas, the writers of theUpanishads give a clear & definite answer to this question.The Upanishads everywhere rest their highly spiritual & deeply mystic doctrines on the Veda.We read in the Isha Upanishad of Surya as the Sun God, but it is the Sun of spiritual illumination, of Agni as the Fire, but it is the inner fire that burns up all sin & crookedness. In the Kena Indra, Agni & Vayu seek to know the supreme Brahman and their greatness is estimated by the nearness with which they touched him,nedistham pasparsha. Uma the daughter of Himavan, the Woman, who reveals the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle & mystical of human scriptures, the gods & Titans are the masters, respectively, of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces & functions of sense, mind & intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the Vedic ritual, to their very syllables a profound significance is everywhere attached; several incidents related in the Upanishads show the deep sense then & before entertained that the sacrifices had a spiritual meaning which must be known if they were to be conducted with full profit or even with perfect safety. The Brahmanas everywhere are at pains to bring out a minute symbolism in the least circumstances of the ritual, in the clarified butter, the sacred grass, the dish, the ladle. Moreover, we see even in the earliest Upanishads already developed the firm outlines and minute details of an extraordinary psychology, physics, cosmology which demand an ancient development and centuries of Yogic practice and mystic speculation to account for their perfect form & clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the three Vyahritis, the five sheaths, the five (or seven) psychological strata, (bhumi, kshiti of the Vedas), the worlds that await us, the gods who help & the demons who hinder go back to Vedic origins.All this may be a later mystic misconception of the hymns & their ritual, but the other hypothesis of direct & genuine derivation is also possible. If there was no common origin, if Greek & Indian separated during the naturalistic period of the common religion supposed to be recorded in the Vedas it is surprising that even the little we know of Greek rites & mysteries should show us ideas coincident with those of Indian Tantra & Yoga.
When we go back to the Veda itself, we find in the hymns which are to us most easily intelligible by the modernity of their language, similar & decisive indications. The moralistic conception of Varuna, for example, is admitted even by the Europeans. We even find the sense of sin, usually supposed to be an advanced religious conception, much more profoundly developed in prehistoric India than it was in any other old Aryan nation even in historic times. Surely, this is in itself a significant indication. Surely, this conception cannot have become so clear & strong without a previous history in the earlier hymns. Nor is it psychologically possible that a cult capable of so advanced an idea, should have been ignorant of all other moral & intellectual conceptions reverencing only natural forces & seeking only material ends. Neither can there have been a sudden leap filled up only by a very doubtful henotheism, a huge hiatus between the naturalism of early Veda and the transcendentalism of the Vedic Brahmavada admittedly present in the later hymns. The European interpretation in the face of such conflicting facts threatens to become a brilliant but shapeless monstrosity. And is there no symbolism in the details of the Vedic sacrifice? It seems to me that the peculiar language of the Veda has never been properly studied or appreciated in this connection. What are we to say of the Vedic anxiety to increase Indra by the Soma wine? Of the description of Soma as the amritam, the wine of immortality, & of its forces as the indavah or moon powers? Of the constant sense of the attacks delivered by the powers of evil on the sacrifice? Of the extraordinary powers already attri buted to the mantra & the sacrifice? Have the neshtram potram, hotram of the Veda no symbolic significance? Is there no reason for the multiplication of functions at the sacrifice or for the subtle distinctions between Gayatrins, Arkins, Brahmas? These are questions that demand a careful consideration which has never yet been given for the problems they raise.
The present essays are merely intended to raise the subject, not to exhaust it, to offer suggestions, not to establish them. The theory of Vedic religion which I shall suggest in these pages, can only be substantiated if it is supported by a clear, full, simple, natural and harmonious rendering of the Veda standing on a sound philological basis, perfectly consistent in itself and proved in hymn after hymn without any hiatus or fatal objection. Such a substantiation I shall one day place before the public. The problem of Vedic interpretation depends, in my view, on three different tests, philological, historic and psychological. If the results of these three coincide, then only can we be sure that we have understood the Veda. But to erect this Delphic tripod of interpretation is no facile undertaking. It is easy to misuse philology. I hold no philology to be sound & valid which has only discovered one or two byelaws of sound modification and for the rest depends upon imagination & licentious conjecture,identifies for instance ethos with swadha, derives uloka from urvaloka or prachetasa from prachi and on the other [hand] ignores the numerous but definitely ascertainable caprices of Pracritic detrition between the European & Sanscrit tongues or considers a number of word-identities sufficient to justify inclusion in a single group of languages. By a scientific philology I mean a science which can trace the origins, growth & structure of the Sanscrit language, discover its primary, secondary & tertiary forms & the laws by which they develop from each other, trace intelligently the descent of every meaning of a word in Sanscrit from its original root sense, account for all similarities & identities of sense, discover the reason of unexpected divergences, trace the deviations which separated Greek & Latin from the Indian dialect, discover & define the connection of all three with the Dravidian forms of speech. Such a system of comparative philology could alone deserve to stand as a science side by side with the physical sciences and claim to speak with authority on the significance of doubtful words in the Vedic vocabulary. The development of such a science must always be a work of time & gigantic labour.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Tarot trumps furnish a complete set of symbols, but the great difficulty hitherto experienced in their attri bution to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet is that these trump cards are numbered from I to XXI, accom- panied by another card marked O, which has always been the stumbling-block, being attri buted by various people to various letters of the alphabet, depending - apparently - on their whim at any particular moment. It should be quite obvious that the only logical place for this Zero card is antecedent to I, and when so placed the cards assume a definite sequential meaning, profoundly explanatory of the letters.
It is essential here to make a remark regarding the nature of the symbols revealed by the Tarot and utilized by the
--
Mastic, Mace, and Storax are the perfumes of this twelfth Path ; the Agate is its jewel ; Vervain its sacred plant. The Ibis is its sacred bird, which ages ago was observed to have the curious habit of standing on one leg for long periods of time, and to the fertile imagination of the ancients this suggested the absorption in profound meditation. In Yoga practice there is a posture called the
Ibis wherein the practitioner balances himself on one leg.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This profounder idea of the world-wide law is at the heart of the teaching about works given in the Gita; a spiritual union with the Highest by sacrifice, an unreserved self-giving to the Eternal is the core of its doctrine. The vulgar conception of sacrifice is an act of painful self-immolation, austere self-mortification, difficult self-effacement; this kind of sacrifice may go even as far as self-mutilation and self-torture. These things may be temporarily necessary in mans hard endeavour to exceed his natural self; if the egoism in his nature is violent and obstinate, it has to be met sometimes by an answering strong internal repression and counterbalancing violence. But the Gita discourages any excess of violence done to oneself; for the self within is really the Godhead evolving, it is Krishna, it is the Divine; it has not to be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture it, but to be increased, fostered, cherished, luminously opened to a divine light and strength and joy and wideness. It is not ones self, but the band of the spirits inner enemies that we have to discourage, expel, slay upon the altar of the growth of the spirit; these can be ruthlessly excised, whose names are desire, wrath, inequality, greed, attachment to outward pleasures and pains, the cohort of usurping demons that are the cause of the souls errors and sufferings. These should be regarded not as part of oneself but as intruders and perverters of our selfs real and diviner nature; these have to be sacrificed in the harsher sense of the word, whatever pain in going they may throw by reflection on the consciousness of the seeker.
But the true essence of sacrifice is not self-immolation, it is self-giving; its object not self-effacement, but self-fulfilment; its method not self-mortification, but a greater life, not self-mutilation, but a transformation of our natural human parts into divine members, not self-torture, but a passage from a lesser satisfaction to a greater Ananda. There is only one thing painful in the beginning to a raw or turbid part of the surface nature; it is the indispensable discipline demanded, the denial necessary for the merging of the incomplete ego. But for that there can be a speedy and enormous compensation in the discovery of a real greater or ultimate completeness in others, in all things, in the cosmic oneness, in the freedom of the transcendent Self and Spirit, in the rapture of the touch of the Divine. Our sacrifice is not a giving without any return or any fruitful acceptance from the other side; it is an interchange between the embodied soul and conscious Nature in us and the eternal Spirit. For even though no return is demanded, yet there is the knowledge deep within us that a marvellous return is inevitable. The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
--
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective practice must carry in them three results that are of a central importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening communion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved consecration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion, and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service. An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that are habitations of the Divinenot the brief restless grasping emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind can imagine.
Next, the practice of this Yoga demands a constant inward remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge, and a constant active externalising of it in works comes in too to intensify the remembrance. In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe,this thought or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the worker. A memory, a self-dynamising meditation of this kind, must and does in its end turn into a profound and uninterrupted vision and a vivid and all-embracing consciousness of that which we so powerfully remember or on which we so constantly meditate. For it compels a constant reference at each moment to the Origin of all being and will and action and there is at once an embracing and exceeding of all particular forms and appearances in That which is their cause and upholder. This way cannot go to its end without a seeing vivid and vital, as concrete in its way as physical sight, of the works of the universal Spirit everywhere. On its summits it rises into a constant living and thinking and willing and acting in the presence of the Supramental, the Transcendent. Whatever we see and hear, whatever we touch and sense, all of which we are conscious, has to be known and felt by us as That which we worship and serve; all has to be turned into an image of the Divinity, perceived as a dwelling-place of his Godhead, enveloped with the eternal Omnipresence. In its close, if not long before it, this way of works turns by communion with the Divine Presence, Will and Force into a way of Knowledge more complete and integral than any the mere creature intelligence can construct or the search of the intellect can discover.
Lastly, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice compels us to renounce all the inner supports of egoism, casting them out of our mind and will and actions, and to eliminate its seed, its presence, its influence out of our nature. All must be done for the Divine; all must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded temple of his own vast cosmic existence. Life becomes more and more the sacrifice of the eternal in the individual constantly self-offered to the eternal Transcendence. It is offered in the wide sacrificial ground of the field of the eternal cosmic Spirit; and the Force too that offers it is the eternal Force, the omnipresent Mother. Therefore is this way a way of union and communion by acts and by the spirit and knowledge in the act as complete and integral as any our Godward will can hope for or our souls strength execute.
1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
the asanas of hatha yoga, the concentrations of raja yoga, the breathing exercises of pranayama, etc. aim at arousing that ascending Force; they can be dangerous and cause profound perturbations, which make the presence and protection of an enlightened Master indispensable. We will return to this later. The difference in the direction of the current, ascending vs. descending,
has to do with a difference in goals which cannot be overemphasized.
1.04 - THE STUDY (The Compact), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
See that you most profoundly gain
What does not suit the human brain!
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
of the Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash
of material or other forces everything in this world, if not the
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
But why any reasons? Is it not possible that the world may have no reason for existence outside itself? Is it really necessary that what is, should justify its existence? Is not the simple fact of existence sufficient to itself? There can be no doubt of it, once we perceive that the fact of existence contains in itself all its own reasons for existence. Only they are so deeply hidden and profound that they escape the vision of the mind. And therefore, because it cannot see, it replaces contemplation by reasoning, vision by intellectual search.
The various hypotheses constructed by the reasoning mind about that which is beyond its knowledge, would undoubtedly have shed light on the riddle of the world but for our regrettable habit of opposing them to each other instead of harmonising them. Harmonised, their number would have increased our knowledge. As things stand, their diversity rather increases the perplexity of our minds.
1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The point is that if you cannot do anything else, at least do this much. Take to regular study so that your day is filled with divine thoughts, philosophical ideas and moods which are spiritual in some way or the other. You may closet yourself in your study for hours together and browse through these profound texts, whatever be the nature of their presentation, because all these philosophical and spiritual presentations through the scriptures and the writings of other masters have one aim namely, the analysis of the structure of things, and enabling the mind to know the inner reality behind this structure. There is a threefold prong provided by Patanjali in this connection wherein he points out that self-control the control of the senses, austerity, or tapas together with svadhyaya, or study of sacred scriptures, will consummate in the adoration of God as the All-reality.
The idea that God is extra-cosmic and outside us, incapable of approach, and that we are likely not to receive any response from Him in spite of our efforts at prayer, etc. all these ideas are due to certain encrustations in the mind, the tamasic qualities which cover the mind and make it again subtly tend towards objects of sense. The desire for objects of sense, subtly present in a very latent form in the subconscious level, becomes responsible for the doubt in the mind that perhaps there is no response from God. This is because our love is not for God it is for objects of sense, and for status in society and enjoyments of various types in the world. And when, through austerity, or tapas, we have put the senses down with the force of our thumb, there is a temporary cessation of their activity.
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Qabalistic literature concerning this aspect of esoteric doc- trine, and I feel more strongly than ever that it is only by m eans of a profound and well-assimilated knowledge of
ADAM KADMON 105
1.05 - BOOK THE FIFTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
The depths profound thro' yielding waves he cleaves,
And to Hell's center a free passage leaves;
1.05 - Buddhism and Women, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
Their profound faith and realization were so
impressive that these women are sometimes
--
illustrated themselves by profound spiritual
accomplishments even if history has not recorded their
--
old profound faith has disappeared with few
exceptions. True practice does not attract young
1.05 - Character Of The Atoms, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
For their whole nature will profoundly lack
The first foundations of a solid frame.
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds and spirit outside the self. The lust-dieted man slaves the ordinances of Heaven that is to say, he subordinates the laws of Nature and the spirit to his own cravings. The result is that he does not feel and therefore makes himself incapable of knowledge. His ignorance is ultimately voluntary; if he cannot see, it is because he will not see. Such voluntary ignorance inevitably has its negative reward. Nemesis follows hubris sometimes in a spectacular way, as when the self-blinded man (Macbeth, Othello, Lear) falls into the trap which his own ambition or possessiveness or petulant vanity has prepared for him; sometimes in a less obvious way, as in the cases where power, prosperity and reputation endure to the end but at the cost of an ever-increasing imperviousness to grace and enlightenment, an ever completer inability to escape, now or hereafter, from the stifling prison of selfness and separateness. How profound can be the spiritual ignorance by which such enslavers of Heavens ordinances are punished is indicated by the behaviour of Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed. The priest who attended him urged the great man to prepare his soul for its coming ordeal by forgiving all his enemies. I have never had any enemies, the Cardinal replied with the calm sincerity of an ignorance which long years of intrigue and avarice and ambition had rendered as absolute as had been his political power, save only those of the State. Like Napoleon, but in a different way, he was feeling heavens power, because he had refused to feel charity and therefore refused to know the whole truth about his own soul or anything else.
Here on earth the love of God is better than the knowledge of God, while it is better to know inferior things than to love them. By knowing them we raise them, in a way, to our intelligence, whereas by loving them, we stoop towards them and may become subservient to them, as the miser to his gold.
1.05 - MORALITY AS THE ENEMY OF NATURE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
very profoundly the value of having enemies: in short that with them
we are forced to do and to conclude precisely the reverse of what
--
sees into the heart of man," it says Nay to the profoundest and most
superior desires of life and takes God as the enemy of life. The saint
1.05 - On painstaking and true repentance which constitute the life of the holy convicts; and about the prison., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
Let no one who laments expect assurance at his departure. For the unknown is not sure. Spare me, through assurance, that I may revive before I depart hence unassured (of salvation.)4 Where the Spirit of the Lord is, the bond is loosed. Where there is profound humility, the bond is loosed. But let those who are without these two assurances make no mistake they are bound.
Those living in the world, and they only, are strangers to these two assurances, and especially the first. But through almsgiving, some so run the race that they know at their departure what their gain has been.
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
able to perceive the profound and supra-personal continuity of the human
mind.
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the next hymn the word ritam does not occur, but the continual refrain of its strophes is the cognate word ritunpibartun, Medhatithi cries to each of the gods in turn,ritun yajnam sh the .. ritubhir ishyata, pibatam ritun yajnavhas, ritun yajnanr asi. Ritu is supposed to have here & elsewhere its classical & modern significance, a season of the year; the ritwik is the priest who sacrifices in the right season; the gods are invited to drink the soma according to the season! It may be so, but the rendering seems to me to make all the phrases of this hymn strangely awkward & improbable. Medhatithi invites Indra to drink Soma by the season, Mitra & Varuna are to taste the sacrifice, this single sacrifice offered by this son of Kanwa, by the season; in the same single sacrifice the priests or the gods are to be impelled by the seasons, by many seasons on a single sacrificial occasion! the Aswins are to drink the Soma by the sacrifice-supporting season! To Agni it is said, by the season thou art leader of the sacrifice. Are such expressions at all probable or even possible in the mouth of a poet using freely the natural language of his age? Are they not rather the clumsy constructions of the scholar drawn to misinterpret his text by the false clue of a later & inapplicable meaning of the central word ritu? But if we suppose the sacrifice to be symbolic &, as ritam means ideal truth in general, so ritu to mean that truth in its ordered application, the ideal law of thought, feeling or action, then this impossible awkwardness vanishes & gives place to a natural construction & a lucid & profound significance. Indra is to drink the wine of immortality according to or by the force of the ideal law, by that ideal law Varuna &Mitra are to enjoy the offering of Ananda of the human mind & the human activity, the gods are to be impelled in their functioning ritubhih, by the ideal laws of the truth,the plural used, in the ordinary manner of the Veda, to express the particular actions of the law of truth, the singular its general action. It is the ideal law that supports the human offering of our activities to the divine life above us, ritun yajnavhas; by the force of the law of Truth Agni leads the sacrifice to its goal.
In this suggestive & significant hymn packed full of the details of the Vedic sacrificial symbolism we again come across Daksha in close connection with Mitra, Varuna & the Truth.
--
Daksha we have supposed to be the viveka, the intuitive discriminating reason which once active is hard to overcome by the powers of ignorance & error; it is again his activity which here also constitutes the essence or the essential condition of the successful sacrifice; for it is evidently meant that by enjoying or stimulating the activity of Daksha, Daksham ddabham, daksham apasam, Mitra & Varuna are enabled to enjoy the effective activities of men under the law of truth, ritena kratum brihantam, ritun yajnam shthe, activities of right knowledge, right action, right emotion, free from crookedness & ignorance & sin. For it is viveka that helps us to distinguish truth from error, right-doing from wrong-doing, just feeling from false & selfish emotions. Once again it is Mitra & Varuna who preside over & take the enjoyment of Dakshas functioning. The same psychological intention perseveres, the same simple & profound ideas & expressions recur in the same natural association, with the same harmony & fixed relation founded on the eternal truth of human nature & a fine & subtle observation of its psychological faculties & functionings.
The next reference to Ritam meets us in the twenty-third hymn of the Mandala, the last hymn of the series assigned to Medhatithi Kanwa, and once again it occurs in connection with the great twin powers, Mitra & Varuna.
--
If we suppose evil in this rik to connote or include moral evil we find Dakshina to have a share, the active energy of the viveka to take its part in the function of protection from sin which is one of the principal attributes of Varuna. It is part of the ideas of Vedanta that sin is in reality a form of ignorance and is purified out of the system by the illumination of divine knowledge. We begin to find by this sin-effacing attri bute of Varuna, prachet, uruchakshas, ptadaksha, ritasya jyotishas pati, by this sin-repelling attri bute of Dakshina, the energy of ideal discrimination, the same profound idea already anticipated in the Rigveda. The Veda abounds with confirmatory passages, of which I will quote at present one only from the hymn of Kanwa to Agni, the thirty-sixth of thisMandala. High-uplifted protect us from evil by the perception, burn utterly every devourer, phi anhaso ni ketun a. All evil is a deviation from the right & truth, from the ritam, a deviation from the self-existent truth & right of the divine or immortal nature; the lords of knowledge dwelling in the human consciousness as the prachetasah, informing its acts of consciousness which include in the ancient psychology action & feeling no less than thought & attuning them to follow spontaneously the just rhythm of the divine right & truth, deliver effectually this human & mortal nature from evil & sin. The place of Daksha & Dakshina in that action is evident; it is primary & indispensable; for the mortal nature being full of wrong perceptions, warped impulses, evil & mixed & confused states of feeling, it is the business of the viveka to sort out the confusion & accustom the mind & heart of man to a juster, truer & purer working. The action of the other faculties of the Truth may be said to come after that of Daksha, of the viveka. In these hymns of Sunahshepa the clear physiognomy of Varuna begins to dawn upon us. He is evidently the master of right knowledge, wide, self-luminous & all-containing in the world-consciousness & in human consciousness. His physical connection with the all-containing ether,for Varuna is Uranus, the Greek Akasha, & wideness is constantly associated with him in the Veda,leads us to surmise that he may also be the master in the ideal faculty, ritam brihat, where he dwells, urukshaya, of pure infinite conscious-being out of which knowledge manifests & with which it is, ultimately, one entity
The hymns of Kanwa follow the hymns of Sunahshepa and Hiranyastupa in the order of the first Mandala. In the hymns of Kanwa we find three or four times the mention, more or less extended in sense, of the Ritam. In his first reference to it he connects it not with Varuna, Mitra or Daksha, but with Agni. That Agni whom Kanwa Medhyatithi has kindled from the truth above (or it may equally mean upon the truth as a basis or in the field of the truth) and again Thee, O Agni, the Manu has set as a light for the eternal birth; thou hast shone forth in Kanwa born from the Truth. This passage is of great importance in fixing the character & psychological functions of Agni; for our present purpose it will be sufficient to notice the expression jyotir janya shashwate which may well have an intimate connection with the ritam jyotih of an earlier hymn, & the description in connection with this puissant phrase of Agni as born from the Truth, and again [of the Truth] as a sort of field in which or from which Kanwa has drawn the light of Agni.
1.05 - Solitude, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven and of Earth!
We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
At the same time the Yogin who knows the Supreme is not subject to any need or compulsion in these activities; for to him they are neither a duty nor a necessary occupation for the mind nor a high amusement, nor imposed by the loftiest human purpose. He is not attached, bound and limited by any nor has he any personal motive of fame, greatness or personal satisfaction in these works; he can leave or pursue them as the Divine in him wills, but he need not otherwise abandon them in his pursuit of the higher integral knowledge. He will do these things just as the supreme Power acts and creates, for a certain spiritual joy in creation and expression or to help in the holding together and right ordering or leading of this world of God's workings. The Gita teaches that the man of knowledge shall by his way of life give to those who have not yet the spiritual consciousness, the love and habit of all works and not only of actions recognised as pious, religious or ascetic in their character; he should not draw men away from the world-action by his example. For the world must proceed in its great upward aspiring; men and nations must not be led to fall away from even an ignorant activity into a worse ignorance of inaction or to sink down into that miserable disintegration and tendency of dissolution which comes upon communities and peoples when there predominates the tamasic principle, the principle whether of obscure confusion and error or of weariness and inertia. "For I too," says the Lord in the Gita, "have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have not or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world; for if I did not do works, all laws would fall into confusion, the worlds would sink towards chaos and I would be the destroyer of these peoples." The spiritual life does not need, for its purity, to destroy interest in all things except the Inexpressible or to cut at the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life. It may well be one of the effects of an integral spiritual knowledge and activity to lift them out of their limitations, substitute for our mind's ignorant, limited, tepid or trepidant pleasure in them a free, intense and uplifting urge of delight and supply a new source of creative spiritual power and illumination by which they can be carried more swiftly and profoundly towards their absolute light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities and most dynamic energy of content and form and practice. The one thing needful must be pursued first and always, but all things else come with it as its outcome and have not so much to be added to us as recovered and reshaped in its self-light and as portions of its self-expressive force.
This then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence of the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make it necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and focus them only on that which will help the transition and to leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly turned towards the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to deal by the surface power of the mind still brings him, by reason of this tendency or habit, out of the depths to the surface or down from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing, to lower levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put aside until secure in a higher consciousness he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light or taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All that cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from any preconceived prejudgment of its emptiness or its incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed mental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind according to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all that is below and choose or reject their material out of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
--
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.
This ambiguity, these opposing appearances of depth and blindness are created by the double character of the human emotive being. For there is in front in men a heart of vital emotion similar to the animal's, if more variously developed; its emotions are governed by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections and all the play of the life-impulses with their imperfections, perversions, often sordid degradations, -- heart besieged and given over to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands or little greeds and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallen life-force and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse. This mixture of the emotive heart and the sensational hungering vital creates in man a false soul of desire; it is this that is the crude and dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control, even though the actual control or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some luminous cave of the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few are conscious of their true soul or feel its direct impulse. There dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports this obscure mass of our nature and around it grows the psychic being, the formed soul or the real Man within us. It is as this psychic being in him grows and the movements of the heart reflect its divinations and impulsions that man becomes more and more aware of his soul, ceases to be a superior animal, and, awakening to glimpses of the godhead within him, admits more and more its intimations of a deeper life and consciousness and an impulse towards things divine. It is one of the decisive moments of the integral Yoga when this psychic being liberated, brought out from the veil to the front, can pour the full flood of its divinations, seeings and impulsions on the mind, life and body of man and begin to prepare the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.
1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
12:This is always the true relation, veiled from us by our ignorance or our wrong consciousness of things. When we attain to knowledge or right consciousness, nothing essential in the eternal relation is changed, but only the inview and the outview from the individual centre is profoundly modified and consequently also the spirit and effect of its activity. The individual is still necessary to the action of the Transcendent in the universe and that action in him does not cease to be possible by his illumination. On the contrary, since the conscious manifestation of the Transcendent in the individual is the means by which the collective, the universal is also to become conscious of itself, the continuation of the illumined individual in the action of the world is an imperative need of the world-play. If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal or a mechanical illusion.
13:It is so that ascetic philosophy tends to conceive it. But individual salvation can have no real sense if existence in the cosmos is itself an illusion. In the Monistic view the individual soul is one with the Supreme, its sense of separateness an ignorance, escape from the sense of separateness and identity with the Supreme its salvation. But who then profits by this escape? Not the supreme Self, for it is supposed to be always and inalienably free, still, silent, pure. Not the world, for that remains constantly in the bondage and is not freed by the escape of any individual soul from the universal Illusion. It is the individual soul itself which effects its supreme good by escaping from the sorrow and the division into the peace and the bliss. There would seem then to be some kind of reality of the individual soul as distinct from the world and from the Supreme even in the event of freedom and illumination. But for the Illusionist the individual soul is an illusion and non-existent except in the inexplicable mystery of Maya. Therefore we arrive at the escape of an illusory nonexistent soul from an illusory non-existent bondage in an illusory non-existent world as the supreme good which that non-existent soul has to pursue! For this is the last word of the Knowledge, "There is none bound, none freed, none seeking to be free." Vidya turns out to be as much a part of the Phenomenal as Avidya; Maya meets us even in our escape and laughs at the triumphant logic which seemed to cut the knot of her mystery.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
a profound temptation, in the midst of that chaos.
Tolstoy begins the relevant section of his confession with an allegory, derived from a tale of the East.
--
patriotism and cowardly love of order is an even more profound phenomenon: hatred for the tragic
conditions of existence, and for the vulnerable life that makes those conditions evident:
--
camps of Germany and the Soviet Union were in some profound manner different from the people that we
know, and love, and are. But there is no reason to make this presumption, except for that convenience and
--
not been corrupted more profoundly than the camp inmates who spat on her?
And for that matter did every one of the brigade members spit on her? Perhaps only two from each
--
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor one who brings
--
understood most profoundly in terms of his relationship to God as made in the image of God rather
than in light of his cognitive abilities, or his place in nature. The essence of this spirit identified with God
--
representation. This means that evolution proceeds at least as often (and, generally, more profoundly) from
behavior to representation (episodic and semantic) from adaptive action and mythic portrayal thereof (all
--
continuation of order. The list is nonetheless characterized by the presence of profound intrinsic structural
limitations. It is of insufficient complexity to truly represent the nature of procedural morality (which is
--
The extremely radical nature of this viewpoint profoundly disturbed the traditionalists in Christs
community. His example served as reproach to their actions; his philosophy, as threat to the integrity of
--
Freuds apprehension of Jungs profound and irreconcilable differences in thought that led to their
professional and private alienation.584 Jungs ideas are not primarily Freudian. He places little emphasis on
--
He viewed religion, not as mere neurotic defense against anxiety, but as a profoundly important means of
adaptation. It is much more accurate to view him as an intellectual descendent of Goe the and Nietzsche
--
definition. The more profound the error, the more difficult the revolution the more fear and uncertaintly
released as a consequence of restructuring. The things that are most informative are also frequently most
--
had as its fantastical end-state or desired future the most profound and far-reaching notion of
transformation ever conceptualized: the final perfection or redemption of matter.
--
forth equally mysterious new substances. In this profound darkness the alchemists fantasy had free play
and could playfully combine the most inconceivable things. It could act without restraint and, in so
--
staggering blow is a precondition for any profound improvement in character. By such improvement, I
336
--
structure of wholeness was always present but was buried in profound unconsciousness, where it can
always be found again if one is willing to risk ones skin to attain the greatest possible range of
--
known, insofar as that could be attained but more profoundly, participation in the process that made
one thing of unknown and known. This construct and act of construction typically had twin final aims,
--
transformation so overwhelming that its equivalent can only be found in the most profound of religious
myths:
--
Where does one not encounter that veiled glance which burdens one with a profound sadness, that
inward-turned glance of the born failure which betrays how such a man speaks to himself that glance
--
It seems to me that we answer this question, implicitly but profoundly, when we lose someone we loved,
and then grieve. This is a very common experience. I dont think we cry because they existed, either but
--
alike, and that any sufficiently profound solution to a personal problem may, if communicated, reduce the
likelihood of that problem existing in anyones experience in the future.659 This is in fact how society and
--
depictions of your behavior. This image has had profound impact on how I behaved, as a child when,
even in your absence, I was compelled to follow the rules which you followed (and which I learned through
--
regardless of time or place. The most profound of such cyclical myths portray heightening of consciousness
as cause for emergent unrest simultaneously portray qualitatively transformed consciousness as cure for
that unrest ( more profoundly portray participation in the act of qualitative transformation of
consciousness as cure for that unrest).
--
Meaning is the most profound manifestation of instinct. Man is a creature attracted by the unknown; a
creature adapted for its conquest. The subjective sense of meaning is the instinct governing rate of contact
--
apparently profound subjective insight into the deepest meaning of the universe, for example (although it is more
commonly associated with extreme terror). Before such states are packaged as pathological, necessarily delusional, it
--
deduced, not from his words, but from a profound contemplation and survey of the whole. [Nietzsche, F. (1967a).
p. 105].
1.05 - Yoga and Hypnotism, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The difference between Yoga and hypnotism is that what hypnotism does for a man through the agency of another and in the sleeping state, Yoga does for him by his own agency and in the waking state. The hypnotic sleep is necessary in order to prevent the activity of the subjects mind full of old ideas and associations from interfering with the operator. In the waking state he would naturally refuse to experience sweetness in vinegar or sourness in sugar or to believe that he can change from disease to health, cowardice to heroism by a mere act of faith; his established associations would rebel violently and successfully against such contradictions of universal experience. The force which transcends matter would be hampered by the obstruction of ignorance and attachment to universal error. The hypnotic sleep does not make the mind a tabula rasa but it renders it passive to everything but the touch of the operator. Yoga similarly teaches passivity of the mind so that the will may act unhampered by the saskras or old associations. It is these saskras, the habits formed by experience in the body, heart or mind, that form the laws of our psychology. The associations of the mind are the stuff of which our life is made. They are more persistent in the body than in the mind and therefore harder to alter. They are more persistent in the race than in the individual; the conquest of the body and mind by the individual is comparatively easy and can be done in the space of a single life, but the same conquest by the race involves the development of ages. It is conceivable, however, that the practice of Yoga by a great number of men and persistence in the practice by their descendants might bring about profound changes in human psychology and, by stamping these changes into body and brain through heredity, evolve a superior race which would endure and by the law of the survival of the fittest eliminate the weaker kinds of humanity. Just as the rudimentary mind of the animal has been evolved into the fine instrument of the human being so the rudiments of higher force and faculty in the present race might evolve into the perfect buddhi of the Yogin.
Yo yacchraddha sa eva sa. According as is a mans fixed and complete belief, that he is,not immediately always but sooner or later, by the law that makes the psychical tend inevitably to express itself in the material. The will is the agent by which all these changes are made and old saskras replaced by new, and the will cannot act without faith. The question then arises whether mind is the ultimate force or there is another which communicates with the outside world through the mind. Is the mind the agent or simply the instrument? If the mind be all, then it is only animals that can have the power to evolve; but this does not accord with the laws of the world as we know them. The tree evolves, the clod evolves, everything evolves Even in animals it is evident that mind is not all in the sense of being the ultimate expression of existence or the ultimate force in Nature. It seems to be all only because that which is all expresses itself in the mind and passes everything through it for the sake of manifestation. That which we call mind is a medium which pervades the world. Otherwise we could not have that instantaneous and electrical action of mind upon mind of which human experience is full and of which the new phenomena of hypnotism, telepathy etc. are only fresh proofs. There must be contact, there must be interpenetration if we are to account for these phenomena on any reasonable theory. Mind therefore is held by the Hindus to be a species of subtle matter in which ideas are waves or ripples, and it is not limited by the physical body which it uses as an instrument. There is an ulterior force which works through this subtle medium called mind. An animal species develops, according to the modern theory, under the subtle influence of the environment. The environment supplies a need and those who satisfy the need develop a new species which survives because it is more fit. This is not the result of any intellectual perception of the need nor of a resolve to develop the necessary changes, but of a desire, often though not always a mute, inarticulate and unthought desire. That desire attracts a force which satisfies it What is that force? The tendency of the psychical desire to manifest in the material change is one term in the equation; the force which develops the change in response to the desire is another. We have a will beyond mind which dictates the change, we have a force beyond mind which effects it. According to Hindu philosophy the will is the Jiva, the Purusha, the self in the nandakoa acting through vijna, universal or transcendental mind; this is what we call spirit. The force is Prakriti or Shakti, the female principle in Nature which is at the root of all action. Behind both is the single Self of the universe which contains both Jiva and Prakriti, spirit and material energy. Yoga puts these ultimate existences within us in touch with each other and by stilling the activity of the saskras or associations in mind and body enables them to act swiftly, victoriously, and as the world calls it, miraculously. In reality there is no such thing as a miracle; there are only laws and processes which are not yet understood.
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Rishis are the seers of a single truth and use in its expression a common language. They differ in temperament and personality; some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use of
Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion.
--
In order to illustrate the method I propose to take the first eleven Suktas of the first Mandala and to show how some of the central ideas of a psychological interpretation arise out of certain important passages or single hymns and how the surrounding context of the passages and the general thought of the hymns assume an entirely new appearance in the light of this profounder thinking.
The Sanhita of the Rig Veda, as we possess it, is arranged in ten books or Mandalas. A double principle is observed in the arrangement. Six of the Mandalas are given each to the hymns of a single Rishi or family of Rishis. Thus the second is devoted chiefly to the Suktas of the Rishi Gritsamada, the third and the seventh similarly to the great names of Vishwamitra and Vasishtha respectively, the fourth to Vamadeva, the sixth to
--
Who, then, is this god Agni to whom language of so mystic a fervour is addressed, to whom functions so vast and profound are ascribed? Who is this guardian of the Truth, who is in his act its illumination, whose will in the act is the will of a seer possessed of a divine wisdom governing his richly varied inspiration? What is the Truth that he guards? And what is this good that he creates for the giver who comes always to him in thought day and night bearing as his sacrifice submission and self-surrender? Is it gold and horses and cattle that he brings or is it some diviner riches?
It is not the sacrificial Fire that is capable of these functions, nor can it be any material flame or principle of physical heat and light. Yet throughout the symbol of the sacrificial Fire is maintained. It is evident that we are in the presence of a mystic symbolism to which the fire, the sacrifice, the priest are only outward figures of a deeper teaching and yet figures which it was thought necessary to maintain and to hold constantly in front.
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
Eddington, and others were also profound philosophers
and even, Wilber writes, mystics. The reason was that they
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
settling, one which in all probability will profoundly affect our
moral outlook and religious beliefs when it has passed from the
--
The profound cleavage in every kind of social group (families,
countries, professions, creeds) which during the past century has
--
ity based on their profound community, evolutionary in its nature
and purpose. The nightmares of brutalization and mechanization
1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
12:Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality, - Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God, - yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night, - a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality.
13:And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknowable to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite, - and still mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to him; he cannot fathom their essential reality.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Of all social, moral and spiritual problems that of power is the most chronically urgent and the most difficult of solution. Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust. Growing with every successive satisfaction, the appetite for power can manifest itself indefinitely, without interruption by bodily fatigue or sickness. Moreover, the nature of society is such that the higher a man climbs in the political, economic or religious hierarchy, the greater are his opportunities and resources for exercising power. But climbing the hierarchical ladder is ordinarily a slow process, and the ambitious rarely reach the top till they are well advanced in life. The older he grows, the more chances does the power lover have for indulging his besetting sin, the more continuously is he subjected to temptations and the more glamorous do those temptations become. In this respect his situation is profoundly different from that of the debauchee. The latter may never voluntarily leave his vices, but at least, as he advances in years, he finds his vices leaving him; the former neither leaves his vices nor is left by them. Instead of bringing to the power lover a merciful respite from his addictions, old age is apt to intensify them by making it easier for him to satisfy his cravings on a larger scale and in a more spectacular way. That is why, in Actons words, all great men are bad. Can we therefore be surprised if political action, undertaken, in all too many cases, not for the public good, but solely or at least primarily to gratify the power lusts of bad men, should prove so often either self-stultifying or downright disastrous?
Ltat cest moi, says the tyrant; and this is true, of course, not only of the autocrat at the apex of the pyramid, but of all the members of the ruling minority through whom he governs and who are, in fact, the real rulers of the nation. Moreover, so long as the policy which gratifies the power lusts of the ruling class is successful, and so long as the price of success is not too high, even the masses of the ruled will feel that the state is themselvesa vast and splendid projection of the individuals intrinsically insignificant ego. The little man can satisfy his lust for power vicariously through the activities of the imperialistic state, just as the big man does; the difference between them is one of degree, not of kind.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have just said that we always look upon ourselves with great indulgence, and I think in fact that our defects very often appear to us to be full of charm and that we justify all our weaknesses. But to tell the truth, this is because we lack self-confidence. Does this surprise you?.. Yes, I repeat, we lack confidence, not in what we are at the present moment, not in our ephemeral and ever-changing outer beingthis being always finds favour in our eyes but we lack confidence in what we can become through effort, we have no faith in the integral and profound transformation which will be the work of our true self, of the eternal, the divine who is in all beings, if we surrender like children to its supremely luminous and far-seeing guidance.
So let us not confuse complacency with confidence and let us return to our subject.
1.06 - Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
is profoundly characteristic of the psyche. Indeed, the structure of the
psyche is so contradictory or contrapuntal that one can scarcely make any
--
meaning and value of suffering on the other, is therefore of profound
therapeutic significance and is undoubtedly far better suited to Western
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There in the supramental Gnosis is the fulfilment, the culminating height, the all-embracing extent of the inner adoration, the profound and integral union, the flaming wings of Love upbearing the power and joy of a supreme Knowledge. For supramental Love brings an active ecstasy that surpasses the void passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated Mind and does not betray the deeper greater calm which is the beginning of the supramental silence. The unity of a love which is able to include in itself all differences without being diminished or abrogated by their present limitations and apparent dissonances is raised to its full potentiality on the supramental level. For there an intense oneness with all creatures founded on a profound oneness of the soul with the Divine can harmonise with a play of relations that only makes the oneness more perfect and absolute. The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life.
For it is the very nature of the supramental experience that it can perpetuate the play of difference without forfeiting or in the least diminishing either the divine union or the infinite oneness. For a supramentalised consciousness it would be utterly possible to embrace all contacts with men and the world in a purified flame-force and with a transfigured significance, because the soul would then perceive always as the object of all emotion and all seeking for love or beauty the One Eternal and could spiritually use a wide and liberated life-urge to meet and join with that One Divine in all things and all creatures.
--
The light it sheds illuminates the other parts of the nature which, for want of any better guidance than their own confused and groping powers, have been wandering in the rounds of the Ignorance; it gives to mind the intrinsic feeling of the thoughts and perceptions, to life the infallible sense of the movements that are misled or misleading and those that are well-inspired; something like a quiet oracle from within discloses the causes of our stumblings, warns in time against their repetition, extracts from experience and intuition the law, not rigid but plastic, of a just direction for our acts, a right stepping, an accurate impulse. A will is created that becomes more in consonance with evolving Truth rather than with the circling and dilatory mazes of a seeking Error. A determined orientation towards the greater Light to be, a soul-instinct, a psychic tact and insight into the true substance, motion and intention of things, coming always nearer and nearer to a spiritual vision, to a knowledge by inner contact, inner sight and even identity, begin to replace the superficial keenness of mental judgment and the eager graspings of the life-force. The works of Life right themselves, escape from confusion, substitute for the artificial or legal order imposed by the intellect and for the arbitrary rule of desire the guidance of the soul's inner insight, enter into the profound paths of the
Spirit. Above all, the psychic being imposes on life the law of the sacrifice of all its works as an offering to the Divine and the Eternal. Life becomes a call to that which is beyond Life; its every smallest act enlarges with the sense of the Infinite.
1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:Four great Aspects of the Mother four of her leading Powers and Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play. One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness. Another embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force. A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, Perfection are their several attributes and it is these powers that they bring with them into the world, manifest in a human disguise in their Vibhutis and shall found in the divine degree of their ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct and living influence of the Mother To the four we give the four great names, Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati.
8:Imperial MAHESHWARI is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother s eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail in the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient and unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their force and the truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away from her into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet has she more than any other the heart of the universal Mother For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
--
10:Wisdom and Force are not the only manifestations of the supreme Mother there is a subtler mystery of her nature and without it Wisdom and Force would be incomplete things and without it perfection would not be perfect. Above them is the miracle of eternal beauty, an unseizable secret of divine harmonies, the compelling magic of an irresistible universal charm and attraction that draws and holds things and forces and beings together and obliges them to meet and unite that a hidden Ananda may play from behind the veil and make of them its rhythms and its figures. This is the power of MAHALAKSHMI and there is no aspect of the Divine Shakti more attractive to the heart of embodied beings. Maheshwari can appear too calm and great and distant for the littleness of earthly nature to approach or contain her, Mahakali too swift and formidable for its weakness to bear; but all turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi. For she throws the spell of the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow out from her like light from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss. Magnetic is the touch of her hands and their occult and delicate influence refines mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda.
11:And yet it is not easy to meet the demand of this enchanting Power or to keep her presence. Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul, harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of the life and surroundings, this is the demand of Mahalakshmi. Where there is affinity to the rhythms of the secret world-bliss and response to the call of the AllBeautiful and concord and unity and the glad flow of many lives turned towards the Divine, in that atmosphere she consents to abide. But all that is ugly and mean and base, all that is poor and sordid and squalid, all that is brutal and coarse repels her advent. Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come; where they are mixed and disfigured with baser things, she turns soon to depart or cares little to pour her riches. If she finds herself in men's hearts surrounded with selfishness and hatred and jealousy and malignance and envy and strife, if treachery and greed and ingratitude are mixed in the sacred chalice, if grossness of passion and unrefined desire degrade devotion, in such hearts the gracious and beautiful Goddess will not linger. A divine disgust seizes upon her and she withdraws, for she is not one who insists or strives; or, veiling her face, she waits for this bitter and poisonous devil's stuff to be rejected and disappear before she will found anew her happy influence. Ascetic bareness and harshness are not pleasing to her nor the suppression of the heart's deeper emotions and the rigid repression of the soul's and the life's parts of beauty. For it is through love and beauty that she lays on men the yoke of the Divine. Life is turned in her supreme creations into a rich work of celestial art and all existence into a poem of sacred delight; the world's riches are brought together and concerted for a supreme order and even the simplest and commonest things are made wonderful by her intuition of unity and the breath of her spirit. Admitted to the heart she lifts wisdom to pinnacles of wonder and reveals to it the mystic secrets of the ecstasy that surpasses all knowledge, meets devotion with the passionate attraction of the Divine, teaches to strength and force the rhythm that keeps the might of their acts harmonious and in measure and casts on perfection the charm that makes it endure for ever.
1.06 - The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Similarly, the subjective search for the self may, like the objective, lean preponderantly to identification with the conscious physical life, because the body is or seems to be the frame and determinant here of the mental and vital movements and capacities. Or it may identify itself with the vital being, the life-soul in us and its emotions, desires, impulses, seekings for power and growth and egoistic fulfilment. Or it may rise to a conception of man as a mental and moral being, exalt to the first place his inner growth, power and perfection, individual and collective, and set it before us as the true aim of our existence. A sort of subjective materialism, pragmatic and outward-going, is a possible standpoint; but in this the subjective tendency cannot long linger. For its natural impulse is to go always inward and it only begins to feel itself and have satisfaction of itself when it gets to the full conscious life within and feels all its power, joy and forceful potentiality pressing for fulfilment. Man at this stage regards himself as a profound, vital Will-to-be which uses body as its instrument and to which the powers of mind are servants and ministers. This is the cast of that vitalism which in various striking forms has played recently so great a part and still exercises a considerable influence on human thought. Beyond it we get to a subjective idealism now beginning to emerge and become prominent, which seeks the fulfilment of man in the satisfaction of his inmost religious, aesthetic, intuitive, his highest intellectual and ethical, his deepest sympathetic and emotional nature and, regarding this as the fullness of our being and the whole object of our being, tries to subject to it the physical and vital existence. These come to be considered rather as a possible symbol and instrument of the subjective life flowing out into forms than as having any value in themselves. A certain tendency to mysticism, occultism and the search for a self independent of the life and the body accompanies this new movementnew to modern life after the reign of individualism and objective intellectualism and emphasises its real trend and character.
But here also it is possible for subjectivism to go beyond and to discover the true Self as something greater even than mind. Mind, life and body then become merely an instrumentation for the increasing expression of this Self in the world,instruments not equal in their hierarchy, but equal in their necessity to the whole, so that their complete perfection and harmony and unity as elements of our self-expression become essential to the true aim of our living. And yet that aim would not be to perfect life, body and mind in themselves, but to develop them so as to make a fit basis and fit instruments for the revelation in our inner and outer life of the luminous Self, the secret Godhead who is one and yet various in all of us, in every being and existence, thing and creature. The ideal of human existence personal and social would be its progressive transformation into a conscious outflowering of the joy, power, love, light, beauty of the transcendent and universal Spirit.
1.06 - The Three Mothers or the First Elements, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
When 44 the patriarch Abraham comprehended the great truism, revolved it in his mind, conceived it perfectly, made careful investigations and profound inquiries, pondered upon it and succeeded in contemplations, the Lord of the Universe appeared to him, called him his friend, made with him a covenant between the ten fingers of his hands, which is the covenant of the tongue, 45 and the covenant between the ten toes of his feet, which is the covenant of circumcision, and said of him: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee." (Jer. I, 5.)
1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
disciples. Our teachers should have extensive and profound understanding
of the Dharma and be able to teach many topics and practices. Furthermore,
--
following, but that doesnt mean they have profound comprehension of the
Dharma or are qualied teachers. Following a particular teacher simply
--
Externally, we are simple, but internally, we practice the profound meditations of the Vajrayana. The bodhisattva practices of the Sutrayana are also
profound; we shouldnt think they are easy. For years practices such as equalizing and exchanging self for others and the tong-len practice of giving and
taking were not taught publicly because they were so profound. Even now,
we are instructed to do the taking and giving meditation secretly, without
--
Tenpey Gyaltsen put into words very profound feelings that resonate within
me. We know that he had a close connection with Tara because his words are
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
attach to the term. Our ideas on this profound subject are the fruit
of a long intellectual and moral evolution, and they are so far from
1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All the passages I have quoted proceed from the hymns of Madhuchchhanda son of Viswamitra, the opening eleven hymns of the Rigveda. This seer is one of the deepest & profoundest of the spirits chosen as vessels & channels of the divine knowledge of the Veda, one of those who least loses the thing symbolised in the material symbol, but who tends rather to let the symbol disappear in that which it symbolises. The comparison of the maker of beautiful images to the milch cow & Indra to the milker is an example of his constant tendency the word gavam is avoided with sudugham, so that the idea of milking or pressing forth may be suggested without insisting on the material image of the cow, & in goduhe, the symbol of the cow melts away into the thing symbolised, knowledge, light, illumination. A comparison with Medhatithi son of Kanwa brings out the difference. In Madhuchchhandas hymns the materialist rendering is often inapplicable & even when applicable yields a much poorer sense than the symbolic renderingbecause the seer is little concerned with the symbol except as the recognised means of suggesting things supramaterial. But Medhatithi is much concerned with the symbol & not indifferent to the outer life; in his hymns the materialist rendering gives us a good sense without excluding the symbolic, but often the symbolic has to be sought for & if we did not know the true Vedic tradition from Madhuchchhanda we could not gather it unaided from Medhatithi. The son of Viswamitra is deeply concerned with knowledge & with immortality & rapture as its attendant circumstances & conditions, the son of Kanwa, though not indifferent to knowledge, with the intoxication of the wine of immortality & its outpouring in mortal life & action. To use Vedic symbolism, one is a herder of kine, the other a herder of horses; Madhuchchhandas totem is the meditative cow, Medhatithis the rapid & bounding horse. There is a great calm, depth & nobility in the first eleven hymns, a great verve, joy, energy & vibrant force in the twelve that follow.
There is only one passage in which Medhatithi uses the word go and that passage is characteristic. There are only three main ideas in the hymn, the drinking of the Soma by Indra, the increase of his rapture & force by the drinking of the Soma, & the result of that increase, Semam nah kamam a prina gobhir aswaih shatakrato, Then do thou fill full this desire of ours with horses & with kine, O Shatakratu. Read apart from his other & deeper hymns, we should not venture to put any symbolic sense into these horses & kine; but from other passages it is evident that Medhatithi was not dispossessed of the tradition of Vedic symbolism, & it would be an injustice to him to suppose that he was lusting merely for a material wealth, that this was his desire and not the illumination of knowledge & the inner joy & vigour which is denoted by the symbol of the steed.
1.07 - Samadhi, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
20:The second class is "objects of devotion," such as the idea or form of the Deity, or the heart or body of your Teacher, or of some man whom you respect profoundly. This practice is not to be commended, because it implies a bias of the mind.
21:You can also meditate on "your dreams." This sounds superstitious; but the idea is that you have already a tendency, independent of your conscious will, to think of those things, which will consequently be easier to think of than others. That this is the explanation is evident from the nature of the preceding and subsequent classes.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
29:All conduct and action are part of the movement of a Power, a Force infinite and divine in its origin and secret sense and will even though the forms of it we see seem inconscient or ignorant, material, vital, mental, finite, which is working to bring out progressively something of the Divine and Infinite in the obscurity of the individual and collective nature. This power is leading towards the Light, but still through the Ignorance. It leads man first through his needs and desires; it guides him next through enlarged needs and desires modified and enlightened by a mental and moral ideal. It is preparing to lead him to a spiritual realisation that overrides these things and yet fulfils and reconciles them in all that is divinely true in their spirit and purpose. It transforms the needs and desires into a divine Will and Ananda. It transforms the mental and moral aspiration into the powers of Truth and Perfection that are beyond them. It substitutes for the divided straining of the individual nature, for the passion and strife of the separate ego, the calm, profound, harmonious and happy law of the universalised person within us, the central being, the spirit that is a portion of the supreme Spirit. This true Person in us, because it is universal, does not seek its separate gratification but only asks in its outward expression in Nature its growth to its real stature, the expression of its inner divine self, that transcendent spiritual power and presence within it which is one with all and in sympathy with each thing and creature and with all the collective personalities and powers of the divine existence, and yet it transcends them and is not bound by the egoism of any creature or collectivity or limited by the ignorant controls of their lower nature. This is the high realisation in front of all our seeking and striving, and it gives the sure promise of a perfect reconciliation and transmutation of all the elements of our nature. A pure, total and flawless action is possible only when that is effected and we have reached the height of this secret Godhead within us.
30:The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule. It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit's impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego.
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:Yet the same law should hold throughout. The error of the practical reason is an excessive subjection to the apparent fact which it can immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying profounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion. What is, is the realisation of an anterior potentiality; present potentiality is a clue to future realisation. And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of phenomena depends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes and if we know the causes of error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour with some hope towards their elimination. For knowledge is power and mastery.
11:In fact, we do pursue as an ideal, so far as we may, the elimination of all these negative or adverse phenomena. We seek constantly to minimise the causes of error, pain and suffering. Science, as its knowledge increases, dreams of regulating birth and of indefinitely prolonging life, if not of effecting the entire conquest of death. But because we envisage only external or secondary causes, we can only think of removing them to a distance and not of eliminating the actual roots of that against which we struggle. And we are thus limited because we strive towards secondary perceptions and not towards root-knowledge, because we know processes of things, but not their essence. We thus arrive at a more powerful manipulation of circumstances, but not at essential control. But if we could grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error, suffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them which should be not relative but entire. We might hope even to eliminate them altogether and justify the dominant instinct of our nature by the conquest of that absolute good, bliss, knowledge and immortality which our intuitions perceive as the true and ultimate condition of the human being.
--
15:Into later Vedanta there crept and arrived at fixity the idea that the limited ego is not only the cause of the dualities, but the essential condition for the existence of the universe. By getting rid of the ignorance of the ego and its resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities, but we eliminate along with them our existence in the cosmic movement. Thus we return to the essentially evil and illusory nature of human existence and the vanity of all effort after perfection in the life of the world. A relative good linked always to its opposite is all that here we can seek. But if we adhere to the larger and profounder idea that the ego is only an intermediate representation of something beyond itself, we escape from this consequence and are able to apply Vedanta to fulfilment of life and not only to the escape from life. The essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is beyond himself, that which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it, no longer as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of the universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into harmony with the Divine all individual determinations.
16:We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe. We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, - the universal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the subconscient, - hr.dya samudra, the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself exclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe. We have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of the individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfilment to which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to the human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the transformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity and freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the outflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of being on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of our evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in herself; of this she strives to be delivered.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
A profound existential malaise can set in-the characteristic pathology of this stage (fulcrum six). No longer protected by anthropocentric gods and goddesses, reason gone flat in its happy capacity to explain away the Mystery, not yet delivered into the hands of the superconscious-we stare out blankly into that dark and gloomy night, which will very shortly swallow us up as surely as it once spat us forth. Tolstoy:
The question, which in my fiftieth year had brought me to the notion of suicide, was the simplest of all questions, lying in the soul of every man: "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life?" Otherwise expressed-"Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything?" Again, in other words, "Is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?"
1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound order-
ing of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the
--
the same flame of expectation burns in us both, there is a profound,
definitive and total contact instantly established between us. It mat-
1.07 - The Ideal Law of Social Development, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But within this general nature and general destiny of mankind each individual human being has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at his possible perfection by a growth from within. So only can the race itself attain to anything profound, living and deep-rooted. It cannot be done brutally, heavily, mechanically in the mass; the group self has no true right to regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is not so constituted. We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find, develop, work out from within. No State or legislator or reformer can cut him rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a mechanical salvation; no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious Shastra can be allowed to say to him permanently, In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy growth be permitted. These things may help him temporarily or they may curb and he grows in proportion as he can use them and then exceed them, train and teach his individuality by them, but assert it always in the end in its divine freedom. Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.
True, his life and growth are for the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self. True, he has to use the ideals, disciplines, systems of cooperation which he finds upon his path; but he can only use them well, in their right way and to their right purpose if they are to his life means towards something beyond them and not burdens to be borne by him for their own sake or despotic controls to be obeyed by him as their slave or subject; for though laws and disciplines strive to be the tyrants of the human soul, their only purpose is to be its instruments and servants and when their use is over they have to be rejected and broken. True it is, too, that he has to gather in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and to make the most of the experience of humanitys past ages and not confine himself in a narrow mentality; but this he can only do successfully by making all this his own through assimilation of it to the principle of his own nature and through its subservience to the forward call of his enlarging future. The liberty claimed by the struggling human mind for the individual is no mere egoistic challenge and revolt, however egoistically or with one-sided exaggeration and misapplication it may sometimes be advanced; it is the divine instinct within him, the law of the Self, its claim to have room and the one primary condition for its natural self-unfolding.
--
Naturally, this is an ideal law which the imperfect human race has never yet really attained and it may be very long before it can attain to it. Man, not possessing, but only seeking to find himself, not knowing consciously, obeying only in the rough subconsciously or half-consciously the urge of the law of his own nature with stumblings and hesitations and deviations and a series of violences done to himself and others, has had to advance by a tangle of truth and error, right and wrong, compulsion and revolt and clumsy adjustments, and he has as yet neither the wideness of knowledge nor the flexibility of mind nor the purity of temperament which would enable him to follow the law of liberty and harmony rather than the law of discord and regimentation, compulsion and adjustment and strife. Still it is the very business of a subjective age when knowledge is increasing and diffusing itself with an unprecedented rapidity, when capacity is generalising itself, when men and nations are drawn close together and partially united though in an inextricable, confused entanglement of chaotic unity, when they are being compelled to know each other and impelled to know more profoundly themselves, mankind, God and the world and when the idea of self-realisation for men and nations is coming consciously to the surface,it is the natural work and should be the conscious hope of man in such an age to know himself truly, to find the ideal law of his being and his development and, if he cannot even then follow it ideally owing to the difficulties of his egoistic nature, still to hold it before him and find out gradually the way by which it can become more and more the moulding principle of his individual and social existence.
It may be said that since man is a mental being limited by the mind, life and body, this development and organisation of a power beyond mind, a supramental power, would be the creation of a new superhuman race and that the use of the words human and humanly would no longer be in place. This is no doubt true, but the possibility for the race still remains, if not for all in the same degree or at the same time, yet in an eventual fulfilment.
1.07 - The Infinity Of The Universe, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
And downward an illimitable profound.
Thus, then, the All that is is limited
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Against this we must set Dr. Tennants viewnamely, that religious experience is something real and unique, but does not add anything to the experiencers knowledge of ultimate Reality and must always be interpreted in terms of an idea of God derived from other sources. A study of the facts would suggest that both these opinions are to some degree correct. The facts of mystical insight (together with the facts of what is taken to be historic revelation) are rationalized in terms of general knowledge and become the basis of a theology. And, reciprocally, an existing theology in terms of general knowledge exercises a profound influence upon those who have undertaken the spiritual life, causing them, if it is low, to be content with a low form of experience, if it is high, to reject as inadequate the experience of any form of reality having characteristics incompatible with those of the God described in the books. Thus mystics make theology, and theology makes mystics.
A person who gives assent to untrue dogma, or who pays all his attention and allegiance to one true dogma in a comprehensive system, while neglecting the others (as many Christians concentrate exclusively on the humanity of the Second Person of the Trinity and ignore the Father and the Holy Ghost), runs the risk of limiting in advance his direct apprehension of Reality. In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience. It is fatal to prejudge it, to compel it to fit the mould imposed by a theory which either does not correspond to the facts at all, or corresponds to only some of the facts. Do not strive to seek after the true, writes a Zen master, only cease to cherish opinions. There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Factselflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity. Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content, in the words of St. John of the Cross, with what is less than God. Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who have ceased to cherish opinionseven opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
--
In Wu Chng-ns extraordinary masterpiece (so admirably translated by Mr. Arthur Waley) there is an episode, at once comical and profound, in which Monkey (who, in the allegory, is the incarnation of human cleverness) gets to heaven and there causes so much trouble that at last Buddha has to be called in to deal with him. It ends in the following passage.
Ill have a wager with you, said Buddha. If you are really so clever, jump off the palm of my right hand. If you succeed, Ill tell the Jade Emperor to come and live with me in the Western Paradise, and you shall have his throne without more ado. But if you fail, you shall go back to earth and do penance there for many a kalpa before you come back to me with your talk.
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Love, wherein are hidden profound mysteries, and the
Kisses of the King's Love are there. ... There the Holy
--
In connection with theurgical practice and ceremonial generally, having little concern for goetic obscurations, there is a remark or two in Mr. Waite's Studies in Mysticism which are not a little profound, and are worthy of quotation in this place.
" Those who are acquainted with the spiritual processes followed by the old mystics will know that these processes are delineated ... in the ceremonies of the great initia- tions, and though notwithstanding they offer . . . only the substitutes of things that are incommunicable on the dramatic side of the mystery . . . there is a condition induced in the candidate by which, if he is otherwise pre- pared, he may enter the sphere of a real experience."
1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Purani, the last to be mentioned of our group, was one of the old guards associated with Sri Aurobindo from the twenties. I shall not speak much about him because his own books tell in every line what profound love and adoration he bore for the Master for whose sake he would do anything. Full of life and gusto, he added a liveliness to our company. His choice of the unearthly hours from 2 a.m. to 6.30 a.m. for service was a great relief to us. He would surge up from the bosom of the night and say, "Here I am!" He had the entire period to himself and kept awake while we were contentedly sleeping and snoring by his side. Now and then we used to hear, as if in a dream, Sri Aurobindo's soft voice asking for something and Purani with military steps advancing and responding to the call of the General. If you happened to wake up by some inadvertent noise, you would find a different figure altogether, moving in the penumbra. No longer that lively, youngish spirit, but a very serious face that does not recognise anything else but the work, and brooks no meddling in his duty when Sri Aurobindo is his sole monopoly. I realised then why he chose that hour for service. He could be concentrated, watchful and all alone with the Master. The midnight surely affects all of us with its portentous weight. Another distinctive feature in his service was his physical strength without which it would have been difficult to lift or carry Sri Aurobindo during the early days of the accident. We have seen how he served as a solid human crutch on Sri Aurobindo's right side and later on, his giant manipulation of the large hand-fan was no less an achievement.
His tremendous vital energy would take little account of things big or small. It would either dash against the door or kick at a poor matchbox! The noise would make Sri Aurobindo remark, "What's the matter?" "It is Purani!" we would reply in fun and evoke his smile. He knew Purani's nature very well. Once when Purani hurt his big toe Sri Aurobindo remarked, "You are always dropping things or knocking against them!" He even referred our jokes to the Mother at Purani's cost.
1.08 - Departmental Kings of Nature, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
hidden and men and beasts fall into a profound sleep; were he to
draw it quite out of the scabbard, the world would come to an end.
1.08 - Independence from the Physical, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
a perfect correlation between our inner state and the outer circumstances (such as illnesses, for example, or "accidents") that befall us, as if life were no longer unfolding from outside in but from inside out, the inward molding the outward, to the most trivial circumstances; though in fact, nothing is trivial anymore, and everyday life appears as a network filled with signs waiting to be recognized. Everything is connected. The world is a miracle. We may make a childish mistake when we imagine spiritual life to be full of visions and apparitions and "supernatural" phenomena. The Divine is nearer to us than we think, the "miracle" less pompous and more profound than all this primitive imagery. Once we have deciphered one of those little signs that pass us by, or even once seen the imperceptible link that ties all things, we are closer to the great Miracle than if we had touched some heavenly manna. Indeed,
perhaps the real miracle is that the Divine is also natural, but we do not know how to look.
1.08 - Phlegyas. Philippo Argenti. The Gate of the City of Dis., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Then we arrived within the moats profound,
That circumvallate that disconsolate city;
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
What distinguishes this profound "nature mysticism" from a simple nature indissociation or ecocentric immersion or biospheric regression (which would be egocentric and anthropocentric, as we have seen) is the realization that nature is not Spirit but an expression of Spirit, radiant and glorious and perfect in its own way, but an expression nonetheless. Emerson says nature is not spirit but a symbol of spirit. Emerson is not regressing to fulcrum-2
(biocentric immersion and nondifferentiation)! Emerson is very clear on this distinction between nature regression, on the one hand, and a mysticism that also embraces nature, on the other-and this distinction rather upsets his environmentalist fans, who seem to want to equate a finite and temporal nature with an infinite and eternal Spirit:
--
That Spirit does not build up nature around us, but puts forth nature through us: there is the profound difference between nature/nation mysticism and mere biocentric immersion; there is the telling difference between the EcoNoetic Self and the merely ecological self; there is the difference between transcendence and regression.
Here, then, is a summary of the widely accepted interpretation of Emerson's view: (1) nature is not Spirit but a symbol of Spirit (or a manifestation of Spirit); (2) sensory awareness in itself does not reveal Spirit but obscures it; (3) an ascending or transcendental current is required to disclose Spirit; (4) Spirit is understood only as nature is transcended (i.e., Spirit is immanent in nature, but fully discloses itself only in a transcendence of nature-in short,
--
And what has that to do with morality? Everything, according to Emerson and Schopenhauer, for in seeing that all sentient beings are expressions of one Self, then all beings are treated as one's Self. And that realization-a profound fruition of the decentering thrust of evolution-is the only source of true compassion, a compassion that does not put self first (egocentric) or a particular society first (sociocentric) or humans first (anthropocentric), nor does it try merely in thought to act as if we are all united (worldcentric), but directly and immediately breathes the common air and beats the common blood of a Heart and Body that is one in all beings.
The whole point of the moral sequence, its very ground and its very goal, its omega point, its chaotic Attractor, is the drive toward the Over-Soul, where treating others as one's Self is not a moral imperative that has to be enforced as an ought or a should or a difficult imposition, but comes as easily and as naturally as the rising of the sun or the shining of the moon.21
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Vedas are the roots of Indian civilisation and the supreme authority in Indian religion. For three thousand years, by the calculation of European scholars, for a great deal more, in all probability, the faith of this nation, certainly one of the most profound, acute and intellectual in the world, has not left its hold on this cardinal point of belief. Its greatest and most rationalistic minds have never swerved from the national faith. Kapila held to it no less than Shankara. The two great revolted intellects, Buddha and Brihaspati, could not dethrone the Veda or destroy Indias spiritual allegiance. India by an inevitable law of her being casts out, sooner or later, everything that is not Vedic. The Dhammapada has become a Scripture for foreign peoples. Brihaspatis strictures are only remembered as a curiosity of our intellectual history. Religious movements & revolutions have come & gone or left their mark but after all and through all the Veda remains to us our Rock of the Ages, our eternal foundation.
Yet the most fundamental and important part of this imperishable Scripture, the actual hymns and mantras of the Sanhitas, has long been a sealed book to the Indian mind, learned or unlearned. The other Vedic books are of minor authority or a secondary formation. The Brahmanas are ritual, grammatical & historical treatises on the traditions & ceremonies of Vedic times whose only valueapart from interesting glimpses of ancient life & Vedantic philosophylies in their attempt to fix and to interpret symbolically the ritual of Vedic sacrifice. The Upanishads, mighty as they are, only aspire to bring out, arrange philosophically in the language of later thinking and crown with the supreme name of Brahman the eternal knowledge enshrined in the Vedas. Yet for some two thousand years at least no Indian has really understood the Vedas. Or if they have been understood, if Sayana holds for us their secret, the reverence of the Indian mind for them becomes a baseless superstition and the idea that the modern Indian religions are Vedic in their substance is convicted of egregious error. For the Vedas Sayana gives us are the mythology of the Adityas, Rudras,Maruts, Vasus,but these gods of the Veda have long ceased to be worshipped,or they are a collection of ritual & sacrificial hymns, but the ritual is dead & the sacrifices are no longer offered.
--
With the acceptance of these modern opinions Hinduism ought by this time to have been as dead among educated men as the religion of the Greeks & Romans. It should at best have become a religio Pagana, a superstition of ignorant villagers. Itis, on the contrary, stronger & more alive, fecund & creative than it had been for the previous three centuries. To a certain extent this unexpected result may be traced to the high opinion in which even European opinion has been compelled to hold the Vedanta philosophy, the Bhagavat Gita and some of the speculationsas the Europeans think themor, as we hold, the revealed truths of the Upanishads. But although intellectually we are accustomed in obedience to Western criticism to base ourselves on the Upanishads & Gita and put aside Purana and Veda as mere mythology & mere ritual, yet in practice we live by the religion of the Puranas & Tantras even more profoundly & intimately than we live by & realise the truths of the Upanishads. In heart & soul we still worship Krishna and Kali and believe in the truth of their existence. Nevertheless this divorce between the heart & the intellect, this illicit compromise between faith & reason cannot be enduring. If Purana & Veda cannot be rehabilitated, it is yet possible that our religion driven out of the soul into the intellect may wither away into the dry intellectuality of European philosophy or the dead formality & lifeless clarity of European Theism. It behoves us therefore to test our faith by a careful examination into the meaning of Purana & Veda and into the foundation of that truth which our intellect seeks to deny [but] our living spiritual experience continues to find in their conceptions. We must discover why it is that while our intellects accept only the truth of Vedanta, our spiritual experiences confirm equally or even more powerfully the truth of Purana. A revival of Hindu intellectual faith in the totality of the spiritual aspects of our religion, whether Vedic, Vedantic, Tantric or Puranic, I believe to be an inevitable movement of the near future.
There has already been, indeed, a local movement towards the rehabilitation of the Veda. Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, preached a monotheistic religion founded on a new interpretation of the sacred hymns. But this important attempt, successful & vigorous in the Panjab, is not likely to comm and acceptance among the more subtle races of the south & east. It was based like the European rendering on a system of philology,the Nirukta of Yaska used by the scholastic ingenuity & robust faith of Dayananda to justify conclusions far-reaching & even extravagant, to which it is difficult to assent unless we are offered stronger foundations.Moreover, by rejecting the authority of all later Scriptures and scouting even the Upanishads because they transcend the severity of his monotheistic teaching, Dayananda cut asunder the unity of Hindu religion even more fatally than the Europeans & by the slenderness of vision & the poverty of spiritual contents, the excessive simplicity of doctrine farther weakened the authority of this version for the Indian intellect. He created a sect & a rendering, but failed to rehabilitate to the educated mind in India the authority of the Vedas. Nevertheless, he put his finger on the real clue, the true principle by which Veda can yet be made to render up its long-guarded secret. A Nirukta, based on a wider knowledge of the Aryan tongues than Dayananda possessed, more scientific than the conjectural philology of the Europeans, is the first condition of this great recovery. The second is a sympathy & flexibility of intelligence capable of accepting passively & moulding itself to the mentality of the men of this remote epoch.
--
I put aside at the beginning the common assumption that since religion started from the fears & desires of savages a record of religion as ancient as the Vedas must necessarily contain a barbarous or semi-barbarous mythology empty of any profound or subtle spiritual & moral ideas or, if it contains them at all, that it must be only in the latest documents. We have no more right to assume that the Vedic Rishis were a race of simple & frank barbarians than to assume that they were a class of deep and acute philosophers. What they were is the thing we have to discover and we may arrive at either conclusion or neither, but we must not start from our goal or begin our argument on the basis of our conclusion. We know nothing of the history & thought of the times, we know nothing of the state of their intellectual & social culture except what we can gather from the Vedic hymns themselves. Indications from other sources may be useful as clues but the hymns are our sole authority.
The indications from external sources are few and inconclusive, but they are by no means favourable to the theory of a materialistic worship of Nature-Powers. The Europeans start with their knowledge of the old Pagan worship, their idea of the crudity of early Greek & German myth & practice and their minds naturally expect to find & even insist on finding an even greater crudity in the Vedas. But it must not be forgotten that in no written record of Greek or Scandinavian do the old religions appear as mere materialistic ideas or the old gods as mere Nature forces; they have also a moral significance, and show a substratum of moral and an admixture even of psychological & philosophical ideas. If in their origin, they were material and barbarous, they had already been moralised & intellectualised. Already even in Homer Pallas Athene is not the Dawn or any natural phenomenon, but a great preterhuman power of wisdom, force & intelligence; Apollo is not the Sunwho is represented by another deity, Helios but a moral or moralised deity. In the Veda, even in the European rendering, Varuna has a similar moral character and represents ethical & religious ideas far in advance of any that we find in the Homeric cult & ethics. We cannot rule out of court the possibility that others of the gods shared this Vedic distinction or that, even perhaps in their oldest hymns, the Indians had gone at least as far as the Greeks in the moralising of their religion.
1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasi-
ness in the self, for which reason the question is generally
1.08 - The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:And yet the human reason demands its own method of satisfaction. Therefore when the age of rationalistic speculation began, Indian philosophers, respectful of the heritage of the past, adopted a double attitude towards the Truth they sought. They recognised in the Sruti, the earlier results of Intuition or, as they preferred to call it, of inspired Revelation, an authority superior to Reason. But at the same time they started from Reason and tested the results it gave them, holding only those conclusions to be valid which were supported by the supreme authority. In this way they avoided to a certain extent the besetting sin of metaphysics, the tendency to battle in the clouds because it deals with words as if they were imperative facts instead of symbols which have always to be carefully scrutinised and brought back constantly to the sense of that which they represent. Their speculations tended at first to keep near at the centre to the highest and profoundest experience and proceeded with the united consent of the two great authorities, Reason and Intuition. Nevertheless, the natural trend of Reason to assert its own supremacy triumphed in effect over the theory of its subordination. Hence the rise of conflicting schools each of which founded itself in theory on the Veda and used its texts as a weapon against the others. For the highest intuitive Knowledge sees things in the whole, in the large and details only as sides of the indivisible whole; its tendency is towards immediate synthesis and the unity of knowledge. Reason, on the contrary, proceeds by analysis and division and assembles its facts to form a whole; but in the assemblage so formed there are opposites, anomalies, logical incompatibilities, and the natural tendency of Reason is to affirm some and to negate others which conflict with its chosen conclusions so that it may form a flawlessly logical system. The unity of the first intuitional knowledge was thus broken up and the ingenuity of the logicians was always able to discover devices, methods of interpretation, standards of varying value by which inconvenient texts of the Scripture could be practically annulled and an entire freedom acquired for their metaphysical speculation.
16:Nevertheless, the main conceptions of the earlier Vedanta remained in parts in the various philosophical systems and efforts were made from time to time to recombine them into some image of the old catholicity and unity of intuitional thought. And behind the thought of all, variously presented, survived as the fundamental conception, Purusha, Atman or Sad Brahman, the pure Existent of the Upanishads, often rationalised into an idea or psychological state, but still carrying something of its old burden of inexpressible reality. What may be the relation of the movement of becoming which is what we call the world to this absolute Unity and how the ego, whether generated by the movement or cause of the movement, can return to that true Self, Divinity or Reality declared by the Vedanta, these were the questions speculative and practical which have always occupied the thought of India.
1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajogun.a) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called "soulhood", - for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment.
7:At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Thus, when the desire of being has projected something of the absolute consciousness into the profound Night of the inconscient, into the dark field of pure impulsions, of blind and violent instinct, the obstacle of a mysterious intervention, the miracle of Matter stopping the cosmic being in its fall permits it to recover knowledge of itself and its highest possibilities.
After it has tended by a progressive materialisation towards the growing obscurity of the relative, it tends in the forms of physical life to the recovery, by a sort of absolute individualisation, of full activity of mind.
1.08 - The Three Schools of Magick 3, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Yellow School could not remain impassive spectators of the abominations. Madame Blavatsky was a mere forerunner. They, in conjunction with the Secret Chiefs of the White School in Europe, Chiefs who had been compelled to suspend all attempts at exoteric enlightenment by the general moral debility which had overtaken the races from which they drew their adepts, have prepared a guide for mankind. This man, of an extreme moral force and elevation, combined with a profound sense of worldly realities, has stood forth in an attempt to save the White School, to rehabilitate its formula, and to fling back from the bastions of moral freedom the howling savages of pessimism. Unless his appeal is heard, unless there comes a truly virile reaction against the creeping atrophy which is poisoning them, unless they enlist to the last man under his standard, a great decisive battle will have been lost.
This prophet of the White School, chosen by its Masters and his brethren, to save the Theory and Practice, is armed with a sword far mightier than Excalibur. He has been entrusted with a new Magical formula, one which can be accepted by the whole human race. Its adoption will streng then the Yellow School by giving a more positive value to their Theory; while leaving the postulates of the Black School intact, it will transcend them and raise their Theory and Practice almost to the level of the Yellow. As to the White School, it will remove from them all taint of poison of the Black, and restore vigour to their central formula of spiritual alchemy by giving each man an independent ideal. It will put an end to the moral castration involved in the assumption that each man, whatever his nature, should deny himself to follow out a fantastic and impracticable ideal of goodness. Incidentally, this formula will save Physical Science itself by making negligible the despair of futility, the vital scepticism which has emasculated it in the past. It shows that the joy of existence is not in a goal, for that indeed is clearly unattainable, but in the going itself.
1.08 - THINGS THE GERMANS LACK, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
sciences, is the chief reason why fuller, richer and profounder natures
can find no education or educators that are fit for them. Nothing
1.09 - A System of Vedic Psychology, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Is there or can there be a system of Vedic psychology? To us who are dominated today by the prestige of European thought and scholarship, the Vedas are a document of primitive barbarism, the ancient Vedanta a mass of sublime but indisciplined speculations. We may admit the existence of many deep psychological intuitions in the Upanishads; we do not easily allow to an age which we have been taught to regard as great but primitive and undeveloped the possibility of a profound and reasoned system in a subject in which Europe with all her modern knowledge has been unable to develop a real science. I believe that this current view of our Vedic forefa thers is entirely erroneous and arises from our application to them of a false system of psychological and intellectual values. Europe has formed certain views about the Veda & the Vedanta, and succeeded in imposing them on the Indian intellect. The ease with which this subjugation has been effected, is not surprising; for the mere mass of labour of Vedic scholarship has been imposing, its ingenuity of philological speculation is well calculated to dazzle the uncritical mind and the audacity & self-confidence with which it constructs its theories conceals the conjectural uncertainty of their foundations. When a hundred world famous scholars cry out, This is so, it is hard indeed for the average mind and even minds above the average, but inexpert in these special subjects, not to acquiesce. Nor has there been in India itself any corresponding labour of scholarship, diligence & sound enquiry which could confront the brilliant and hazardous generalisations of modern Sanscrit scholarship with the results of a more perfect system and a more penetrating vision. The only attempt in that direction the attempt of Swami Dayanandahas not been of a kind to generate confidence in the dispassionate judgment of posterity which must be the final arbiter of these disputes; for not only was that great Pundit and vigorous disputant unequipped with the wide linguistic & philological scholarship necessary for his work, but his method was rapid, impatient, polemical, subservient to certain fixed religious ideas rather than executed in the calm, disinterested freedom of the careful and impartial thinker and scholar. Judgment has passed on the Veda & Vedanta by default in favour of the scholastic criticism of Europe which has alone been represented in the court of modern opinion.
Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the paralysis that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second & third hand & reassert its right to judge and inquire with a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. When that day comes, we shall, I think, discover that the imposing fabric of Vedic theory is based upon nothing more sound or lasting than a foundation of loosely massed conjectures. We shall question many established philological myths,the legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion of India from the north, the artificial & unreal distinction of Aryan & Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogeneous Indo-Afghan race; the strange dogma of a henotheistic Vedic naturalism; the ingenious & brilliant extravagances of the modern sun & star myth weavers, and many another hasty & attractive generalisation which, after a brief period of unquestioning acceptance by the easily-persuaded intellect of mankind, is bound to depart into the limbo of forgotten theories. We attach an undue importance & value to the ephemeral conclusions of European philology, because it is systematic in its errors and claims to be a science.We forget or do not know that the claims of philology to a scientific value & authority are scouted by European scientists; the very word, Philologe, is a byword of scorn to serious scientific writers in Germany, the temple of philology. One of the greatest of modern philologists & modern thinkers, Ernest Renan, was finally obliged after a lifetime of hope & earnest labour to class the chief preoccupation of his life as one of the petty conjectural sciencesin other words no science at all, but a system of probabilities & guesses. Beyond one or two generalisations of the mutations followed by words in their progress through the various Aryan languages and a certain number of grammatical rectifications & rearrangements, resulting in a less arbitrary view of linguistic relations, modern philology has discovered no really binding law or rule for its own guidance. It has fixed one or two sure signposts; the rest is speculation and conjecture.We are not therefore bound to worship at the shrines of Comparative Science & Comparative Mythology & offer up on these dubious altars the Veda & Vedanta. The question of Vedic truth & the meaning of Veda still lies open. If Sayanas interpretation of Vedic texts is largely conjectural and likely often to be mistaken & unsound, the European interpretation can lay claim to no better certainty. The more lively ingenuity and imposing orderliness of the European method of conjecture may be admitted; but ingenuity & orderliness, though good helps to an enquiry, are in themselves no guarantee of truth and a conjecture does not cease to be a conjecture, because its probability or possibility is laboriously justified or brilliantly supported. It is on the basis of a purely conjectural translation of the Vedas that Europe presents us with these brilliant pictures of Vedic religion, Vedic society, Vedic civilisation which we so eagerly accept and unquestioningly reproduce. For we take them as the form of an unquestionable truth; in reality, they are no more than brilliantly coloured hypotheses,works of imagination, not drawings from the life.
1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the intelligence of man is not composed entirely and exclusively of the rational intellect and the rational will; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and powerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly at all self-possessing light and force for which we have not even a name. But, at any rate, its character is to drive at a kind of illumination,not the dry light of the reason, nor the moist and suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar splendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge, which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of revelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a supernatural light a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by Reason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralists scheme of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous or imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which mans ordinary conduct of life hides away from his impulses and from his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading are its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this in the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and pious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of which the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations.
This very complexity of his mental being, with the absence of any one principle which can safely dominate the others, the absence of any sure and certain light which can guide and fix in their vacillations the reason and the intelligent will, is mans great embarrassment and stumbling-block. All the hostile distinctions, oppositions, antagonisms, struggles, conversions, reversions, perversions of his mentality, all the chaotic war of ideas and impulses and tendencies which perplex his efforts, have arisen from the natural misunderstandings and conflicting claims of his many members. His reason is a judge who gives conflicting verdicts and is bribed and influenced by the suitors; his intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the conflicts of the different estates of his realm and by the sense of his own partiality and final incompetence. Still in the midst of it all he has formed certain large ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his nature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony.
1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
far-reaching vision in this hatred,--it is the most profound hatred
that exists. On its account alone Art is profound.
21
--
even than the discovery of Stendhal. This profound man, who was
right ten times over in esteeming the superficial Germans low, found
1.09 - Stead and Maskelyne, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In judging the evidence, we must attach especial importance to the opinion of men who have dealt with the facts at first hand. Recently, two such men have put succinctly their arguments for and against the truth of spiritualism, Mr. W. T. Stead and the famous conjurer, Mr. Maskelyne. We will deal with Mr. Maskelyne first, who totally denies the value of the facts on which spiritualism is based. Mr. Maskelyne puts forward two absolutely inconsistent theories, first, that spiritualism is all fraud and humbug, the second, that it is all subconscious mentality. The first was the theory which has hitherto been held by the opponents of the new phenomena, the second the theory to which they are being driven by an accumulation of indisputable evidence. Mr. Maskelyne, himself a professed master of jugglery and illusion, is naturally disposed to put down all mediums as irregular competitors in his own art; but the fact that a conjuror can produce an illusory phenomenon, is no proof that all phenomena are conjuring. He farther argues that no spiritualistic phenomena have been produced when he could persuade Mr. Stead to adopt conditions which precluded fraud. We must know Mr. Maskelynes conditions and have Mr. Steads corroboration of this statement before we can be sure of the value we must attach to this kind of refutation. In any case we have the indisputable fact that Mr Stead himself has been the medium in some of the most important and best ascertained of the phenomena. Mr. Maskelyne knows that Mr. Stead is an honourable man incapable of a huge and impudent fabrication of this kind and he is therefore compelled to fall back on the wholly unproved theory of the subconscious mind. His arguments do not strike us as very convincing. Because we often write without noticing what we are writing, mechanically, therefore, says this profound thinker, automatic writing must be the same kind of mental process. The one little objection to this sublimely felicitous argument is that automatic writing has no resemblance whatever to mechanical writing. When a an writes mechanically, he does not notice what he is writing; when he writes automatically, he notices it carefully and has his whole attention fixed on it. When he writes mechanically, his hand records something that it is in his mind to write; when he writes automatically, his hand transcribes something which it is not in his mind to write and which is often the reverse of what his mind would tell him to write. Mr. Maskelyne farther gives the instance of a lady writing a letter and unconsciously putting an old address which, when afterwards questioned, she could not remember. This amounts to no more than a fit of absent-mindedness in which an old forgotten fact rose to the surface of the mind and by the revival of old habit was reproduced on the paper, but again sank out of immediate consciousness as soon as the mind returned to the present. This is a mental phenomenon essentially of the same class as our continuing unintentionally to write the date of the last year even in this years letters. In one case it is the revival, in the other the persistence of an old habit. What has this to do with the phenomena of automatic writing which are of an entirely different class and not attended by absent-mindedness at all? Mr. Maskelyne makes no attempt to explain the writing of facts in their nature unknowable to the medium, or of repeated predictions of the future, which are common in automatic communications.
On the other side Mr. Steads arguments are hardly more convincing. He bases his belief, first, on the nature of the communications from his son and others in which he could not be deceived by his own mind and, secondly, on the fact that not only statements of the past, but predictions of the future occur freely. The first argument is of no value unless we know the nature of the communication and the possibility or impossibility of the facts stated having been previously known to Mr. Stead. The second is also not conclusive in itself. There are some predictions which a keen mind can make by inference or guess, but, if we notice the hits and forget the misses, we shall believe them to be prophecies and not ordinary previsions. The real value of Mr. Steads defence of the phenomena lies in the remarkable concrete instance he gives of a prediction from which this possibility is entirely excluded. The spirit of Julia, he states, predicted the death within the year of an acquaintance who, within the time stated, suffered from two illnesses, in one of which the doctors despaired of her recovery. On each occasion the predicting spirit was naturally asked whether the illness was not to end in the death predicted, and on each she gave an unexpected negative answer and finally predicted a death by other than natural means. As a matter of fact, the lady in question, before the year was out, leaped out of a window and was killed. This remarkable prophecy was obviously neither a successful inference nor a fortunate guess, nor even a surprising coincidence. It is a convincing and indisputable prophecy. Its appearance in the automatic writing can only be explained either by the assumption that Mr. Stead has a subliminal self, calling itself Julia, gifted with an absolute and exact power of prophecy denied to the man as we know him,a violent, bizarre and unproved assumption,or by the admission that there was a communicant with superior powers to ordinary humanity using the hand of the writer. Who that was, Julia or another, ghost, spirit or other being, is a question that lies beyond. This controversy, with the worthlessness of the arguments on either side and the supreme worth of the one concrete and precise fact given, is a signal proof of our contention that, in deciding this question, it is not a priori arguments, but facts used for their evidential value as an impartial lawyer would use them, that will eventually prevail.
1.09 - The Absolute Manifestation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
There is one word more expressive than any other by which we can define this second condition of the Absolutes pure activity and objectivisation of the Impersonal; it is the word, Play. A child at play,that is the most adequate, the most profound word that can be said of this mystery of the Absolute manifesting itself to itself.
How shall we conceive, how describe this play, this infinite transfiguration of the elements of the Infinite, this radiating of all in each, this reflection of each in all, this perpetual exchange and incessant and mutual transcreating of endless possibilities, numberless conditions in the One and Identical?
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being, - but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects, - wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of him. It follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or another of him. The only thing needed for that is, first, to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and each thing else begins to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
Your argument that because we know the union with the
--
I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. The selfgiving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, carries in its wake an inexpressible Ananda - and it is brought by this method sooner than by any other, so that one can say almost,
"A self-less self-giving is the best policy." Only one does not do it out of policy. Ananda is the result, but it is done not for the result, but for the self-giving itself and for the Divine himself - a subtle distinction, it may seem to the mind, but very real.
1.1.01 - The Divine and Its Aspects, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Impersonality belongs to the intellectual mind and the static self, personality to the soul and heart and dynamic being. Those who disregard the personal Divine ignore something which is profound and essential.
In X's case there exists a conflict between his ideas of the Truth and his heart. But in following the heart in its purer impulses one follows something that is at least as precious as the mind's loyalty to its own conceptions of what the Truth may be.
11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A subtler and profounder ether's field
And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.
1.10 - Aesthetic and Ethical Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Neither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle; they are merely two powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole of life; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very doubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite language, but can at best say that its kernel of will, character and self-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection. The aesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection of the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane the right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty and delight of human existence. But neither can be the highest principle of the human order. We can combine them; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the hedonistic side of morals; we can steady, guide and streng then the delight of life by the introduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will give it endurance and purity. These two powers of our psychological being, which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential principle of delight,the Indian terms are more profound and expressive, Tapas and Ananda,2can be thus helped by each other, the one to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression. But that even this much reconciliation may come about they must be taken up and enlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and comprehending both equally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly their purposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be provided for us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning capacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign of our nature.
The epithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something different, even at its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, Celticised or else only a rough Teutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism.
1.10 - BOOK THE TENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
By the vast chaos of these depths profound;
By the sad silence which eternal reigns
--
And sigh'd profoundly, conscious of the shame
Nor yet the nurse her impious love divin'd,
1.10 - GRACE AND FREE WILL, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In this context we may mention those sudden theophanies which are sometimes vouchsafed to children and sometimes to adults, who may be poets or Philistines, learned or unsophisticated, but who have this in common, that they have done nothing at all to prepare for what has happened to them. These gratuitous graces, which have inspired much literary and pictorial art, some splendid and some (where inspiration was not seconded by native talent) pathetically inadequate, seem generally to belong to one or other of two main classessudden and profoundly impressive perception of ultimate Reality as Love, Light and Bliss, and a no less impressive perception of it as dark, awe-inspiring and inscrutable Power. In memorable forms, Wordsworth has recorded his own experience of both these aspects of the divine Ground.
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
To the natural scientist Mankind offers a profoundly enigmatic
object of study. Anatomically, as Linnaeus perceived, Man differs
--
cernment and a profound knowledge of biology, the procedure is
in danger of lapsing into puerile and sterile subtleties. But pro-
1.10 - The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Indra the god of the sky, but has a very profound and striking significance if Indra be the illumined Mind and Saraswati the inspiration that proceeds from the hidden plane of the supra-
102
1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
hidden, profound, subconscious, it is that which enables
and compels things to remain in existence. It is the reason
1.10 - The Scolex School, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"One day quite soon an entirely different kind of electricity will be discovered which will bring as many profound changes into human living as the first type did. This new electricity will move in a finer ether than does our familiar kind, and thus will be nearer in vibration to the fifth dimension, to the innermost source of things, that realm of 'withinness' wherein all is held poised by a colossal force, that same force which is packed within the atom. Electricity number two will be unthinkably more powerful than our present electricity number one." (V.S. Alder, The Fifth Dimension, p. 132)
Exhausted; I must restring my bow.
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or, and this is the idea I write to suggest, is it not rather the culmination of a long increasing & ever progressing error? The theory this book is written to enunciate & support is simply this, that our forefa thers of early Vedantic times understood the Veda, to which they were after all much nearer than ourselves, far better than Sayana, far better than Roth & Max Muller, that they were, to a great extent, in possession of the real truth about the Veda, that that truth was indeed a deep spiritual truth, karmakanda as well as jnanakanda of the Veda contains an ancient knowledge, a profound, complex & well-ordered psychology & philosophy, strange indeed to our modern conception, expressed indeed in language still stranger & remoter from our modern use of language, but not therefore either untrue or unintelligible, and that this knowledge is the real foundation of our later religious developments, & Veda, not only by historical continuity, but in real truth & substance is the parent & bedrock of all later Hinduism, of Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyaya, Yoga, of Vaishnavism & Shaivism&Shaktism, of Tantra&Purana, even, in a remoter fashion, of Buddhism & the later unorthodox religions. From this quarry all have hewn their materials or from this far-off source drawn unknowingly their waters; from some hidden seed in the Veda they have burgeoned into their wealth of branchings & foliage. The ritualism of Sayana is an error based on a false preconception popularised by the Buddhists & streng thened by the writers of the Darshanas,on the theory that the karma of the Veda was only an outward ritual & ceremony; the naturalism of the modern scholars is an error based on a false preconception encouraged by the previous misconceptions of Sayana,on the theory of the Vedas [as] not only an ancient but a primitive document, the production of semi-barbarians. The Vedantic writers of the Upanishads had alone the real key to the secret of the Vedas; not indeed that they possessed the full knowledge of a dialect even then too ancient to be well understood, but they had the knowledge of the Vedic Rishis, possessed their psychology, & many of their general ideas, even many of their particular terms & symbols. That key, less & less available to their successors owing to the difficulty of the knowledge itself & of the language in which it was couched and to the immense growth of outward ritualism, was finally lost to the schools in the great debacle of Vedism induced by the intellectual revolutions of the centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era.
It is therefore a Vedantic or even what would nowadays be termed a theosophic interpretation of the Veda which in this book I propose to establish. My suggestion is that the gods of the Rigveda were indeed, as the European scholars have seen, masters of the Nature-Powers, but not, as they erroneously theorise, either exclusively or even mainly masters of the visible & physical Nature-Powers. They presided over and in their nature & movement were also & more predominantly mental Nature-Powers, vital Nature-Powers, even supra-mental Nature-Powers. The religion of the Vedic Rishis I suppose on this hypothesis to have been a sort of practical & concrete Brahmavada founded on the three principles of complex existence, isotheism of the gods and parallelism of their functions on all the planes of that complex existence; the secret of their ideas, language & ritual I suppose to rest in an elaborate habit of symbolism & double meaning which tends to phrase & typify all mental phenomena in physical and concrete figures. While the European scholars suppose the Rishis to have been simple-minded barbarians capable only of a gross & obvious personification of forces, only of a confused, barbarous and primitive system of astronomical allegories and animistic metaphors, I suppose them to have been men of daring and observant minds, using a bold and vigorous if sometimes fanciful system of images to express an elaborate practical psychology and self-observation in which what we moderns regard as abstract experiences & ideas were rather perceived with the vividness of physical experiences & images & so expressed in the picturesque terms of a great primitive philosophy. Their outward sacrifice & ritual I suppose to have been partly the symbols & partly the means of material expression for certain psychological processes, the first foundations of our Hindu system of Yoga, by which they believed themselves able to attain inward & outward mastery, knowledge, joy and extended life & being.
1.10 - The Three Modes of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The idea of the three essential modes of Nature is a creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious, because it was the result of long psychological experiment and profound internal experience. Therefore without a long inner experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive perception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately or firmly utilise. Still certain broad indications may help the seeker on the Way of Works to understand, analyse and control by his assent or refusal the combinations of his own nature.
These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities, gun.as, and are given the names sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattwa is the force of equilibrium and translates in quality as good and harmony and happiness and light; rajas is the force of kinesis and translates in quality as struggle and effort, passion and action; tamas is the force of inconscience and inertia and translates in quality
--
Tamas is replaced by a divine peace and tranquil eternal repose out of which is released from a supreme matrix of calm concentration the play of action and knowledge. There is no rajasic kinesis, no desire, no joyful and sorrowful striving of action, creation and possession, no fruitful chaos of troubled impulse. Rajas is replaced by a self-possessed power and illimitable act of force, that even in its most violent intensities does not shake the immovable poise of the soul or stain the vast and profound heavens and luminous abysses of its peace. There is no constructing light of mind casting about to seize and imprison the Truth, no insecure or inactive ease. Sattwa is replaced by an illumination and a spiritual bliss identical with the depth and infinite existence of the soul and instinct with a direct and au thentic knowledge that springs straight from the veiled glories of the secret Omniscience.
This is the greater consciousness into which our inferior consciousness has to be transformed, this nature of the Ignorance with its unquiet unbalanced activity of the three modes changed into this greater luminous supernature. At first we become free from the three gunas, detached, untroubled, nistraigun.ya; but this is the recovery of the native state of the soul, the self, the spirit free and watching in its motionless calm the motion of
1.10 - THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
as that most profound of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob
Burckhardt of Ble, had done, knew at once that something had been
--
it the profoundest instinct of life, the instinct that guarantees the
future of life and life eternal, is understood religiously,--the road
1.11 - A STREET, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
And, if you'll probe the thing profoundly,
Knew you so much and you'll confess it roundly!
1.11 - BOOK THE ELEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Now I die absent, in the vast profound;
And me, without my self, the seas have drown'd.
1.11 - FAITH IN MAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
has been profoundly altered. Under the combined influence of Sci-
ence and History, and of social developments, the twofold sense of
--
plays itself. A profound common aspiration arising out of the very
shape of the modern world is not this specifically what is most to
1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and pow-
erful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But that is the end of a long and difficult journey, and the Master of works does not wait till then to meet the seeker on the path of Yoga and put his secret or half-shown Hand upon him and upon his inner life and actions. Already he was there in the world as the Originator and Receiver of works behind the dense veils of the Inconscient, disguised in force of Life, visible to the Mind through symbol godheads and figures. It may well be in these disguises that he first meets the soul destined to the way of the integral Yoga. Or even, wearing still vaguer masks, he may be conceived by us as an Ideal or mentalised as an abstract Power of Love, Good, Beauty or Knowledge; or, as we turn our feet towards the Way, he may come to us veiled as the call of Humanity or a Will in things that drives towards the deliverance of the world from the grasp of Darkness and Falsehood and Death and Suffering-the great quaternary of the Ignorance. Then, after we have entered the path, he envelops us with his wide and mighty liberating Impersonality or moves near to us with the face and form of a personal Godhead. In and around us we feel a Power that upholds and protects and cherishes; we hear a Voice that guides; a conscious Will greater than ourselves rules us; an imperative Force moves our thought and actions and our very body; an ever-widening Consciousness assimilates ours, a living Light of Knowledge lights all within, or a Beatitude invades us; a Mightiness presses from above, concrete, massive and overpowering, and penetrates and pours itself into the very stuff of our nature; a Peace sits there, a Light, a Bliss, a Strength, a Greatness. Or there are relations, personal, intimate as life itself, sweet as love, encompassing like the sky, deep like deep waters. A Friend walks at our side; a Lover is with us in our heart's secrecy; a Master of the Work and the Ordeal points our way; a Creator of things uses us as his instrument; we are in the arms of the eternal Mother All these more seizable aspects in which the Ineffable meets us are truths and not mere helpful symbols or useful imaginations; but as we progress, their first imperfect formulations in our experience yield to a larger vision of the one Truth that is behind them. At each step their mere mental masks are shed and they acquire a larger, a profounder, a more intimate significance. At last on the supramental borders all these Godheads combine their sacred forms and, without at all ceasing to be, coalesce together. On this path the Divine Aspects have not revealed themselves only in order to be cast away, they are not temporary spiritual conveniences or compromises with an illusory Consciousness or dream-figures mysteriously cast upon us by the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute; on the contrary, their power increases and their absoluteness reveals itself as they draw near to the Truth from which they issue.
For that now superconscient Transcendence is a Power as well as an Existence. The supramental Transcendence is not a vacant Wonder, but an inexpressible which contains for ever all essential things that have issued from it; it holds them there in their supreme everlasting reality and their own characteristic absolutes. The diminution, division, degradation that create here the sense of an unsatisfactory puzzle, a mystery of Maya, themselves diminish and fall from us in, our ascension, and the Divine Powers assume their real forms and appear more and more as the terms of a Truth in process of realisation here. A soul of the Divine is here slowly awaking out of its involution and concealment in the material Inconscience. The Master of our works is not a Master of illusions, but a supreme Reality who is working out his self-expressive realities delivered slowly from the cocoons of the Ignorance in which for the purposes of an evolutionary manifestation they were allowed for a while to slumber. For the supramental Transcendence is not a thing absolutely apart and unconnected with our present existence. It is a greater Light out of which all this has come for the adventure of the Soul lapsing into the Inconscience and emerging out of it, and, while that adventure proceeds, it waits superconstient above our minds till it can become conscious in us. Hereafter it will unveil itself and by the unveiling reveal to us all the significance of our own being and our works; for it will disclose the Divine whose fuller manifestation in the world will release and accomplish that covert significance.
1.11 - The Reason as Governor of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Recently, however, there has been a very noticeable revolt of the human mind against this sovereignty of the intellect, a dissatisfaction, as we might say, of the reason with itself and its own limitations and an inclination to give greater freedom and a larger importance to other powers of our nature. The sovereignty of the reason in man has been always indeed imperfect, in fact, a troubled, struggling, resisted and often defeated rule; but still it has been recognised by the best intelligence of the race as the authority and law-giver. Its only widely acknowledged rival has been faith. Religion alone has been strongly successful in its claim that reason must be silent before it or at least that there are fields to which it cannot extend itself and where faith alone ought to be heard; but for a time even Religion has had to forego or abate its absolute pretension and to submit to the sovereignty of the intellect. Life, imagination, emotion, the ethical and the aesthetic need have often claimed to exist for their own sake and to follow their own bent, practically they have often enforced their claim, but they have still been obliged in general to work under the inquisition and partial control of reason and to refer to it as arbiter and judge. Now, however, the thinking mind of the race has become more disposed to question itself and to ask whether existence is not too large, profound, complex and mysterious a thing to be entirely seized and governed by the powers of the intellect. Vaguely it is felt that there is some greater godhead than the reason.
To some this godhead is Life itself or a secret Will in life; they claim that this must rule and that the intelligence is only useful in so far as it serves that and that Life must not be repressed, minimised and mechanised by the arbitrary control of reason. Life has greater powers in it which must be given a freer play; for it is they alone that evolve and create. On the other hand, it is felt that reason is too analytical, too arbitrary, that it falsifies life by its distinctions and set classifications and the fixed rules based upon them and that there is some profounder and larger power of knowledge, intuition or another, which is more deeply in the secrets of existence. This larger intimate power is more one with the depths and sources of existence and more able to give us the indivisible truths of life, its root realities and to work them out, not in an artificial and mechanical spirit but with a divination of the secret Will in existence and in a free harmony with its large, subtle and infinite methods. In fact, what the growing subjectivism of the human mind is beginning obscurely to see is that the one sovereign godhead is the soul itself which may use reason for one of its ministers, but cannot subject itself to its own intellectuality without limiting its potentialities and artificialising its conduct of existence.
The highest power of reason, because its pure and characteristic power, is the disinterested seeking after true knowledge. When knowledge is pursued for its own sake, then alone are we likely to arrive at true knowledge. Afterwards we may utilise that knowledge for various ends; but if from the beginning we have only particular ends in view, then we limit our intellectual gain, limit our view of things, distort the truth because we cast it into the mould of some particular idea or utility and ignore or deny all that conflicts with that utility or that set idea. By so doing we may indeed make the reason act with great immediate power within the limits of the idea or the utility we have in view, just as instinct in the animal acts with great power within certain limits, for a certain end, yet finds itself helpless outside those limits. It is so indeed that the ordinary man uses his reasonas the animal uses his hereditary, transmitted instinctwith an absorbed devotion of it to the securing of some particular utility or with a useful but hardly luminous application of a customary and transmitted reasoning to the necessary practical interests of his life. Even the thinking man ordinarily limits his reason to the working out of certain preferred ideas; he ignores or denies all that is not useful to these or does not assist or justify or actually contradicts or seriously modifies them,except in so far as life itself compels or cautions him to accept modifications for the time being or ignore their necessity at his peril. It is in such limits that mans reason normally acts. He follows most commonly some interest or set of interests; he tramples down or through or ignores or pushes aside all truth of life and existence, truth of ethics, truth of beauty, truth of reason, truth of spirit which conflicts with his chosen opinions and interests; if he recognises these foreign elements, it is nominally, not in practice, or else with a distortion, a glossing which nullifies their consequences, perverts their spirit or whittles down their significance. It is this subjection to the interests, needs, instincts, passions, prejudices, traditional ideas and opinions of the ordinary mind1 which constitutes the irrationality of human existence.
1.11 - The Second Genesis, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
What a profound view opens to us here! It is in the state of infinite manifestation, in the absolute movement that are found the condition and the occasion for the relative to appear and for the individual being to enter into the contrary state-of concentration. It is from the absolute activity that is born the possibility of individual limitation and the extinction of the being in the inertia of Matter, while on the contrary from the withdrawal of the eternal existence into itself is born the possibility of resurrection for the ephemeral being out of the broken tomb of relative forms into the infinite consciousness.
The relative and the Absolute appear then like two poles of the Infinite which turn by turn become immerged in Being and in Non-being.
1.11 - The Seven Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veil of figures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers, of the Waters, of the five worlds, of the birth and ascent of
Agni which is also the upward journey of man and the Gods whose image man forms in himself from level to level of the great hill of being (sanoh. sanum). Once we apply it and seize the true sense of the symbol of the Cow and the symbol of the
--
moment. Simply, easily, without straining there disengages itself the profound and luminous doctrine of the ancient Mystics, the secret of the Veda.
1.11 - Works and Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Prakriti. Let us then interpret the niyata karma of the Gita as the nityakarma of the Vedic rule, its kartavya karma or work that has to be done as the Aryan rule of social duty and let us take too its work done as a sacrifice to mean simply these Vedic sacrifices and this fixed social duty performed disinterestedly and without any personal object. This is how the Gita's doctrine of desireless work is often interpreted. But it seems to me that the Gita's teaching is not so crude and simple, not so local and temporal and narrow as all that. It is large, free, subtle and profound; it is for all time and for all men, not for a particular age and country.
Especially, it is always breaking free from external forms, details, dogmatic notions and going back to principles and the great facts of our nature and our being. It is a work of large philosophic truth and spiritual practicality, not of constrained religious and philosophical formulas and stereotyped dogmas.
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
of something greater, mightier, more remote and profound than
itself?
--
HE UPANISHAD first affirms the existence of this profounder, vaster, more puissant consciousness behind our
mental being. That, it affirms, is Brahman. Mind, Life,
--
of the body, Mind was the man, in a very profound and radical
sense of the phrase. It is not only that the human being is the one
--
all the necessary elements of this great practice, this profound
psychological self-training and spiritual aspiration are set forth
--
has escaped it, a profound word of the riddle of existence from
which it has turned its eyes or which it was unable or thought it
1.12 - Delight of Existence - The Solution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:IN THIS conception of an inalienable underlying delight of existence of which all outward or surface sensations are a positive, negative or neutral play, waves and foamings of that infinite deep, we arrive at the true solution of the problem we are examining. The self of things is an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowledge of itself is, again, an infinite inalienable delight of being. In formlessness and in all forms, in the eternal awareness of infinite and indivisible being and in the multiform appearances of finite division this self-existence preserves perpetually its self-delight. As in the apparent inconscience of Matter our soul, growing out of its bondage to its own superficial habit and particular mode of self-conscious existence, discovers that infinite Conscious-Force constant, immobile, brooding, so in the apparent non-sensation of Matter it comes to discover and attune itself to an infinite conscious Delight imperturbable, ecstatic, all-embracing. This delight is its own delight, this self is its own self in all; but to our ordinary view of self and things which awakes and moves only upon surfaces, it remains hidden, profound, subconscious. And as it is within all forms, so it is within all experiences whether pleasant, painful or neutral. There too hidden, profound, subconscious, it is that which enables and compels things to remain in existence. It is the reason of that clinging to existence, that overmastering will-to-be, translated vitally as the instinct of self-preservation, physically as the imperishability of matter, mentally as the sense of immortality which attends the formed existence through all its phases of self-development and of which even the occasional impulse of self-destruction is only a reverse form, an attraction to other state of being and a consequent recoil from present state of being. Delight is existence, Delight is the secret of creation, Delight is the root of birth, Delight is the cause of remaining in existence, Delight is the end of birth and that into which creation ceases. "From Ananda" says the Upanishad "all existences are born, by Ananda they remain in being and increase, to Ananda they depart."
2:As we look at these three aspects of essential Being, one in reality, triune to our mental view, separable only in appearance, in the phenomena of the divided consciousness, we are able to put in their right place the divergent formulae of the old philosophies so that they unite and become one, ceasing from their agelong controversy. For if we regard world-existence only in its appearances and only in its relation to pure, infinite, indivisible, immutable Existence, we are entitled to regard it, describe it and realise it as Maya. Maya in its original sense meant a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing, measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which outlines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make measurable the limitless. Later the word came from its original sense of knowledge, skill, intelligence to acquire a pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion, and it is in the figure of an enchantment or illusion that it is used by the philosophical systems.
--
8:If this view be right, then certain consequences inevitably impose themselves. In the first place, since in our depths we ourselves are that One, since in the reality of our being we are the indivisible All-Consciousness and therefore the inalienable All-Bliss, the disposition of our sensational experience in the three vibrations of pain, pleasure and indifference can only be a superficial arrangement created by that limited part of ourselves which is uppermost in our waking consciousness. Behind there must be something in us, - much vaster, profounder, truer than the superficial consciousness, - which takes delight impartially in all experiences; it is that delight which secretly supports the superficial mental being and enables it to persevere through all labours, sufferings and ordeals in the agitated movement of the Becoming. That which we call ourselves is only a trembling ray on the surface; behind is all the vast subconscient, the vast superconscient profiting by all these surface experiences and imposing them on its external self which it exposes as a sort of sensitive covering to the contacts of the world; itself veiled, it receives these contacts and assimilates them into the values of a truer, a profounder, a mastering and creative experience. Out of its depths it returns them to the surface in forms of strength, character, knowledge, impulsion whose roots are mysterious to us because our mind moves and quivers on the surface and has not learned to concentrate itself and live in the depths.
9:In our ordinary life this truth is hidden from us or only dimly glimpsed at times or imperfectly held and conceived. But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master - a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within. We are aware of it within supporting and helping the apparent and superficial self and smiling at its pleasures and pains as at the error and passion of a little child. And if we can go back into ourselves and identify ourselves, not with our superficial experience, but with that radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body, vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being. In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an anandamaya behind the manomaya, a vast Bliss-Self behind the limited mental self, and the latter is only a shadowy image and disturbed reflection of the former. The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface.
10:Again this triple vibration of pleasure, pain, indifference, being superficial, being an arrangement and result of our imperfect evolution, can have in it no absoluteness, no necessity. There is no real obligation on us to return to a particular contact a particular response of pleasure, pain or neutral reaction, there is only an obligation of habit. We feel pleasure or pain in a particular contact because that is the habit our nature has formed, because that is the constant relation the recipient has established with the contact. It is within our competence to return quite the opposite response, pleasure where we used to have pain, pain where we used to have pleasure. It is equally within our competence to accustom the superficial being to return instead of the mechanical reactions of pleasure, pain and indifference that free reply of inalienable delight which is the constant experience of the true and vast Bliss-Self within us. And this is a greater conquest, a still deeper and more complete self-possession than a glad and detached reception in the depths of the habitual reactions on the surface. For it is no longer a mere acceptance without subjection, a free acquiescence in imperfect values of experience, but enables us to convert imperfect into perfect, false into true values, - the constant but veritable delight of the Spirit in things taking the place of the dualities experienced by the mental being.
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Then came the 1st and 2nd December programmes for the School Anniversary. The entire Ashram was busy and bustling. The Mother also had no rest. Nobody suspected that a profound tragedy was being enacted in the closed chambers of Sri Aurobindo. His ailment had been kept a guarded secret. On 1st December, some improvement was noticed; the temperature was normal. He was in a more cheerful mood and even joked with Sanyal. When the doctor suggested that a detailed blood examination would be advisable, Sri Aurobindo smiled and retorted, "You doctors can think only in terms of disease and medicine, but always there is much more effectual knowledge beyond and above it. I don't need anything." We were very happy with the answer, but missed its ambiguous import and thought that it carried a consoling assurance. Next evening the temperature shot up. It had been a heavy day for the Mother because of the Annual Physical Display in the Playground where more than two hundred people took part. The function went off well. When Sri Aurobindo was informed of it, he remarked with a contented smile, "Ah, it is finished!" As soon as the activities were over, the Mother came to Sri Aurobindo's room, placed the garland from her neck at his feet and stood there quietly. Her countenance was very grave. He was indrawn with his eyes closed. Later Sanyal expressed a desire to use some drugs in order to fight the infection. The Mother warned him against the use of any violent drugs or drastic methods not only because Sri Aurobindo would not like them, but they would be, on the contrary, positively harmful. "He will work out whatever is necessary. Give some simple medicines," was her instruction.
On 3rd December, the temperature again dropped to normal. Thinking that Sri Aurobindo was improving, Sanyal proposed to leave that evening. The Mother heard him gravely, but gave no reply. He took the hint and added quickly, "I would rather stay for a few more days, Mother." A smile lit up her face. In the afternoon the picture rapidly changed. The temperature shot up, respiratory distress showed itself for the first time. Sri Aurobindo refused to take any liquid. At the Mother's persuasion he sipped some fruit juice and immediately lapsed into a trance. Almost the whole day he remained in that condition. The Mother, owing to this set-back, did not go to the Playground.
1.12 - Love The Creator, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
A childlike question, surely, but one that must be put, for the questions of children often strike at the root of profound secrets. Where we see only pure and simple facts, their simplicity shows us the mystery and the enigma. All of the Absolute that has no relation to our manifested relativities is brought into our ken by that question.
What are the mysteries formulated by being and by the world in comparison with the mystery of that which, never coming into form, sets at defiance all the formulae of our ignorance? Here how shall we speak of indifference or a divine inertia? We might just as well say the contrary and one statement would not be more valid than the other.
1.12 - The Divine Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
external rather than inwardly profound in its concepts. No such
general thing as duty exists; we have only duties, often in conflict
--
root or flows from these sources is profound, essential, right;
the rest - opinions, impulses, habits, desires - may be merely
--
of the profoundest deeps of his inner consciousness, governed
by his immortal, divine and highest Self, all his works will be
1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Uttering these words, the Master remained silent. After a time he said: "These are very profound words. I feel as if someone were pressing my mouth. . . . I have seen with my own eyes that God dwells even in the sexual organ. I saw Him once in the sexual intercourse of a dog and a bitch.
"The universe is conscious on account of the Consciousness of God. Sometimes I find that this Consciousness wriggles about, as it were, even in small fish."
1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor even intended to be more than an intermediary or minister, it cannot succeed in giving a perfect law to the other estates of the realm, although it may impose on them a temporary and imperfect order as a passage to a higher perfection. The rational or intellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of manhood, nor would a rational society be the last and highest expression of the possibilities of an aggregate human life,unless indeed we give to this word, reason, a wider meaning than it now possesses and include in it the combined wisdom of all our powers of knowledge, those which stand below and above the understanding and logical mind as well as this strictly rational part of our nature. The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the phases of his development, is greater and profounder than his intellect and drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary constructions of the human reason.
Meanwhile, the intellect performs its function; it leads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with unbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take him by the hand. It takes first the lower powers of his existence, each absorbed in its own urge, each striving with a blind self-sufficiency towards the fulfilment of its own instincts and primary impulses; it teaches them to understand themselves and to look through the reflecting eyes of the intelligence on the laws of their own action. It enables them to discern intelligently the high in themselves from the low, the pure from the impure and out of a crude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous formulas of their possibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide, teacher, purifier, liberator. For it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each other and to draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It streng thens and purifies the hedonistic and the aesthetic activities and softens their quarrel with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and seriousness, brings them to the support of the practical and dynamic powers and allies them more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the ethical will by infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and ennobles by all these separately or together the practical, dynamic and utilitarian temperament of the human being. At the same time it plays the part of a judge and legislator, seeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised combinations which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by a settled path and act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a balanced rhythm. Here it finds after a time that its legislative action becomes a force for limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system which it has imposed in the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause of petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to bring in its own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned by the obscure revolt of the oppressed springs of life, ethics, aesthetics, the social, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, if this at first brings in again some confusion, disorder and uncertainty, yet it awakens new movements of imagination, insight, self-knowledge and self-realisation by which old systems and formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments are made and in the end larger potentialities and combinations are brought into play. By this double action of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what it has seen and again in due season questioning what has been accomplished in order to make a new affirmation, fixing a rule and order and liberating from rule and order, the progress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem its steps and stages.
--
It is not only that he has to contrive continually some new harmony between the various elements of his being, physical, vitalistic, practical and dynamic, aesthetic, emotional and hedonistic, ethical, intellectual, but each of them again has to arrive at some order of its own disparate materials. In his ethics he is divided by different moral tendencies, justice and charity, self-help and altruism, self-increase and self-abnegation, the tendencies of strength and the tendencies of love, the moral rule of activism and the moral rule of quietism. His emotions are necessary to his development and their indulgence essential to the outflowering of his rich humanity; yet is he constantly called upon to coerce and deny them, nor is there any sure rule to guide him in the perplexity of this twofold need. His hedonistic impulse is called many ways by different fields, objects, ideals of self-satisfaction. His aesthetic enjoyment, his aesthetic creation forms for itself under the stress of the intelligence different laws and forms; each seeks to impose itself as the best and the standard, yet each, if its claim were allowed, would by its unjust victory impoverish and imprison his faculty and his felicity in its exercise. His politics and society are a series of adventures and experiments among various possibilities of autocracy, monarchism, military aristocracy, mercantile oligarchy, open or veiled plutocracy, pseudo-democracy of various kinds, bourgeois or proletarian, individualistic or collectivist or bureaucratic, socialism awaiting him, anarchism looming beyond it; and all these correspond to some truth of his social being, some need of his complex social nature, some instinct or force in it which demands that form for its effectuation. Mankind works out these difficulties under the stress of the spirit within it by throwing out a constant variation of types, types of character and temperament, types of practical activity, aesthetic creation, polity, society, ethical order, intellectual system, which vary from the pure to the mixed, from the simple harmony to the complex; each and all of these are so many experiments of individual and collective self-formation in the light of a progressive and increasing knowledge. That knowledge is governed by a number of conflicting ideas and ideals around which these experiments group themselves: each of them is gradually pushed as far as possible in its purity and again mixed and combined as much as possible with others so that there may be a more complex form and an enriched action. Each type has to be broken in turn to yield place to new types and each combination has to give way to the possibility of a new combination. Through it all there is growing an accumulating stock of self-experience and self-actualisation of which the ordinary man accepts some current formulation conventionally as if it were an absolute law and truth,often enough he even thinks it to be that,but which the more developed human being seeks always either to break or to enlarge and make more profound or subtle in order to increase or make room for an increase of human capacity, perfectibility, happiness.
This view of human life and of the process of our development, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of the place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the intellect has a double working, dispassionate and interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth and of knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to establish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not confined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at a catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its widest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But it is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing to be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the scientist, the savant labouring to add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet and artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be, does not matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when it tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself at fault.
1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The child of that City will be born with a flame, consciously, voluntarily, without having to undo millennia of animality or abysses of prejudice. He will not be told incessantly that he has to earn a living, for nobody will earn a living in the City of the Future, nobody will have money. Living will be devoted to serving the Truth, each according to his capacity or talent, and the only earnings will be joy. He will not be deluged with musts and must-nots; he will only be shown the immediate sadness of not listening to the right little note. He will not be tormented with the idea of finding a job, being a success, outranking others, passing or failing grades, for nobody succeeds or fails in the City of the Future, nobody has a job, nobody takes precedence over anybody; one does the one job of pursuing a clear little note that lights up everything, does everything for one, takes care of everything for one, unites everything in its tranquil harmony, and whose only success is to be in accord with itself and with the whole. He will not learn to depend on a teacher, a book or a machine, but to rely on that little flame inside, that sprightly little flowing that guides his steps, prompts a discovery, leads by chance to an experience and brings out knowledge effortlessly. And he will learn to cultivate the powers of his body the way others today cultivate the powers of push buttons. His faculties will not be confined in ready-made forms of vision and comprehension; in him will be fostered a vision that has nothing to do with the eyes, a comprehension that is not from books, dreams of other worlds that prepare tomorrow's, direct communications and instant intuitions and subtle senses. And if machines are still used in the City of the Future, he will be told that they are temporary crutches until we find in our own heart the source of the pure Power which will one day transmute matter as we now transmute a blank sheet of paper into a green prairie with the stroke of a pencil. He will be taught the Look, the true and potent look, the look that creates, that changes everything he will be taught to use his own powers and to believe in his power of truth, and that the purer and clearer he is, in harmony with the Law, the more matter responds to Truth. And, instead of entering a prison, the child will grow up in an atmosphere of natural oneness, free of you, me, yours or mine, where he will not have been taught constantly to put up screens and mental barriers, but to be consciously what he unconsciously has been since the beginning of time: to extend himself into all that is and lives, to feel in all that feels, to comprehend through an identical more profound breathing, through a silence that carries everything, to recognize the same little flame everywhere, to love the same clear little flowing everywhere, and to be the self everywhere, behind a thousand different faces and in a thousand musics that are a single music.
Then there will be no more boundaries inside or outside, no more I want, I take, no more lack or absence, no more confined and lonely self, no more against or for, good or evil. There will be one single supreme Harmony in thousands of bodies, plucking its chord in this one and that one, this circumstance and that accident, this gesture and that one, unifying everything in one single movement whose every second is perfect and every act true, every word exact, every thought right, every line rhythmical, every heart in unison and Truth will mold matter according to its right vision. And this little city without boundaries will radiate by its simple power of truth, attracting what must be attracted, discarding what must be discarded, simply by its own force of concentration, touching this point of the universe or that one, this soul or that one, answering thousands of invisible calls, continuously emitting its high, clear note which will brighten the world and lighten hearts, unbeknownst to all.
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
On May 5, 1909, after one year of confinement, Sri Aurobindo was acquitted. He owed his life to two unexpected events. One of the prisoners had betrayed him, denouncing him as the leader of the underground movement. His testimony in court would have meant the death penalty for Sri Aurobindo, but mysteriously he was shot in his cell. Then came the day of the trial, and as everyone sat expecting a verdict of capital punishment, Sri Aurobindo's lawyer was seized by a sudden illumination, which spread through the entire courtroom and profoundly shook the jury: "Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore I say that a man in his position is standing not only before the bar of this court, but before the bar of the High Court of History." Sri Aurobindo was thirty-seven. His brother Barin, beside him in the cage, was sentenced to the gallows.208
Sri Aurobindo continued to hear the voice: Remember never to fear, never to hesitate. Remember that it is I who am doing this, not you nor any other. Therefore whatever clouds may come, whatever dangers and sufferings, whatever difficulties, whatever impossibilities, there is nothing impossible, nothing difficult.
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
The times have undergone a profound change: the procreative
power no longer proceeds from God, rather is God born from
1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A different division of the typal society is quite possible. But whatever the arrangement or division, the typal principle cannot be the foundation of an ideal human society. Even according to the Indian theory it does not belong either to the periods of mans highest attainment or to the eras of his lowest possibility; it is neither the principle of his ideal age, his age of the perfected Truth, Satyayuga, Kritayuga, in which he lives according to some high and profound realisation of his divine possibility, nor of his iron age, the Kaliyuga, in which he collapses towards the life of the instincts, impulses and desires with the reason degraded into a servant of this nether life of man. This too precise order is rather the appropriate principle of the intermediate ages of his cycle in which he attempts to maintain some imperfect form of his true law, his dharma, by will-power and force of character in the Treta, by law, arrangement and fixed convention in the Dwapara.1 The type is not the integral man, it is the fixing and emphasising of the generally prominent part of his active nature. But each man contains in himself the whole divine potentiality and therefore the Shudra cannot be rigidly confined within his Shudrahood, nor the Brahmin in his Brahminhood, but each contains within himself the potentialities and the need of perfection of his other elements of a divine manhood. In the Kali age these potentialities may act in a state of crude disorder, the anarchy of our being which covers our confused attempt at a new order. In the intermediate ages the principle of order may take refuge in a limited perfection, suppressing some elements to perfect others. But the law of the Satya age is the large development of the whole truth of our being in the realisation of a spontaneous and self-supported spiritual harmony. That can only be realised by the evolution, in the measure of which our human capacity in its enlarging cycles becomes capable of it, of the spiritual ranges of our being and the unmasking of their inherent light and power, their knowledge and their divine capacities.
We shall better understand what may be this higher being and those higher faculties, if we look again at the dealings of the reason with the trend towards the absolute in our other faculties, in the divergent principles of our complex existence. Let us study especially its dealings with the suprarational in them and the infrarational, the two extremes between which our intelligence is some sort of mediator. The spiritual or suprarational is always turned at its heights towards the Absolute; in its extension, living in the luminous infinite, its special power is to realise the infinite in the finite, the eternal unity in all divisions and differences. Our spiritual evolution ascends therefore through the relative to the absolute, through the finite to the infinite, through all divisions to oneness. Man in his spiritual realisation begins to find and seize hold on the satisfying intensities of the absolute in the relative, feels the large and serene presence of the infinite in the finite, discovers the reconciling law of a perfect unity in all divisions and differences. The spiritual will in his outer as in his inner life and formulation must be to effect a great reconciliation between the secret and eternal reality and the finite appearances of a world which seeks to express and in expressing seems to deny it. Our highest faculties then will be those which make this possible because they have in them the intimate light and power and joy by which these things can be grasped in direct knowledge and experience, realised and made normally and permanently effective in will, communicated to our whole nature. The infrarational, on the other hand, has its origin and basis in the obscure infinite of the Inconscient; it wells up in instincts and impulses, which are really the crude and more or less haphazard intuitions of a subconscient physical, vital, emotional and sensational mind and will in us. Its struggle is towards definition, towards self-creation, towards finding some finite order of its obscure knowledge and tendencies. But it has also the instinct and force of the infinite from which it proceeds; it contains obscure, limited and violent velleities that move it to grasp at the intensities of the absolute and pull them down or some touch of them into its finite action: but because it proceeds by ignorance and not by knowledge, it cannot truly succeed in this more vehement endeavour. The life of the reason and intelligent will stands between that upper and this nether power. On one side it takes up and enlightens the life of the instincts and impulses and helps it to find on a higher plane the finite order for which it gropes. On the other side it looks up towards the absolute, looks out towards the infinite, looks in towards the One, but without being able to grasp and hold their realities; for it is able only to consider them with a sort of derivative and remote understanding, because it moves in the relative and, itself limited and definite, it can act only by definition, division and limitation. These three powers of being, the suprarational, rational and infrarational are present, but with an infinitely varying prominence in all our activities.
The limitations of the reason become very strikingly, very characteristically, very nakedly apparent when it is confronted with that great order of psychological truths and experiences which we have hitherto kept in the background the religious being of man and his religious life. Here is a realm at which the intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered mind of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are unintelligible to him and sees everywhere forms of life and principles of thought and action which are absolutely strange to his experience. He may try to learn this speech and understand this strange and alien life; but it is with pain and difficulty, and he cannot succeed unless he has, so to speak, unlearned himself and become one in spirit and nature with the natives of this celestial empire. Till then his efforts to understand and interpret them in his own language and according to his own notions end at the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation. The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist. At the best even this futile labour can extract, can account for only the externals of the things it attempts to explain; the spirit is missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of that capital omission even the account of the externals is left without real truth and has only an apparent correctness.
The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous. Either it views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an abstract nothingness or persuade it to purify itself in the light of the reasoning intelligence; or it allows it a role, leaves it perhaps for the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as a moralising influence or its utility to the State for keeping the lower classes in order, even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a rational religion.
--
Reason has indeed a part to play in relation to this highest field of our religious being and experience, but that part is quite secondary and subordinate. It cannot lay down the law for the religious life, it cannot determine in its own right the system of divine knowledge; it cannot school and lesson the divine love and delight; it cannot set bounds to spiritual experience or lay its yoke upon the action of the spiritual man. Its sole legitimate sphere is to explain as best it can, in its own language and to the rational and intellectual parts of man, the truths, the experiences, the laws of our suprarational and spiritual existence. That has been the work of spiritual philosophy in the East andmuch more crudely and imperfectly doneof theology in the West, a work of great importance at moments like the present when the intellect of mankind after a long wandering is again turning towards the search for the Divine. Here there must inevitably enter a part of those operations proper to the intellect, logical reasoning, inferences from the data given by rational experience, analogies drawn from our knowledge of the apparent facts of existence, appeals even to the physical truths of science, all the apparatus of the intelligent mind in its ordinary workings. But this is the weakest part of spiritual philosophy. It convinces the rational mind only where the intellect is already predisposed to belief, and even if it convinces, it cannot give the true knowledge. Reason is safest when it is content to take the profound truths and experiences of the spiritual being and the spiritual life, just as they are given to it, and throw them into such form, order and language as will make them the most intelligible or the least unintelligible to the reasoning mind. Even then it is not quite safe, for it is apt to harden the order into an intellectual system and to present the form as if it were the essence. And, at best, it has to use a language which is not the very tongue of the suprarational truth but its inadequate translation and, since it is not the ordinary tongue either of the rational intelligence, it is open to non-understanding or misunderstanding by the ordinary reason of mankind. It is well-known to the experience of the spiritual seeker that even the highest philosophising cannot give a true inner knowledge, is not the spiritual light, does not open the gates of experience. All it can do is to address the consciousness of man through his intellect and, when it has done, to say, I have tried to give you the truth in a form and system which will make it intelligible and possible to you; if you are intellectually convinced or attracted, you can now seek the real knowledge, but you must seek it by other means which are beyond my province.
But there is another level of the religious life in which reason might seem justified in interfering more independently and entitled to assume a superior role. For as there is the suprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the infrarational life of the instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning. These too feel the touch of the religious sense in man, share its needs and experience, desire its satisfactions. Religion includes this satisfaction also in its scope, and in what is usually called religion it seems even to be the greater part, sometimes to an external view almost the whole; for the supreme purity of spiritual experience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Much impurity, ignorance, superstition, many doubtful elements must form as the result of this contact and union of our highest tendencies with our lower ignorant nature. Here it would seem that reason has its legitimate part; here surely it can intervene to enlighten, purify, rationalise the play of the instincts and impulses. It would seem that a religious reformation, a movement to substitute a pure and rational religion for one that is largely infrarational and impure, would be a distinct advance in the religious development of humanity. To a certain extent this may be, but, owing to the peculiar nature of the religious being, its entire urge towards the suprarational, not without serious qualifications, nor can the rational mind do anything here that is of a high positive value.
1.13 - SALVATION, DELIVERANCE, ENLIGHTENMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
SALVATIONbut from what? Deliveranceout of which particular situation into what other situation? Men have given many answers to these questions, and because human temperaments are of such profoundly different kinds, because social situations are so various and fashions of thought and feeling so compelling while they last, the answers are many and mutually incompatible.
There is first of all material salvationism. In its simplest form this is merely the will to live expressing itself in a formulated desire to escape from circumstances that menace life. In practice, the effective fulfilment of such a wish depends on two things: the application of intelligence to particular economic and political problems, and the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere of good will, in which intelligence can do its work to the best advantage. But men are not content to be merely kind and clever within the limits of a concrete situation. They aspire to relate their actions, and the thoughts and feelings accompanying those actions, to general principles and a philosophy on the cosmic scale. When this directing and explanatory philosophy is not the Perennial Philosophy or one of the historical theologies more or less closely connected with the Perennial Philosophy, it takes the form of a pseudoreligion, a system of organized idolatry. Thus, the simple wish not to starve, the well-founded conviction that it is very difficult to be good or wise or happy when one is desperately hungry, comes to be elaborated, under the influence of the metaphysic of Inevitable Progress, into prophetic Utopianism; the desire to escape from oppression and exploitation comes to be explained and guided by a belief in apocalyptic revolutionism, combined, not always in theory, but invariably in practice, with the Moloch-worship of the nation as the highest of all goods. In all these cases salvation is regarded as a deliverance, by means of a variety of political and economic devices, out of the miseries and evils associated with bad material conditions into another set of future material conditions so much better than the present that, somehow or other, they will cause everybody to be perfectly happy, wise and virtuous. Officially promulgated in all the totalitarian countries, whether of the right or the left, this confession of faith is still only semiofficial in the nominally Christian world of capitalistic democracy, where it is drummed into the popular mind, not by the representatives of state or church, but by those most influential of popular moralists and philosophers, the writers of advertising copy (the only authors in all the history of literature whose works are read every day by every member of the population).
1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Biosphere, differs from it profoundly in its structure and quality of vital com-
pletion. Whereas the Biosphere in its essence is complexity linked but divergent
1.14 - FOREST AND CAVERN, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.
--
Go on! It is a woe profound!
'Tis for your sweetheart's room you're bound,
1.14 - The Principle of Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The giving of the example of God himself to the liberated man is profoundly significant; for it reveals the whole basis of the
Gita's philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he who has exalted himself into the divine nature and according to that divine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine nature?
1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
This, like the events I call synchronistic, points to a profound
harmony between all forms of existence.
1.14 - The Supermind as Creator, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11:The difficulty, in its lower term, disappears if we realise that Mind is only a preparatory form of our consciousness. Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself, "This now I know." And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge, - a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality, - Mind has to make room for another consciousness which will fulfil Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken. The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
12:On the other hand, the unitarian consciousness or indivisible Unity cannot be that impossible entity, a thing without contents out of which all contents have issued and into which they disappear and become annihilated. It must be an original selfconcentration in which all is contained but in another manner than in this temporal and spatial manifestation. That which has thus concentrated itself, is the utterly ineffable and inconceivable Existence which the Nihilist images to his mind as the negative Void of all that we know and are but the Transcendentalist with equal reason may image to his mind as the positive but indistinguishable Reality of all that we know and are. "In the beginning," says the Vedanta, "was the one Existence without a second," but before and after the beginning, now, for ever and beyond Time is that which we cannot describe even as the One, even when we say that nothing but That is. What we can be aware of is, first, its original self-concentration which we endeavour to realise as the indivisible One; secondly, the diffusion and apparent disintegration of all that was concentrated in its unity which is the Mind's conception of the universe; and thirdly, its firm self-extension in the Truth-consciousness which contains and upholds the diffusion and prevents it from being a real disintegration, maintains unity in utmost diversity and stability in utmost mutability, insists on harmony in the appearance of an all-pervading strife and collision, keeps eternal cosmos where Mind would arrive only at a chaos eternally attempting to form itself. This is the Supermind, the Truth-consciousness, the Real-Idea which knows itself and all that it becomes.
1.15 - THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the most profound. First conditions of survival, then conditions of
health, and finally, above all, conditions of synthesis.
1.15 - The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhavam agatah.; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. This double aspect in the Gita's doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missed too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the schools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the doctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makes all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam uttamam.
If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation.
1.15 - The Supreme Truth-Consciousness, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:Different potentialities are embodied, placed, related in this field of Time and Space, each with its powers and possibilities fronting other powers and possibilities, and as a result the successions of Time become in their appearance to the mind a working out of things by shock and struggle and not a spontaneous succession. In reality, there is a spontaneous working out of things from within and the external shock and struggle are only the superficial aspect of this elaboration. For the inner and inherent law of the one and whole, which is necessarily a harmony, governs the outer and processive laws of the parts or forms which appear to be in collision; and to the supramental vision this greater and profounder truth of harmony is always present. That which is an apparent discord to the mind because it considers each thing separately in itself, is an element of the general ever-present and ever-developing harmony to the Supermind because it views all things in a multiple unity. Besides, the mind sees only a given time and space and views many possibilities pell-mell as all more or less realisable in that time and space; the divine Supermind sees the whole extension of Time and Space and can embrace all the mind's possibilities and very many more not visible to the mind, but without any error, groping or confusion; for it perceives each potentiality in its proper force, essential necessity, right relation to the others and the time, place and circumstance both of its gradual and its ultimate realisation. To see things steadily and see them whole is not possible to the mind; but it is the very nature of the transcendent Supermind.
7:This Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light. It is present, even though concealed, in every form and force of the universe; it is that which determines sovereignly and spontaneously form, force and functioning; it limits the variations it compels; it gathers, disperses, modifies the energy which it uses; and all this is done in accord with the first laws2 that its self-knowledge has fixed in the very birth of the form, at the very starting-point of the force. It is seated within everything as the Lord in the heart of all existences, - he who turns them as on an engine by the power of his Maya;3 it is within them and embraces them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal.4
8:Each thing in Nature, therefore, whether animate or inanimate, mentally self-conscious or not self-conscious, is governed in its being and in its operations by an indwelling Vision and Power, to us subconscient or inconscient because we are not conscious of it, but not inconscient to itself, rather profoundly and universally conscient. Therefore each thing seems to do the works of intelligence, even without possessing intelligence, because it obeys, whether subconsciously as in the plant and animal or half-consciously as in man, the real-idea of the divine Supermind within it. But it is not a mental Intelligence that informs and governs all things; it is a self-aware Truth of being in which self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence: it is this Truth-consciousness which has not to think out things but works them out with knowledge according to the impeccable self-vision and the inevitable force of a sole and self-fulfilling Existence. Mental intelligence thinks out because it is merely a reflecting force of consciousness which does not know, but seeks to know; it follows in Time step by step the working of a knowledge higher than itself, a knowledge that exists always, one and whole, that holds Time in its grasp, that sees past, present and future in a single regard.
9:This, then, is the first operative principle of the divine Supermind; it is a cosmic vision which is all-comprehensive, allpervading, all-inhabiting. Because it comprehends all things in being and static self-awareness, subjective, timeless, spaceless, therefore it comprehends all things in dynamic knowledge and governs their objective self-embodiment in Space and Time.
1.15 - The Transformed Being, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We have forgotten that little note, the simple note that fills hearts and fills everything, as if the world were suddenly bemisted in orange tenderness, vast and profound as a fathomless love, so old, so old it seems to embrace the ages, to well up from the depths of time, from the depths of sorrow, all the sorrows of the earth and all its nights, its wanderings, its millions of painful paths life after life, its millions of departed faces, its extinct and annihilated loves, which suddenly come back to seize us again amid that orange explosion as if we had been all those pains and faces and beings on the millions of paths of the earth, and all their songs of hope and despair, all their lost and departed loves, all their never-extinguished music in that one little golden note which bursts out for a second on the wild foam and fills everything with an indescribable orange communion, a total comprehension, a music of triumphant sweetness behind the pain and chaos, an overflowing instantaneousness, as if we were in the Goal forever.
We have reached the shore.
1.15 - The Value of Philosophy, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy. There are many questions--and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life--which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers.
But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge.
1.16 - Dianus and Diana, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
sapped by a profounder view of nature and man.
In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of
1.16 - THE ESSENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
proximate expression of a profound but confused
aspiration striving to see the light and to take
1.17 - Legend of Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Again established in the dwelling of his preceptor, Prahlāda gave lessons himself to the sons of the demons, in the intervals of his leisure. "Sons of the offspring of Diti," he was accustomed to say to them, "hear from me the supreme truth; nothing else is fit to be regarded; nothing, else here is an object to be coveted. Birth, infancy, and youth are the portion of all creatures; and then succeeds gradual and inevitable decay, terminating with all beings, children of the Daityas, in death: this is manifestly visible to all; to you as it is to me. That the dead are born again, and that it cannot be otherwise, the sacred texts are warrant: but production cannot be without a material cause; and as long as conception and parturition are the material causes of repeated birth, so long, be sure, is pain inseparable from every period of existence. The simpleton, in his inexperience, fancies that the alleviation of hunger, thirst, cold, and the like is pleasure; but of a truth it is pain; for suffering gives delight to those whose vision is darkened by delusion, as fatigue would be enjoyment to limbs that are incapable of motion[3]. This vile body is a compound of phlegm and other humours. Where are its beauty, grace, fragrance, or other estimable qualities? The fool that is fond of a body composed of flesh, blood, matter, ordure, urine, membrane, marrow, and bones, will be enamoured of hell. The agreeableness of fire is caused by cold; of water, by thirst; of food, by hunger: by other circumstances their contraries are equally agreeable[4]. The child of the Daitya who takes to himself a wife introduces only so much misery into his bosom; for as many as are the cerished affections of a living creature, so many are the thorns of anxiety implanted in his heart; and he who has large possessions in his house is haunted, wherever he goes, with the apprehension that they may be lost or burnt or stolen. Thus there is great pain in being born: for the dying man there are the tortures of the judge of the deceased, and of passing again into 'the womb. If you conclude that there is little enjoyment in the embryo state, you must then admit that the world is made up of pain. Verily I say unto you, that in this ocean of the world, this sea of many sorrows, Viṣṇu is your only hope. If ye say, you know nothing of this; 'we are children; embodied spirit in bodies is eternal; birth, youth, decay, are the properties of the body, not of the soul[5].' But it is in this way that we deceive ourselves. I am yet a child; but it is my purpose to exert myself when I am a youth. I am yet a youth; but when I become old I will do what is needful for the good of my soul. I am now old, and all my duties are to be fulfilled. How shall I, now that my faculties fail me, do what was left undone when my strength was unimpaired?' In this manner do men, whilst their minds are distracted by sensual pleasures, ever propose, and never attain final beatitude: they die thirsting[6]. Devoted in childhood to play, and in youth to pleasure, ignorant and impotent they find that old age is come upon them. Therefore even in childhood let the embodied soul acquire discriminative wisdom, and, independent of the conditions of infancy, youth, or age, strive incessantly to be freed. This, then, is what I declare unto you; and since you know that it is not untrue, do you, out of regard to me, call to your minds Viṣṇu, the liberator from all bondage. What difficulty is there in thinking upon him, who, when remembered, bestows prosperity; and by recalling whom to memory, day and night, all sin is cleansed away? Let all your thoughts and affections be fixed on him, who is present in all beings, and you shall laugh at every care. The whole world is suffering under a triple affliction[7]. 'What wise man would feel hatred towards beings who are objects of compassion? If fortune be propitious to them, and I am unable to partake of the like enjoyments, yet wherefore should I cerish malignity towards those who are more prosperous than myself: I should rather sympathise with their happiness; for the suppression of malignant feelings is of itself a reward[8]. If beings are hostile, and indulge in hatred, they are objects of pity to the wise, as encompassed by profound delusion. These are the reasons for repressing hate, which are adapted to the capacities of those who see the deity distinct from his creatures. Hear, briefly, what influences those who have approached the truth. This whole world is but a manifestation of Viṣṇu, who is identical with all things; and it is therefore to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same with themselves. Let us therefore lay aside the angry passions of our race, and so strive that we obtain that perfect, pure, and eternal happiness, which shall be beyond the power of the elements or their deities, of fire, of the sun, of the moon, of wind, of Indra, of the regent of the sea; which shall be unmolested by spirits of air or earth; by Yakṣas, Daityas, or their chiefs; by the serpent-gods or monstrous demigods of Swerga; which shall be uninterrupted by men or beasts, or by the infirmities of human nature; by bodily sickness and disease[9], or hatred, envy, malice, passion, or desire; which nothing shall molest, and which every one who fixes his whole heart on Keśava shall enjoy. Verily I say unto you, that you shall have no satisfaction in various revolutions through this treacherous world, but that you will obtain placidity for ever by propitiating Viṣṇu, whose adoration is perfect calm. What here is difficult of attainment, when he is pleased? Wealth, pleasure, virtue, are things of little moment. Precious is the fruit that you shall gather, be assured, from the exhaustless store of the tree of true wisdom."
Footnotes and references:
1.17 - M. AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Nangta, the Vedantist, was a man of profound knowledge. The song moved him to tears though he didn't understand its meaning. Padmalochan also wept when I sang the songs of Ramprasad about the Divine Mother. And he was truly a great pundit."
After the midday meal Sri Ramakrishna rested a few minutes in his room. M. was sitting on the floor. The Master was delighted to hear the music that was being played in the nahabat. He then explained to M. that Brahman alone has become the universe and all living beings.
1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life and ideals of the race. He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth. It is indeed curious to note that the
The Divine Birth and Divine Works
1.18 - The Divine Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Karmayoga of the Gita. The Gita does not try to define works by any outward signs through which it can be recognisable to an external gaze, measurable by the criticism of the world; it deliberately renounces even the ordinary ethical distinctions by which men seek to guide themselves in the light of the human reason. The signs by which it distinguishes divine works are all profoundly intimate and subjective; the stamp by which they are known is invisible, spiritual, supra-ethical.
They are recognisable only by the light of the soul from which they come. For, it says, "what is action and what is inaction, as to this even the sages are perplexed and deluded," because, judging by practical, social, ethical, intellectual standards, they discriminate by accidentals and do not go to the root of the matter; "I will declare to thee that action by the knowledge of which thou shalt be released from all ills. One has to understand about action as well as to understand about wrong action and about inaction one has to understand; thick and tangled is the way of works." Action in the world is like a deep forest, gahana, through which man goes stumbling as best he can, by the light of the ideas of his time, the standards of his personality, his environment, or rather of many times, many personalities, layers of thought and ethics from many social stages all inextricably confused together, temporal and conventional amidst all their claim to absoluteness and immutable truth, empirical and irrational in spite of their aping of right reason. And finally the sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation of fixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise the
1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
which must lead, as we shall see, to the profound modification of
the whole structure not only of our Thought but of our Beliefs.
--
its own profoundest aspirations. Let us look more closely at OX and
OY and see how these two vectors or currents appear and are at
1.18 - The Human Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thought and the Word and travelled to the secret worlds of the luminous Bliss. In the light of the conclusions at which we have arrived, we can now study the more important passages, profound, beautiful and luminous, in which this great discovery of the human forefa thers is hymned. We shall find there the summary of that great hope which the Vedic mystics held ever before their eyes; that journey, that victory is the ancient, primal achievement set as a type by the luminous Ancestors for the mortality that was to come after them. It was the conquest of the powers of the circumscribing Night (ratr paritakmya), Vritras,
Sambaras and Valas, the Titans, Giants, Pythons, subconscient
--
Vasishtha which I shall next examine, VII.76, although to a superficial glance it would seem to be only an ecstatic picture of the physical Dawn. This first impression, however, disappears when we examine it; we see that there is a constant suggestion of a profounder meaning and, the moment we apply the key we have found, the harmony of the real sense appears. The hymn commences with a description of that rising of the Sun into the light of the supreme Dawn which is brought about by the gods and the Angirases. "Savitri, the god, the universal Male, has ascended into the Light that is immortal and of all the births, jyotir amr.tam visvajanyam; by the work (of sacrifice) the eye of the gods has been born (or, by the will-power of the gods vision has been born); Dawn has manifested the whole world (or, all that comes into being, all existences, visvam bhuvanam)." This immortal light into which the sun rises is elsewhere called the true light, r.tam jyotih., Truth and immortality being constantly associated in the Veda. It is the light of the knowledge given by the seven-headed thought which Ayasya discovered when he became visvajanya, universal in his being; therefore this light too is called visvajanya, for it belongs to the fourth plane, the turyam svid of Ayasya, from which all the rest are born and by whose truth all the rest are manifested in their large universality and no longer in the limited terms of the falsehood and crookedness.
Therefore it is called also the eye of the gods and the divine dawn that makes manifest the whole of existence.
1.18 - The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In spirituality then would lie our ultimate, our only hope for the perfection whether of the individual or of the communal man; not the spirit which for its separate satisfaction turns away from the earth and her works, but that greater spirit which surpasses and yet accepts and fulfils them. A spirituality that would take up into itself mans rationalism, aestheticism, ethicism, vitalism, corporeality, his aspiration towards knowledge, his attraction towards beauty, his need of love, his urge towards perfection, his demand for power and fullness of life and being, a spirituality that would reveal to these ill-accorded forces their divine sense and the conditions of their godhead, reconcile them all to each other, illumine to the vision of each the way which they now tread in half-lights and shadows, in blindness or with a deflected sight, is a power which even mans too self-sufficient reason can accept or may at least be brought one day to accept as sovereign and to see in it its own supreme light, its own infinite source. For that reveals itself surely in the end as the logical ultimate process, the inevitable development and consummation of all for which man is individually and socially striving. A satisfying evolution of the nascent spirituality still raw and inchoate in the race is the possibility to which an age of subjectivism is a first glimmer of awakening or towards which it shows a first profound potentiality of return. A deeper, wider, greater, more spiritualised subjective understanding of the individual and communal self and its life and a growing reliance on the spiritual light and the spiritual means for the final solution of its problems are the only way to a true social perfection. The free rule, that is to say, the predominant lead, control and influence of the developed spiritual mannot the half-spiritualised priest, saint or prophet or the raw religionistis our hope for a divine guidance of the race. A spiritualised society can alone bring about a reign of individual harmony and communal happiness; or, in words which, though liable to abuse by the reason and the passions, are still the most expressive we can find, a new kind of theocracy, the kingdom of God upon earth, a theocracy which shall be the government of mankind by the Divine in the hearts and minds of men.
Certainly, this will not come about easily, or, as men have always vainly hoped from each great new turn and revolution of politics and society, by a sudden and at once entirely satisfying change and magical transformation. The advance, however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments; for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive turn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation. Such an evolution of the elements of a spiritualised society is that which a subjective age makes at least possible, and if at the same time it raises to the last height of active power things which seem the very denial of such a potentiality, that need be no index of a practical impossibility of the new birth, but on the contrary may be the sign of its approach or at the lowest a strong attempt at achievement. Certainly, the whole effort of a subjective age may go wrong; but this happens oftenest when by the insufficiency of its materials, a great crudeness of its starting-point and a hasty shallowness or narrow intensity of its inlook into itself and things it is foredoomed to a fundamental error of self-knowledge. It becomes less likely when the spirit of the age is full of freedom, variety and a many-sided seeking, a persistent effort after knowledge and perfection in all the domains of human activity; that can well convert itself into an intense and yet flexible straining after the infinite and the divine on many sides and in many aspects. In such circumstances, though a full advance may possibly not be made, a great step forward can be predicted.
We have seen that there are necessarily three stages of the social evolution or, generally, of the human evolution in both individual and society. Our evolution starts with an infrarational stage in which men have not yet learned to refer their life and action in its principles and its forms to the judgment of the clarified intelligence; for they still act principally out of their instincts, impulses, spontaneous ideas, vital intuitions or obey a customary response to desire, need and circumstance,it is these things that are canalised or crystallised in their social institutions. Man proceeds by various stages out of these beginnings towards a rational age in which his intelligent will more or less developed becomes the judge, arbiter and presiding motive of his thought, feeling and action, the moulder, destroyer and re-creator of his leading ideas, aims and intuitions. Finally, if our analysis and forecast are correct, the human evolution must move through a subjective towards a suprarational or spiritual age in which he will develop progressively a greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than intuitive, a gnostic consciousness. He will be able to perceive a higher divine end, a divine sanction, a divine light of guidance for all he seeks to be, think, feel and do, and able, too, more and more to obey and live in this larger light and power. That will not be done by any rule of infrarational religious impulse and ecstasy, such as characterised or rather darkly illumined the obscure confusion and brute violence of the Middle Ages, but by a higher spiritual living for which the clarities of the reason are a necessary preparation and into which they too will be taken up, transformed, brought to their invisible source.
--
This may well lead to an age, if the development of reason is strongest, of great individual thinkers who seize on some idea of life and its origins and laws and erect that into a philosophy, of critical minds standing isolated above the mass who judge life, not yet with a luminous largeness, a minute flexibility of understanding or a clear and comprehensive profundity, but still with power of intelligence, insight, acuteness, perhaps even a preeminent social thinker here and there who, taking advantage of some crisis or disturbance, is able to get the society to modify or reconstruct itself on the basis of some clearly rational and intelligent principle. Such an age seems to be represented by the traditions of the beginnings of Greek civilisation, or rather the beginnings of its mobile and progressive period. Or if spirituality predominates, there will be great mystics capable of delving into the profound and still occult psychological possibilities of our nature who will divine and realise the truth of the self and spirit in man and, even though they keep these things secret and imparted only to a small number of initiates, may yet succeed in deepening with them the crude forms of the popular life. Even such a development is obscurely indicated in the old traditions of the mysteries. In prehistoric India we see it take a peculiar and unique turn which determined the whole future trend of the society and made Indian civilisation a thing apart and of its own kind in the history of the human race. But these things are only a first beginning of light in the midst of a humanity which is still infrarational as well as infra-spiritual and, even when it undergoes the influence of these precursors, responds only obscurely to their inspirations and without any clearly intelligent or awakened spiritual reception of what they impart or impose. It still turns everything into infrarational form and disfiguring tradition and lives spiritually by ill-understood ceremonial and disguising symbol. It feels obscurely the higher things, tries to live them in its own stumbling way, but it does not yet understand; it cannot lay hold either on the intellectual form or the spiritual heart of their significance.
As reason and spirituality develop, they begin to become a larger and more diffused force, less intense perhaps, but wider and more effective on the mass. The mystics become the sowers of the seed of an immense spiritual development in which whole classes of society and even men from all classes seek the light, as happened in India in the age of the Upanishads. The solitary individual thinkers are replaced by a great number of writers, poets, thinkers, rhetoricians, sophists, scientific inquirers, who pour out a profuse flood of acute speculation and inquiry stimulating the thought-habit and creating even in the mass a generalised activity of the intelligence,as happened in Greece in the age of the sophists. The spiritual development, arising uncurbed by reason in an infrarational society, has often a tendency to outrun at first the rational and intellectual movement. For the greatest illuminating force of the infrarational man, as he develops, is an inferior intuition, an instinctively intuitional sight arising out of the force of life in him, and the transition from this to an intensity of inner life and the growth of a deeper spiritual intuition which outleaps the intellect and seems to dispense with it, is an easy passage in the individual man. But for humanity at large this movement cannot last; the mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being. Therefore we see that the reason in its growth either does away with the distinct spiritual tendency for a time, as in ancient Greece, or accepts it but spins out around its first data and activities a vast web of the workings of the intelligence, so that, as in India, the early mystic seer is replaced by the philosopher-mystic, the religious thinker and even the philosopher pure and simple.
For a time the new growth and impulse may seem to take possession of a whole community as in Athens or in old Aryan India. But these early dawns cannot endure in their purity, so long as the race is not ready. There is a crystallisation, a lessening of the first impetus, a new growth of infrarational forms in which the thought or the spirituality is overgrown with inferior accretions or it is imbedded in the form and may even die in it, while the tradition of the living knowledge, the loftier life and activity remains the property of the higher classes or a highest class. The multitude remains infrarational in its habit of mind, though perhaps it may still keep in capacity an enlivened intelligence or a profound or subtle spiritual receptiveness as its gain from the past. So long as the hour of the rational age has not arrived, the irrational period of society cannot be left behind; and that arrival can only be when not a class or a few but the multitude has learned to think, to exercise its intelligence activelyit matters not at first however imperfectlyupon their life, their needs, their rights, their duties, their aspirations as human beings. Until then we have as the highest possible development a mixed society, infrarational in the mass, but saved for civilisation by a higher class whose business it is to seek after the reason and the spirit, to keep the gains of mankind in these fields, to add to them, to enlighten and raise with them as much as possible the life of the whole.
At this point we see that Nature in her human mass tends to move forward slowly on her various lines of active mind and life towards a greater application of reason and spirituality which shall at last bring near the possibility of a rational and, eventually, a spiritual age of mankind. Her difficulties proceed from two sides. First, while she originally developed thought and reason and spirituality by exceptional individuals, now she develops them in the mass by exceptional communities or nations,at least in the relative sense of a nation governed, led and progressively formed and educated by its intellectually or spiritually cultured class or classes. But the exceptional nation touched on its higher levels by a developed reason or spirituality or both, as were Greece and later Rome in ancient Europe, India, China and Persia in ancient Asia, is surrounded or neighboured by enormous masses of the old infrarational humanity and endangered by this menacing proximity; for until a developed science comes in to redress the balance, the barbarian has always a greater physical force and unexhausted native power of aggression than the cultured peoples. At this stage the light and power of civilisation always collapses in the end before the attack of the outer darkness. Then ascending Nature has to train the conquerors more or less slowly, with long difficulty and much loss and delay to develop among themselves what their incursion has temporarily destroyed or impaired. In the end humanity gains by the process; a greater mass of the nations is brought in, a larger and more living force of progress is applied, a starting-point is reached from which it can move to richer and more varied gains. But a certain loss is always the price of this advance.
1.19 - Equality, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the spiritual nature of the equality enjoined, high and universal in its character and comprehension, which gives its distinctive note to the teaching of the Gita in this matter. For otherwise the mere teaching of equality in itself as the most desirable status of the mind, feelings and temperament in which we rise superior to human weakness, is by no means peculiar to the Gita. Equality has always been held up to admiration as the philosophic ideal and the characteristic temperament of the sages. The Gita takes up indeed this philosophic ideal, but carries it far beyond into a higher region where we find ourselves breathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophic poise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascension out of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to a serenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character its pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; the happier and serener philosophic equality prefers self-mastery by knowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifference seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone, udasnavad asnah., as the Gita expresses it; there is also the religious or Christian equality which is a perpetual kneeling or a prostrate resignation and submission to the will of God. These are the three steps and means towards divine peace, heroic endurance, sage indifference, pious resignation, titiks.a, udasnata, namas or nati. The Gita takes them all in its large synthetic manner and weaves them into its upward soul-movement, but it gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a more universal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives the values of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strain of character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding, beyond the stress of the emotions.
The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customary disturbances of its nature-life; it is because it has this pleasure and because, having it, it gives a sanction to the troubled play of the lower nature that the play continues perpetually; for the
1.19 - GOD IS NOT MOCKED, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Horizontally and vertically, in physical and temperamental kind as well as in degree of inborn ability and native goodness, human beings differ profoundly one from another. Why? To what end and for what past causes? Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. The man of science, on the contrary, would say that the responsibility rested with the parents who had caused the blindness of their child either by having the wrong kind of genes, or by contracting some avoidable disease. Hindu or Buddhist believers in reincarnation according to the laws of karma (the destiny which, by their actions, individuals and groups of individuals impose upon themselves, one another and their descendants) would give another answer and say that, owing to what he had done in previous existences, the blind man had predestined himself to choose the sort of parents from whom he would have to inherit blindness.
These three answers are not mutually incompatible. The parents are responsible for making the child what, by heredity and upbringing, he turns out to be. The soul or character incarnated in the child is of such a nature, owing to past behaviour, that it is forced to select those particular parents. And collaborating with the material and efficient causes is the final cause, the teleological pull from in front. This teleological pull is a pull from the divine Ground of things acting upon that part of the timeless now, which a finite mind must regard as the future. Men sin and their parents sin; but the works of God have to be manifested in every sentient being (either by exceptional ways, as in this case of supernormal healing, or in the ordinary course of events)have to be manifested again and again, with the infinite patience of eternity, until at last the creature makes itself fit for the perfect and consummate manifestation of unitive knowledge, of the state of not I, but God in me.
1.19 - ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD OF US OF AN ULTRA-HUMAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
accentuation of the forces of liberty, a profound modification
should become discernible in the working of anthropogenesis, and
1.20 - Equality and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We see at once what a profound extension we get here for the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common with other systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living. Endurance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said, the foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita's truth of knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but gives them an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance.
The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul's power of self-mastery by fortitude, an equality attained by a struggle with one's nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its natural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness, but not the supreme joy of the liberated self living not by a rule, but in the pure, easy, spontaneous perfection of its divine being, so that "however it may act and live, it acts and lives
--
Oneness with God, oneness with all beings, the realisation of the eternal divine unity everywhere and the drawing onwards of men towards that oneness are the law of life which arises from the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater, wider, more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, to help mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhile to do all works for God and help man also to do with joy and acceptance all the works to which he is called, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t, sarvakarman.i jos.ayan, no greater or more liberal rule of divine works can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secret goal of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existence of the race. It is that to which it must turn for the happiness all
Equality and Knowledge
1.20 - HOW MAY WE CONCEIVE AND HOPE THAT HUMAN UNANIMIZATION WILL BE REALIZED ON EARTH?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
It is a profoundly instructive and mysterious phenomenon.
The human mass is spiritually warmed and illumined by the iron
1.21 - IDOLATRY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The many varieties of higher idolatry may be classed under three main heads: technological, political and moral. Technological idolatry is the most ingenuous and primitive of the three; for its devotees, like those of the lower idolatry, believe that their redemption and liberation depend upon material objectsin this case gadgets. Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalistic countries derive their working philosophy of life. In Soviet Russia too, technological idolatry was strenuously preached, becoming, during the years of that countrys industrialization, a kind of state religion. So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of hubris and inevitable nemesis. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothingcan enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages.
Only a little less ingenuous are the political idolaters. For the worship of redemptive gadgets these have substituted the worship of redemptive social and economic organizations. Impose the right kind of organizations upon human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to nationalism and war, will automatically disappear. Most political idolaters are also technological idolatersand this in spite of the fact that the two pseudo-religions are finally incompatible, since technological progress at its present rate makes nonsense of any political blue-print, however ingeniously drawn, within a matter, not of generations, but of years and sometimes even of months. Further, the human being is, unfortunately, a creature endowed with free will; and if, for any reason, individuals do not choose to make it work, even the best organization will not produce the results it was intended to produce.
1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
doubtless was to keep the names a profound secret; and how could
that be done more surely than by sinking them in the sea? what human
--
of Rome was kept a profound secret, lest the enemies of the republic
might lure him away, even as the Romans themselves had induced many
1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
inevitably led to a profound reshaping of planetary values.
To some outraged spirits, no doubt, Man appeared diminished
--
will grasp the profound identity existing between the forces of civ-
ilization and those of evolution. Man will then assume his true
--
at the same time the world will be infected by a profound schism
some trying to emerge from themselves in order to dominate the
1.23 - Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A subjective age may stop very far short of spirituality; for the subjective turn is only a first condition, not the thing itself, not the end of the matter. The search for the Reality, the true self of man, may very easily follow out the natural order described by the Upanishad in the profound apologue of the seekings of Bhrigu, son of Varuna. For first the seeker found the ultimate reality to be Matter and the physical, the material being, the external man our only self and spirit. Next he fixed on life as the Reality and the vital being as the self and spirit; in the third essay he penetrated to Mind and the mental being; only afterwards could he get beyond the superficial subjective through the supramental Truth-Consciousness to the eternal, the blissful, the ever creative Reality of which these are the sheaths. But humanity may not be as persistent or as plastic as the son of Varuna, the search may stop short anywhere. Only if it is intended that he shall now at last arrive and discover, will the Spirit break each insufficient formula as soon as it has shaped itself and compel the thought of man to press forward to a larger discovery and in the end to the largest and most luminous of all. Something of the kind has been happening, but only in a very external way and on the surface. After the material formula which governed the greater part of the nineteenth century had burdened man with the heaviest servitude to the machinery of the outer material life that he has ever yet been called upon to bear, the first attempt to break through, to get to the living reality in things and away from the mechanical idea of life and living and society, landed us in that surface vitalism which had already begun to govern thought before the two formulas inextricably locked together lit up and flung themselves on the lurid pyre of the world-war. The vital lan has brought us no deliverance, but only used the machinery already created with a more feverish insistence, a vehement attempt to live more rapidly, more intensely, an inordinate will to act and to succeed, to enlarge the mere force of living or to pile up a gigantic efficiency of the collective life. It could not have been otherwise even if this vitalism had been less superficial and external, more truly subjective. To live, to act, to grow, to increase the vital force, to understand, utilise and fulfil the intuitive impulse of life are not things evil in themselves: rather they are excellent things, if rightly followed and rightly used, that is to say, if they are directed to something beyond the mere vitalistic impulse and are governed by that within which is higher than Life. The Life-power is an instrument, not an aim; it is in the upward scale the first great subjective supraphysical instrument of the Spirit and the base of all action and endeavour. But a Life-power that sees nothing beyond itself, nothing to be served except its own organised demands and impulses, will be very soon like the force of steam driving an engine without the driver or an engine in which the locomotive force has made the driver its servant and not its controller. It can only add the uncontrollable impetus of a high-crested or broad-based Titanism, or it may be even a nether flaming demonism, to the Nature forces of the material world with the intellect as its servant, an impetus of measureless unresting creation, appropriation, expansion which will end in something violent, huge and colossal, foredoomed in its very nature to excess and ruin, because light is not in it nor the souls truth nor the sanction of the gods and their calm eternal will and knowledge.
But beyond the subjectivism of the vital self there is the possibility of a mental subjectivism which would at first perhaps, emerging out of the predominant vitalism and leaning upon the already realised idea of the soul as a soul of Life in action but correcting it, appear as a highly mentalised pragmatism. This first stage is foreshadowed in an increasing tendency to rationalise entirely man and his life, to govern individual and social existence by an ordered scientific plan based upon his discovery of his own and of lifes realities. This attempt is bound to fail because reason and rationality are not the whole of man or of life, because reason is only an intermediate interpreter, not the original knower, creator and master of our being or of cosmic existence. It can besides only mechanise life in a more intelligent way than in the past; to do that seems to be all that the modern intellectual leaders of the race can discover as the solution of the heavy problem with which we are impaled. But it is conceivable that this tendency may hereafter rise to the higher idea of man as a mental being, a soul in mind that must develop itself individually and collectively in the life and body through the play of an ever-expanding mental existence. This greater idea would realise that the elevation of the human existence will come not through material efficiency alone or the complex play of his vital and dynamic powers, not solely by mastering through the aid of the intellect the energies of physical Nature for the satisfaction of the life-instincts, which can only be an intensification of his present mode of existence, but through the greatening of his mental and psychic being and a discovery, bringing forward and organisation of his subliminal nature and its forces, the utilisation of a larger mind and a larger life waiting for discovery within us. It would see in life an opportunity for the joy and power of knowledge, for the joy and power of beauty, for the joy and power of the human will mastering not only physical Nature, but vital and mental Nature. It might discover her secret yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realise itself in the act, inner means of overcoming the obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous achievements of material Science. A development of this kind is far enough away from the dreams of the mass of men, but there are certain pale hints and presages of such a possibility and ideas which lead to it are already held by a great number who are perhaps in this respect the yet unrecognised vanguard of humanity. It is not impossible that behind the confused morning voices of the hour a light of this kind, still below the horizon, may be waiting to ascend with its splendours.
Such a turn of human thought, effort, ideas of life, if it took hold of the communal mind, would evidently lead to a profound revolution throughout the whole range of human existence. It would give it from the first a new tone and atmosphere, a loftier spirit, wider horizons, a greater aim. It might easily develop a science which would bring the powers of the physical world into a real and not only a contingent and mechanical subjection and open perhaps the doors of other worlds. It might develop an achievement of Art and Beauty which would make the greatness of the past a comparatively little thing and would save the world from the astonishingly callous reign of utilitarian ugliness that even now afflicts it. It would open up a closer and freer interchange between human minds and, it may well be hoped, a kindlier interchange between human hearts and lives. Nor need its achievements stop here, but might proceed to greater things of which these would be only the beginnings. This mental and psychic subjectivism would have its dangers, greater dangers even than those that attend a vitalistic subjectivism, because its powers of action also would be greater, but it would have what vitalistic subjectivism has not and cannot easily have, the chance of a detecting discernment, strong safeguards and a powerful liberating light.
Moving with difficulty upward from Matter to spirit, this is perhaps a necessary stage of mans development. This was one principal reason of the failure of past attempts to spiritualise mankind, that they endeavoured to spiritualise at once the material man by a sort of rapid miracle, and though that can be done, the miracle is not likely to be of an enduring character if it overleaps the stages of his ascent and leaves the intervening levels untrodden and therefore unmastered. The endeavour may succeed with individuals,Indian thought would say with those who have made themselves ready in a past existence,but it must fail with the mass. When it passes beyond the few, the forceful miracle of the spirit flags; unable to transform by inner force, the new religion for that is what it becomestries to save by machinery, is entangled in the mechanical turning of its own instruments, loses the spirit and perishes quickly or decays slowly. That is the fate which overtakes all attempts of the vitalistic, the intellectual and mental, the spiritual endeavour to deal with material man through his physical mind chiefly or alone; the endeavour is overpowered by the machinery it creates and becomes the slave and victim of the machine. That is the revenge which our material Nature, herself mechanical, takes upon all such violent endeavours; she waits to master them by their concessions to her own law. If mankind is to be spiritualised, it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being. It may be questioned whether such a mass progress or conversion is possible; but if it is not, then the spiritualisation of mankind as a whole is a chimera.
1.24 - Matter, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The older creeds, more patient, more broodingly profound, not touched with the torture and the feverish impatience of the soul under the burden of the Iron Age, did not make this formidable division; they acknowledged Earth the Mother and Heaven the
Father and accorded to them an equal love and reverence; but their ancient mysteries are obscure and unfathomable to our gaze who, whether our view of things be materialistic or spiritual, are alike content to cut the Gordian knot of the problem of existence with one decisive blow and to accept an escape into an eternal bliss or an end in an eternal annihilation or an eternal quietude.
1.24 - RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith and devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds ba the and from which they have, so to speak, been crystallized out into personalities more or less fully developed, according to the more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. (Of this psychic medium an eminent contemporary philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has written, in an essay on telepathy contri buted to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as follows. We must therefore consider seriously the possibility that a persons experience initiates more or less permanent modifications of structure or process in something which is neither his mind nor his brain. There is no reason to suppose that this substratum would be anything to which possessive adjectives, such as mine and yours and his, could properly be applied, as they can be to minds and animated bothes. Modifications which have been produced in the substratum by certain of Ms past experience are activated by Ns present experiences or interests, and they become cause factors in producing or modifying Ns later experiences.) Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent existence, possessing its own derived and secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith and devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something out there, as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith and love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get peoples prayers answered. Ultimately, of course, I alone am the giver, in the sense that all this happens in accordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic and spiritual, no less than in its material, aspects. Nevertheless, the devas (those imperfect forms under which, because of their own voluntary ignorance, men worship the divine Ground) may be thought of as relatively independent powers. The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the devas sicken and finally the. Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints and Virgins and relics have lost the power and the second-hand psychic objectivity which they once possessed. Thus, when Chaucer lived and wrote, the deva called Thomas Becket was giving to any Canterbury pilgrim, who had sufficient faith, all the boons he could ask for. This once-powerful deity is now stone-dead; but there are still certain churches in the West, certain mosques and temples in the East, where even the most irreligious and un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely numinous presence. It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that this presence is the presence of that God who is a Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit; it is rather the psychic presence of mens thoughts and feelings about the particular, limited form of God, to which they have resorted according to the impulse of their inborn naturethoughts and feelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts and feeling of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime. The presence in these consecrated buildings, the presence evoked by the performance of traditional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramental object, name or formulaall these are real presences, but real presences, not of God or the Avatar, but of something which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, is yet less and other than it.
Dulcis Jesu memoria
1.24 - The Killing of the Divine King, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
failing strength springs directly from their profound veneration for
him and from their anxiety to preserve him, or rather the divine
1.24 - The Seventh Bolgia - Thieves. Vanni Fucci. Serpents., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Of the profoundest well is all inclining,
The structure of each valley doth import
1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the Orient the systematization of mental prayer was carried out at some unknown but certainly very early date. Both in India and China spiritual exercises (accompanied or preceded by more or less elaborate physical exercises, especially breathing exercises) are known to have been used several centuries before the birth of Christ. In the West, the monks of the Thebaid spent a good part of each day in meditatioq as a means to contemplation or the unitive knowledge of God; and at all periods of Christian history, more or less methodical mental prayer has been largely used to supplement the vocal praying of public and private worship. But the systematization of mental prayer into elaborate spiritual exercises was not undertaken, it would seem, until near the end of the Middle Ages, when reformers within the Church popularized this new form of spirituality in an effort to revivify a decaying monasticism and to reinforce the religious life of a laity that had been bewildered by the Great Schism and profoundly shocked by the corruption of the clergy. Among these early systematizers the most effective and influential were the canons of Windesheim, who were in close touch with the Brethren of the Common Life. During the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries spiritual exercises became, one might almost say, positively fashionable. The early Jesuits had shown what extraordinary transformations of character, what intensities of will and devotion, could be achieved by men systematically trained on the intellectual and imaginative exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and as the prestige of the Jesuits stood very high, at this time, in Catholic Europe, the prestige of spiritual exercises also stood high. Throughout the first century of the Counter-Reformation numerous systems of mental prayer (many of them, unlike the Ignatian exercises, specifically mystical) were composed, published and eagerly bought. After the Quietist controversy mysticism fell into disrepute and, along with mysticism, many of the once popular systems, which their authors had designed to assist the soul on the path towards contemplation. For more detailed information on this interesting and important subject the reader should consult Pourrats Christian Spirituality, Bede Frosts The Art of Mental Prayer, Edward Leens Progress through Mental Prayer and Aelfrida Tillyards Spiritual Exercises. Here it is only possible to give a few characteristic specimens from the various religious traditions.
Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learnt, and more than this is not known to me.
--
In India the repetition of the divine name or the mantram (a short devotional or doctrinal affirmation) is called japam and is a favourite spiritual exercise among all the sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. The shortest mantram is OMa spoken sym bol that concentrates within itself the whole Vedanta philosophy. To this and other mantrams Hindus attribute a kind of magical power. The repetition of them is a sacramental act, conferring grace ex opere operato. A similar efficacity was and indeed still is attri buted to sacred words and formulas by Buddhists, Moslems, Jews and Christians. And, of course, just as traditional religious rites seem to possess the power to evoke the real presence of existents projected into psychic objectivity by the faith and devotion of generations of worshippers, so too long-hallowed words and phrases may become channels for conveying powers other and greater than those belonging to the individual who happens at the moment to be pronouncing them. And meanwhile the constant repetition of this word GOD or this word LOVE may, in favourable circumstances, have a profound effect upon the subconscious mind, inducing that selfless one-pointedness of will and thought and feeling, without which the unitive knowledge of God is impossible. Furthermore, it may happen that, if the word is simply repeated all whole, and not broken up or undone by discursive analysis, the Fact for which the word stands will end by presenting itself to the soul in the form of an integral intuition. When this happens, the doors of the letters of this word are opened (to use the language of the Sufis) and the soul passes through into Reality. But though all this may happen, it need not necessarily happen. For there is no spiritual patent medicine, no pleasant and infallible panacea for souls suffering from separateness and the deprivation of God. No, there is no guaranteed cure; and, if used improperly, the medicine of spiritual exercises may start a new disease or aggravate the old. For example, a mere mechanical repetition of the divine name can result in a kind of numbed stupefaction that is as much below analytical thought as intellectual vision is above it. And because the sacred word constitutes a kind of prejudgment of the experience induced by its repetition, this stupefaction, or some other abnormal state, is taken to be the imme thate awareness of Reality and is idolatrously cultivated and hunted after, with a turning of the will towards what is supposed to be God before there has been a turning of it away from the self.
The dangers which beset the practicer of japam, who is insufficiently mortified and insufficiently recollected and aware, are encountered in the same or different forms by those who make use of more elaborate spiritual exercises. Intense concentration on an image or idea, such as is recommended by many teachers, both Eastern and Western, may be very helpful for certain persons in certain circumstances, very harmful in other cases. It is helpful when the concentration results in such mental stillness, such a silence of intellect, will and feeling, that the divine Word can be uttered within the soul. It is harmful when the image concentrated upon becomes so hallucinatingly real that it is taken for objective Reality and idolatrously worshipped; harmful, too, when the exercise of concentration produces unusual psycho-physical results, in which the person experiencing them takes a personal pride, as being special graces and divine communications. Of these unusual psycho-physical occurrences the most ordinary are visions and auditions, foreknowledge, telepathy and other psychic powers, and the curious bodily phenomenon of intense neat. Many persons who practise concentration exercises experience this heat occasionally. A number of Christian saints, of whom the best known are St. Philip Neri and St. Catherine of Siena, have experienced it continuously. In the East techniques have been developed whereby the accession of heat resulting from intense concentration can be regulated, controlled and put to do useful work, such as keeping the contemplative warm in freezing weather. In Europe, where the phenomenon is not well understood, many would-be contemplatives have experienced this heat, and have imagined it to be some special divine favour, or even the experience of union, and being insufficiently mortified and humble, have fallen into idolatry and a God-eclipsing spiritual pride.
1.27 - On holy solitude of body and soul., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
10. The depth of the dogmas is profound, and the mind of the solitary does not caper among them without risk.1
11. It is not safe to swim in ones clothes, nor should a slave of passion touch theology.
--
33. Some diminish the passions, others sing psalms and spend most of their time in prayer, while some apply themselves to contemplation, and live their life in profound contemplation. Let the question be investigated after the manner of the ladder. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it in the Lord.3
34. There are idle souls living in monasteries, and by indulging in what nourishes their idleness they come to complete ruin. But there are also souls who through living with others strip themselves of their idleness. And the same thing often occurs not only with the careless, but with the zealous too.
1.28 - Describes the nature of the Prayer of Recollection and sets down some of the means by which we can make it a habit., #The Way of Perfection, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
This may not be evident at first, if the recollection is not very profound-for at this stage it is
sometimes more so and sometimes less. At first it may cause a good deal of trouble, for the body
1.2 - Katha Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
of the external sacrifice to which these profound phrases are inapplicable.
14. "Hearken to me and understand, O Nachiketas; I declare
13.01 - A Centurys Salutation to Sri Aurobindo The Greatness of the Great, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo from his very birth was such an impersonal personalityand, in the very highest sense. He had never the consciousness of a particular individual person: all reference to a personal frame of his was deleted from the texture of his nature and character. There was some reference to the family frame in a very moderate way, almost casually: the stress was much more on the next higher frame, the national. In its time the national frame was very strong and played a great part; and yet even there it was not an end in itself, the frame of humanity always loomed large behind. In fact it was that that gave a greater and truer value and significance to the national frame. The national is but a ladder to humanity, it is a unit in the human collectivity. It serves as a channel for international and global welfare, but there is yet a still larger frame, the frame of the spirit, the transcendent consciousness. Indeed it was this that lay at the bottom of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness as the bedrock of his being which gave the whole tone and temper of his life, its meaning and purpose. Even when not overt and patent this noumenal personality was always there insistent from behind; it gave a peculiar rhythm and stress, newness and freshness and a profound element of purposefulness to the whole life, even to the activities of the earlier and narrower frames. For it was like viewing everything through the eyes of infinity and eternity, the eye wide extended in heaven as the Vedic Rishi says, the third eye.
In other words, the yogi, the Divine, the Impersonal man in Sri Aurobindo was the real person always there from the very birth. Thus we see him starting life exactly with the thing where every one ends. In his inner being he had not to pass through the gradations that lead an ordinary person gradually towards the widening ranges of consciousness and existence. In all the stations of his life, in every sphere and status Sri Aurobindo was doing his duties, that is, his workkartavyam karmaselflessly, which means with no sense of self, or perhaps we should say, with supreme Selfhoodness; for such is the character, the very nature of the born yogi, the Godman. The duties done for and within a frame of life tend always to overflow, as it were, the boundaries and do not always strictly follow the norm of the limited frame. For example, even while in the family life, in the midst of relatives and close friends he was never moved by mere attachment or worldly ties, he was impelled to do what he had to in the circumstances, unattached, free, under another command. Again, when he chose the larger field of national life, here too, he was not limited to that frame, his patriotism was not chauvinism or a return to the parochialism of the past; his patriotism was broad-based upon the sense of human solidarity and even the broad-based humanity was not broad enough for the consciousness in him; for humanity does not mean mere humanitarianism, charity, benevolence, or service to mankind. True humanity can be or is to be reached by pushing it still farther into the Divinity where men are not merely brothers or even portions of the Divine but one with Him, the self-same being and personality.
1.30 - Adonis in Syria, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light,
revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its
1.33 - The Golden Mean, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Let us go back for a moment to the passage above quoted. The text goes on to give the reason for the facts. "Because of me in Thee which thou knewest not. for why? Because thou wast the knower, and me." (AL II, 12-13) The unexpected use or disuse of capitals, the queer syntax, the unintelligibility of the whole passage: these certainly indicate some profound Qabalistic import in these texts.
So we had better mark that Strictly Private, and forget it.
1.3.5.05 - The Path, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the supramental Power is allowed by man's discerning assent and vigilant surrender to act according to its own profound and subtle insight and flexible potency, it will bring about slowly or swiftly a divine transformation of our present semiperfect nature.
This descent, this working is not without its possibility of calamitous fall and danger. If the human mind or the vital desire seizes hold on the descending force and tries to use it according to its own limited and erring ideas or flawed and egoistic impulses,
1.39 - The Ritual of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
he should conceal the natural emotion under an air of profound
dejection. For was he not severing the body of the corn-god with his
1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
much pomp and profound reverence, he was not suffered to live beyond
a certain length of time which was prescribed by the sacred books,
1.53 - The Propitation of Wild Animals By Hunters, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
a profound conviction that it must be the guilty one, or his
accomplice."
1913 10 07p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, the whole atmosphere of the house is charged with a religious solemnity; one immediately goes down into the depths; the meditations here are more in-gathered and serious; dispersion vanishes to give place to concentration; and I feel this concentration literally descending from my head and entering into my heart; and the heart seems to attain a depth more profound than the head. It is as though for three months I had been loving with my head and that now I were beginning to love with my heart; and this brings me an incomparable solemnity and sweetness of feeling.
A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me.
1913 12 13p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Give me Thy light, O Lord, grant that I do not fall into any error. Grant that the infinite reverence, the utter devotion, that intense and profound love I bring to Thee may be radiant, convincing, contagious, and be awakened in every heart.
O Lord, Eternal Master, Thou art my Light and my Peace; guide my steps, open my eyes, illumine my heart, and lead me on the paths that go straight to Thee.
1914 04 08p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Lord, my thought is calm and my heart ingathered; I turn towards Thee with a profound devotion and a boundless trust: I know that Thy love is all-powerful and that Thy justice will reign over the earth; I know that the hour is near when the last veil will be rent and all iniquity disappear to give place to an era of peace and harmonious effort.
O Lord, with thought rapt within and the heart at peace, I approach Thee and all my being is filled with Thy divine Presence; grant that I may see Thee alone in all things and that all may be resplendent with Thy divine Light. Oh, may all hatred be appeased, all rancour effaced, all fears dispelled, all suspicions destroyed, all malevolence overcome, and in this city, in this country, upon this earth, may all hearts feel vibrating within them that sublime love, source of all transfiguration.
1914 05 23p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Lord, Thou of whom I would be constantly conscious and whom I would realise in the smallest cells of my being, Thou whom I would know as myself and see manifested in all things, Thou who art the sole reality, the sole cause and aim of existence, grant that my love for Thee may grow ever greater so that I may be all love, Thy love itself, and that, being Thy love, I may unite integrally with Thee. May this love grow more and more intense, complete, luminous, powerful; may this love become an irresistible urge towards Thee, the invincible means of manifesting Thee. May everything in this being become pure, profound, disinterested, divine lovefrom the unfathomable depths to the outermost substance. May the God with form who manifests in this aggregate be entirely moulded from Thy complete and sublime love, the love which is at once the source and the realisation of all knowledge; may thought be clarified, organised, enlightened, transformed by Thy love; may all the life-forces, solely impregnated by Thy love and moulded from it, draw from it irresistible purity and constant energy, power and rectitude. May this weakened intermediary being, take advantage of its weakness to reconstitute itself with elements entirely moulded from Thy love, and may this body, now a burning brazier, radiate Thy divine, impersonal, sublime and calm love from every pore. May the brain be reconstituted by Thy love. Lastly, may Thy love overflow, flood, penetrate, transfigure, regenerate, animate all things, with the power, the splendour, the sweetness and force which are its very own. In Thy love is peace, in Thy love is joy, in Thy love is Thy servitors sovereign lever of work.
Thy love is vaster than the universe and more lasting than all the ages; it is infinite, eternal, it is Thyself. And it is Thyself I want to be and that I am, for such is Thy law, such is Thy will.
1914 06 20p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Thou source of all love and all light, Thou whom we cannot know in Thyself but can manifest ever more completely and perfectly, Thou whom we cannot conceive but can approach in profound silence, to complete Thy incommensurable boons Thou must come to our help until we have gained Thy victory.
Let that true love be born which soothes all suffering; establish that immutable peace wherein resides true power; give us the sovereign knowledge which dispels all darkness.
1914 07 04p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With the calm and strong certitude that Thou wilt one day accomplish the expected miracle and manifest in its fullness Thy sublime splendour, we turn to Thee in a profound rapture, and silently implore Thee.
Immensity, Infinitude, Wonder. Thou alone art and Thou shinest resplendent in all things. The hour of Thy fulfilment is near. All Nature is ingathered in a solemn concentration.
1914 08 18p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let me turn to Thee in a profound and silent contemplation; let me place this integral being and its multiple activities at Thy feet as an offering; let me stop all the play of these forces, unify all these consciousnesses, so that one alone may persist, the one which is able to hear Thy comm and and understand it; let me plunge again into Thee as in a sovereignly beneficent sea, that which purifies from all ignorance. I feel as if I have gone down very deep into an unfathomable abyss of doubt and darkness, as if I am exiled from Thy eternal splendour; but I know that in this descent is the possibility of a higher ascent which will enable me to span a vaster horizon and draw a little nearer to Thy infinite heavens. Thy light is there, steady and guiding, shining without intermission in the depths of the abyss as in the luminous splendours; and a serene confidence, a calm indifference, a tranquil certitude dwell permanently in my consciousness. I am like a boat which has long enjoyed the delights of the port and, despite the dark storm-laden clouds which hide the sun, unfurls its sails to launch forth into the great unknown, towards shores unheard of, towards new lands.
I am Thine, Lord, without any restriction or preference; may Thy will be done in all its rigorous plenitude; all my being adheres to it with a joyous acceptance and a calm serenity.
1914 09 01p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Mother Divine, with what fervour, what ardent love I came to Thee in Thy deepest consciousness, in Thy high status of sublime love and perfect felicity, and I nestled so close into Thy arms and loved Thee with so intense a love that I became altogether Thyself. Then in the silence of our mute ecstasy a voice from yet profounder depths arose and the voice said, Turn towards those who have need of thy love. All the grades of consciousness appeared, all the successive worlds. Some were splendid and luminous, well ordered and clear; there knowledge was resplendent, expression was harmonious and vast, will was potent and invincible. Then the worlds darkened in a multiplicity more and more chaotic, the Energy became violent and the material world obscure and sorrowful. And when in our infinite love we perceived in its entirety the hideous suffering of the world of misery and ignorance, when we saw our children locked in a sombre struggle, flung upon each other by energies that had deviated from their true aim, we willed ardently that the light of Divine Love should be made manifest, a transfiguring force at the centre of these distracted elements. Then, that the will might be yet more powerful and effective, we turned towards Thee, O unthinkable Supreme, and we implored Thy aid. And from the unsounded depths of the Unknown a reply came sublime and formidable and we knew that the earth was saved.
***
1915 01 02p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every idea, however powerful and profound it may be, repeated too often, expressed too constantly, becomes stale, insipid, worthless. The highest concepts thus lose their freshness after a time and the intelligence which delighted in transcendental speculations suddenly feels an imperious need to abandon all reasonings and all its philosophy and contemplate life with the marvelling gaze of a child, so as no longer to remember anything of its past knowledge, were it even a sovereignly divine one.
It is true to say that the divisions of time are purely arbitrary, that the date assigned to the renewal of the year varies according to the latitude, the climate, the customs, and that it is purely conventional. This is the mental attitude which smiles at the childishness of men and wants to let itself be guided by profounder truths. And then suddenly the mind itself feels its powerlessness to translate these truths precisely, and, renouncing all wisdom of this kind, it lets the song of the aspiring heart arise, the heart for which every circumstance is an opportunity for a deeper, vaster and more intense aspiration. The year of the West renews itself: why not profit by it to will with renewed ardour that this symbol should become a reality and the deplorable things of the past give place to things which must exist in all glory?
Always we believe that we can define Thee, can shut Thee up in our mental formulas; but however vast, complex, synthetic they may be, Thou wilt remain always the Inexpressible even for him who knows and lives Thee. For one can live Thee though one is unable to express Thee, can be Thy infinity and realise it though unable to define or explain Thee; always Thou wilt remain the eternal mystery, worthy of all our wonder;not only in Thy unthinkable and even unknowable Transcendence but in Thy universal manifestation, in all that we integrally are. And always forms of thought are succeeded by new forms, ever purer, higher and more comprehensive, but never will one of them be considered sufficient to give so much as an idea of what Thou art. And each new fact will be a new problem, more marvellous and mysterious than all that preceded it. Yet, faced with its own ignorance and incapacity, the mental being remains luminous, smiling and calm, even as though it possessed the supreme knowledge that of its being Thou, innumerably, invariably, infinitely, very simply Thou.
--- Overview of adj profound
The adj profound has 6 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (12) profound ::: (showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth; "the differences are profound"; "a profound insight"; "a profound book"; "a profound mind"; "profound contempt"; "profound regret")
2. (8) profound ::: (of the greatest intensity; complete; "a profound silence"; "a state of profound shock")
3. fundamental, profound ::: (far-reaching and thoroughgoing in effect especially on the nature of something; "the fundamental revolution in human values that has occurred"; "the book underwent fundamental changes"; "committed the fundamental error of confusing spending with extravagance"; "profound social changes")
4. profound ::: (coming from deep within one; "a profound sigh")
5. heavy, profound, sound, wakeless ::: ((of sleep) deep and complete; "a heavy sleep"; "fell into a profound sleep"; "a sound sleeper"; "deep wakeless sleep")
6. profound, unfathomed, unplumbed, unsounded ::: (situated at or extending to great depth; too deep to have been sounded or plumbed; "the profound depths of the sea"; "the dark unfathomed caves of ocean"-Thomas Gray; "unplumbed depths of the sea"; "remote and unsounded caverns")
--- Similarity of adj profound
6 senses of profound
Sense 1
profound (vs. superficial)
=> deep
=> thoughtful
Also See-> intense#1; scholarly#1
Sense 2
profound
=> intense (vs. mild)
Sense 3
fundamental, profound
=> significant (vs. insignificant), important
Sense 4
profound
=> deep (vs. shallow)
Sense 5
heavy, profound, sound, wakeless
=> deep (vs. shallow)
Sense 6
profound, unfathomed, unplumbed, unsounded
=> deep (vs. shallow)
--- Antonyms of adj profound
6 senses of profound
Sense 1
profound (vs. superficial)
superficial (vs. profound)
=> apparent(prenominal), ostensible, seeming(prenominal)
=> dilettante, dilettantish, dilettanteish, sciolistic
=> facile
=> glib
=> looking, sounding
=> shallow
=> skin-deep
Sense 2
profound
INDIRECT (VIA intense) -> mild
Sense 3
fundamental, profound
INDIRECT (VIA significant) -> insignificant, unimportant
Sense 4
profound
INDIRECT (VIA deep) -> shallow
Sense 5
heavy, profound, sound, wakeless
INDIRECT (VIA deep) -> shallow
Sense 6
profound, unfathomed, unplumbed, unsounded
INDIRECT (VIA deep) -> shallow
--- Pertainyms of adj profound
6 senses of profound
Sense 1
profound (vs. superficial)
Sense 2
profound
Sense 3
fundamental, profound
Sense 4
profound
Sense 5
heavy, profound, sound, wakeless
Sense 6
profound, unfathomed, unplumbed, unsounded
--- Derived Forms of adj profound
6 senses of profound
Sense 1
profound (vs. superficial)
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#1
=> profoundness
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#3
=> astuteness, profundity, profoundness, depth, deepness
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#5
=> profundity, profoundness
RELATED TO->(noun) profundity#1
=> reconditeness, abstruseness, abstrusity, profoundness, profundity
RELATED TO->(noun) profundity#3
=> astuteness, profundity, profoundness, depth, deepness
RELATED TO->(noun) profundity#2
=> profundity, profoundness
Sense 2
profound
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#1
=> profoundness
Sense 3
fundamental, profound
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#2
=> reconditeness, abstruseness, abstrusity, profoundness, profundity
Sense 4
profound
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#1
=> profoundness
Sense 5
heavy, profound, sound, wakeless
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#1
=> profoundness
Sense 6
profound, unfathomed, unplumbed, unsounded
RELATED TO->(noun) profoundness#4
=> deepness, profundity, profoundness
RELATED TO->(noun) profundity#4
=> deepness, profundity, profoundness
--- Grep of noun profound
profoundness
Wikipedia - Contemplation -- Profound thinking about something
Wikipedia - Epidemic -- A profoundly debilitating, often deadly infectious disease, which proves highly contagious, yet limited to a specific area and period
Wikipedia - Expert -- Person with broad and profound competence in a particular field
Wikipedia - Metamorphosis -- Profound change in body structure during the postembryonic development of an organism
Wikipedia - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum -- Rapid (in geological terms) global warming, profound changes in ecosystems, and major perturbations in the carbon cycle which started about 55.0 million years ago
Wikipedia - Profound Decisions
Wikipedia - Profound Lore Records -- Canadian independent record label
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17853572-lost-and-profound
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20522149-amusing-to-profound--my-conversations-with-animals-i-and-ii
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20871349-profoundly-disconnected
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213405-the-seven-profound-insane-books
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34441190.Love_Profound__Cowboys_and_Angels___2_
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35335055.The_Principle_of_Oneness_A_Practical_Guide_to_Experiencing_the_Profound_Unity_of_Everything
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3573351-profound-simplicity
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40614483-profound-good
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/581665.Profoundly_Erotic
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/990804.Maps_Of_The_Profound
Integral World - "Beyond My Ken?": Personal Ponderings on the Philosopher Profound, Jordan Gruber
Profound Connection
selforum - sri aurobindo and mothers profound and
selforum - we keep open mind and let profound
selforum - sri aurobindo gave profound definition
selforum - irony disrupts profound intellectual
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2012/05/profound-ignorance-of-and-disregard-for.html
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheFourProfoundWeaves
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MistakenForProfound
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeeminglyProfoundFool
Dimension W (2016 - 2016) - In the near future, humans have discovered a fourth dimension, Dimension W, and a supposedly infinite source of energy within. In order to harness this profound new energy, mankind develops advanced "coils," devices that link to and use the power of Dimension W. However, by year 2071, the New Tesla...
American Masters (1983 - Current) - American Masters is a PBS television show which produces biographies on artists, actors and writers of the United States who have left a profound impact on the nation's popular culture. It is produced by WNET in New York City. The show debuted on PBS in 1986.
All Quiet On The Western Front(1930) - A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I.
Lassie Come Home(1943) - This Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor feature film is a story about the profound bond between Yorkshire schoolboy Joe Carraclough (Roddy McDowall) and his rough collie, Lassie (Pal).
All Quiet on the Western Front (1979) ::: 7.1/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 30min | Drama, War | TV Movie 14 November 1979 -- A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I. Director: Delbert Mann Writers: Paul Monash (screenplay), Erich Maria Remarque (novel) Stars:
Carla's Song (1996) ::: 6.8/10 -- TV-MA | 2h 7min | Drama, Romance, War | 15 May 1997 (USA) -- 1987, love in time of war. A bus driver George Lennox meets Carla, a Nicaraguan exile living a precarious, profoundly sad life in Glasgow. Her back is scarred, her boyfriend missing, her ... S Director: Ken Loach Writer:
Clara (2018) ::: 6.7/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 45min | Sci-Fi | 3 May 2019 (USA) -- An obsessive astronomer and a curious artist form an unlikely bond which leads them to a profound, scientific discovery. Director: Akash Sherman Writers: Akash Sherman, Akash Sherman (story) | 1 more credit
Despicable Me (2010) ::: 7.6/10 -- PG | 1h 35min | Animation, Comedy, Crime | 9 July 2010 (USA) -- When a criminal mastermind uses a trio of orphan girls as pawns for a grand scheme, he finds their love is profoundly changing him for the better. Directors: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud Writers:
Goodbye Bafana (2007) ::: 7.1/10 -- R | 1h 58min | Biography, Drama, History | 11 April 2007 (France) -- Goodbye Bafana is the true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner's name was Nelson Mandela. Director: Bille August Writers: Bille August, Bob Graham (book) | 3 more credits Stars:
Hip-Hop Evolution ::: TV-MA | 1h 30min | Documentary, Music | TV Series (2016 ) -- MC and journalist Shad Kabango meets with Hip-Hop's biggest stars to retrace how Hip-Hop became the world's most popular music, but realizes that Hip-Hop's true legacy is something much more profound. Stars:
Kissed (1996) ::: 6.4/10 -- R | 1h 18min | Drama, Romance | 11 April 1997 (USA) -- Over the years, a child's romantic ideals about death blossom into necrophilia, the study of embalming and the most profound relationship of her life. Director: Lynne Stopkewich Writers: Angus Fraser (screenplay), Lynne Stopkewich (screenplay) | 1 more credit
Penguin Bloom (2020) ::: 6.8/10 -- TV-14 | 1h 35min | Drama | 27 January 2021 (USA) -- A family takes in an injured Magpie that makes a profound difference in their lives. Director: Glendyn Ivin Writers: Shaun Grant, Harry Cripps | 3 more credits
Pleasantville (1998) ::: 7.5/10 -- PG-13 | 2h 4min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy | 23 October 1998 (USA) -- Two 1990s teenage siblings find themselves in a 1950s sitcom, where their influence begins to profoundly change that complacent world. Director: Gary Ross Writer: Gary Ross
The Go-Getter (2007) ::: 6.6/10 -- R | 1h 33min | Comedy, Drama | 22 January 2007 (USA) -- When his mother dies, a teenager takes a road-trip in a stolen car to find his long-lost brother. Along the way he discovers a profound connection with the car-owner and with himself as well. Director: Martin Hynes Writer:
The Pass (2016) ::: 6.5/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 28min | Drama, Romance | 8 May 2018 (USA) -- A romantic interaction between two young footballers profoundly affects one of them throughout the rest of his life and career. Director: Ben A. Williams Writers: John Donnelly, John Donnelly (screenplay by)
The Sunset Limited (2011) ::: 7.4/10 -- TV-MA | 1h 31min | Drama | TV Movie 12 February 2011 -- Through a chance encounter, two men of opposing ideologies deliberate spiritual, philosophical, and profound matters in a New York City apartment. Director: Tommy Lee Jones Writers:
Toy Story (1995) ::: 8.3/10 -- G | 1h 21min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy | 22 November 1995 (USA) -- A cowboy doll is profoundly threatened and jealous when a new spaceman figure supplants him as top toy in a boy's room. Director: John Lasseter Writers: John Lasseter (original story by), Pete Docter (original story by) | 6
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Devout_Bracers_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Devout_Breastplate_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Dire_Mace_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Dire_Sledge_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Dire_Wand_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Glorified_Bracers_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Glorified_Tunic_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_Bangle_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_Cincture_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_Earring_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_Ring_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_Stone_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Reverent_Coat_of_the_Profound
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Reverent_Wristguard_of_the_Profound
https://phantasystar.fandom.com/wiki/The_Profound_Darkness
Aho Girl -- -- Diomedéa -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy Romance School Shounen -- Aho Girl Aho Girl -- Yoshiko Hanabatake is an idiot beyond all belief. Somehow managing to consistently score zeroes on all of her tests and consumed by an absurd obsession with bananas, her senseless acts have caused even her own mother to lose all hope. Only one person is up to the task of keeping her insanity in check: childhood friend Akuru "A-kun" Akutsu. -- -- Though he bemoans the ridiculous behavior he has to endure, the studious but terrifying A-kun is always ready to put an end to any stupidity Yoshiko gets up to, with no qualms about using physical force. Unfortunately, no matter how many times he attempts to knock some sense into her, the girl bounces right back to her usual shenanigans, even dragging in some other eccentrics along for the ride. Try as he might to rein in her nonsense, every moment is unpredictable with Yoshiko and her profound idiocy on the loose. -- -- 355,295 6.87
Crayon Angel -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Crayon Angel Crayon Angel -- In Crayon Angel, Tanaami recalls his childhood memories of wartime Japan during the Second World War. The animation mixes wartime footage, family photographs and pop imagery, much of which is seen through fusuma-like grids that cut apart the image and distance it from the viewer. The soundtrack includes a haunting heartbeat, sounds of sirens and Robert Plant’s moans. The title refers to a campaign ran during the war by a confectionary company that asked children to submit crayon drawings of their brand icon, an angel, which had a profound emotional impact on Tanaami as a child. -- -- (Source: Collaborative Cataloging Japan) -- Movie - ??? ??, 1975 -- 918 3.73
Dimension W -- -- Orange, Studio 3Hz -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Seinen -- Dimension W Dimension W -- In the near future, humans have discovered a fourth dimension, Dimension W, and a supposedly infinite source of energy within. In order to harness this profound new energy, mankind develops advanced "coils," devices that link to and use the power of Dimension W. However, by year 2071, the New Tesla Energy corporation has monopolized the energy industry with coils, soon leading to the illegal distribution of unofficial coils that begin flooding the markets. -- -- Kyouma Mabuchi is an ex-soldier who is wary of all coil-based technology to the extent that he still drives a gas-powered car. Kyouma is a "Collector," individuals with the sole duty of hunting down illegal coils in exchange for money. What started out as just any other mission is turned on its head when he bumps in Mira Yurizaki, an android with a connection to the "father" of coils. When a series of strange events begin to take place, these two unlikely allies band together to uncover the mysteries of Dimension W. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 258,136 7.21
Gangsta. -- -- Manglobe -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Drama Seinen -- Gangsta. Gangsta. -- Nicholas Brown and Worick Arcangelo, known in the city of Ergastalum as the "Handymen," are mercenaries for hire who take on jobs no one else can handle. Contracted by powerful mob syndicates and police alike, the Handymen have to be ready and willing for anything. After completing the order of killing a local pimp, the Handymen add Alex Benedetto—a prostitute also designated for elimination—to their ranks to protect her from forces that want her gone from the decrepit hellhole of a city she has come to call home. However, this criminal’s paradise is undergoing a profound period of change that threatens to corrode the delicate balance of power. -- -- Ergastalum was once a safe haven for "Twilights," super-human beings born as the result of a special drug but are now being hunted down by a fierce underground organization. This new threat is rising up to challenge everything the city stands for, and the Handymen will not be able to avoid this coming war. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 448,327 7.40
Great Rabbit -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Psychological -- Great Rabbit Great Rabbit -- Once we called the noble, profound and mysterious existence The Great. We have moved with the time, our thought and consciousness has changed. And yet what makes us still keep calling it The Great? -- -- (Source: kankaku.jp) -- Movie - ??? ??, 2012 -- 828 4.45
Hisone to Maso-tan -- -- Bones -- 12 eps -- Original -- Comedy Drama Fantasy Military -- Hisone to Maso-tan Hisone to Maso-tan -- Straightforward and innocent Hisone Amakasu is a Self-Defense Force rookie stationed at the Air Self-Defense Force's Gifu Base. She was struggling with the fact that she sometimes hurts people unintentionally by her innocent words and decided to join the Air Self-Defense Force, hoping to maintain a certain distance from people. This decision led her to a fateful encounter which profoundly changed her life. It was the "OTF" dragon hidden in the base and it chose Hisone as his pilot. When it soared into the sky with Hisone, her fate as a dragon pilot was decided. It is said that dragons have a key to the future of the world... -- -- (Source: ANN) -- 66,634 7.36
Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Action Mystery Supernatural Thriller -- Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- Following the events of Satsujin Kousatsu (Zen), Shiki Ryougi has been in a coma for two years due to a traffic accident. When she finally awakens, she has no memories of her past and is plagued by a profound loneliness. Even stranger, she notices dark lines encompassing the things around her, and if she touches them she can disassemble the object—something which completely terrifies her. Her friend, Mikiya Kokutou, enlists the help of Touko Aozaki, a mage who can help Shiki understand what her eyes—the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception"—are truly capable of and how to use them properly. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - May 24, 2008 -- 175,302 7.89
Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Action Mystery Supernatural Thriller -- Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- Following the events of Satsujin Kousatsu (Zen), Shiki Ryougi has been in a coma for two years due to a traffic accident. When she finally awakens, she has no memories of her past and is plagued by a profound loneliness. Even stranger, she notices dark lines encompassing the things around her, and if she touches them she can disassemble the object—something which completely terrifies her. Her friend, Mikiya Kokutou, enlists the help of Touko Aozaki, a mage who can help Shiki understand what her eyes—the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception"—are truly capable of and how to use them properly. -- -- Movie - May 24, 2008 -- 175,302 7.89
Kiznaiver -- -- Trigger -- 12 eps -- Original -- Sci-Fi Drama Romance -- Kiznaiver Kiznaiver -- Katsuhira Agata is a quiet and reserved teenage boy whose sense of pain has all but vanished. His friend, Chidori Takashiro, can only faintly remember the days before Katsuhira had undergone this profound change. Now, his muffled and complacent demeanor make Katsuhira a constant target for bullies, who exploit him for egregious sums of money. But their fists only just manage to make him blink, as even emotions are far from his grasp. -- -- However, one day Katsuhira, Chidori, and four other teenagers are abducted and forced to join the Kizuna System as official "Kiznaivers." Those taking part are connected through pain: if one member is injured, the others will feel an equal amount of agony. These individuals must become the lab rats and scapegoats of an incomplete system designed with world peace in mind. With their fates literally intertwined, the Kiznaivers must expose their true selves to each other, or risk failing much more than just the Kizuna System. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Crunchyroll -- 565,047 7.42
Kono Oto Tomare! -- -- Platinum Vision -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Drama Music Romance School Shounen -- Kono Oto Tomare! Kono Oto Tomare! -- Gen Kudou, a koto maker, believes that his delinquent grandson Chika would never understand the profoundness of the traditional musical instrument. In an attempt to make up for his naivety and understand the words of his late grandfather, Chika tries to join the Tokise High School Koto Club. -- -- Even though the club is in dire need of members, new club president Takezou Kurata is unwilling to easily accept Chika's application due to his bad reputation. Nonetheless, after seeing Chika's seriousness and enthusiasm, Takezou allows the problem child to join, along with koto prodigy Satowa Houzuki and three of Chika's energetic friends. Kono Oto Tomare! follows the merry band of musicians as they aspire to play at the national competition. -- -- 157,320 7.87
Kono Oto Tomare! -- -- Platinum Vision -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Drama Music Romance School Shounen -- Kono Oto Tomare! Kono Oto Tomare! -- Gen Kudou, a koto maker, believes that his delinquent grandson Chika would never understand the profoundness of the traditional musical instrument. In an attempt to make up for his naivety and understand the words of his late grandfather, Chika tries to join the Tokise High School Koto Club. -- -- Even though the club is in dire need of members, new club president Takezou Kurata is unwilling to easily accept Chika's application due to his bad reputation. Nonetheless, after seeing Chika's seriousness and enthusiasm, Takezou allows the problem child to join, along with koto prodigy Satowa Houzuki and three of Chika's energetic friends. Kono Oto Tomare! follows the merry band of musicians as they aspire to play at the national competition. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 157,320 7.87
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing -- -- Sunrise -- 49 eps -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Space Drama Mecha -- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Mobile Suit Gundam Wing -- The United Earth Sphere Alliance is a powerful military organization that has ruled over Earth and space colonies with an iron fist for several decades. When the colonies proclaimed their opposition to this, their leader was assassinated. Now, in the year After Colony 195, bitter colonial rebels have launched "Operation Meteor," sending five powerful mobile suits to Earth for vengeance. Built out of virtually indestructible material called Gundanium Alloy, these "Gundams" begin an assault against the Alliance and its sub organization OZ. -- -- One Gundam, whose pilot has taken the name of the slain colony leader Heero Yuy, is forced to make a crash landing into the ocean after an atmospheric battle against OZ's ace pilot Zechs Marquise. Upon coming ashore, he is found by Relena Peacecraft, daughter of a peace-seeking politician, who witnesses Heero's descent to Earth. Although neither of them realize it yet, this encounter will have a profound impact on both their lives, as well as those on Earth and in space colonies. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- 135,013 7.72
Momokuri -- -- Satelight -- 26 eps -- Web manga -- Comedy Romance Slice of Life -- Momokuri Momokuri -- After taking one hundred secret photos and observing him from afar for months, second-year high schooler Yuki Kurihara has finally mustered up the courage to ask out her first-year crush Shinya "Momo" Momotsuki. Although taken by surprise, the bashful Momo accepts; however, he does not know the profoundly abnormal truth. As her strait-laced friend, Norika Mizuyama, has observed, Yuki has developed some unnerving—but nonetheless sincere—habits: taking pictures of Momo in secret, doing extensive research into his personal life, collecting his used straws, and even going "Momo watching." -- -- Though Momo remains blissfully unaware of his new girlfriend's peculiar habits, he does notice some oddities in their daily conversations. Still unsure and nervous about his first relationship, Momo finds himself regularly getting into awkward interactions due to his inexperience, but nevertheless resolves to make his new girlfriend happy. -- -- Momokuri follows Yuki and Momo as they shyly explore their newfound love, and also deal with the problems that arise from it. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- ONA - Dec 24, 2015 -- 74,971 7.09
Momokuri -- -- Satelight -- 26 eps -- Web manga -- Comedy Romance Slice of Life -- Momokuri Momokuri -- After taking one hundred secret photos and observing him from afar for months, second-year high schooler Yuki Kurihara has finally mustered up the courage to ask out her first-year crush Shinya "Momo" Momotsuki. Although taken by surprise, the bashful Momo accepts; however, he does not know the profoundly abnormal truth. As her strait-laced friend, Norika Mizuyama, has observed, Yuki has developed some unnerving—but nonetheless sincere—habits: taking pictures of Momo in secret, doing extensive research into his personal life, collecting his used straws, and even going "Momo watching." -- -- Though Momo remains blissfully unaware of his new girlfriend's peculiar habits, he does notice some oddities in their daily conversations. Still unsure and nervous about his first relationship, Momo finds himself regularly getting into awkward interactions due to his inexperience, but nevertheless resolves to make his new girlfriend happy. -- -- Momokuri follows Yuki and Momo as they shyly explore their newfound love, and also deal with the problems that arise from it. -- -- ONA - Dec 24, 2015 -- 74,971 7.09
Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou -- -- AIC Spirits, BeSTACK -- 14 eps -- Game -- Action Horror Supernatural Drama Martial Arts Fantasy School -- Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou -- Something evil is stirring in the shadows of Tokyo... -- -- During the spring of his senior year in high school, quiet Tatsuma Hiyuu transfers to Magami Academy in Shinjuku. The mysterious boy's "outsider" status and his profound skills in martial arts quickly earn him the friendship of class delinquent Kyouichi Houraiji. Through an uncanny connection and a happenstance challenge, he also meets Yuuya Daigo of the wrestling club, the captain of the girls' archery club, Komaki Sakurai, and Aoi Misato, the Student Council President. -- -- During their encounter, there is a sudden, harsh disruption of the Ryumyaku (literally Dragon Pulse, otherwise known as Dragon Vein or Dragon Stream), the flow of arcane energy. The surge awakens within the five teenagers a latent power, giving them each a supernatural ability. Enlightened to their newly acquired gifts by Hisui, the young heir of the Kisaragi Clan who maintains his family's antiques shop - as well as their duty to protect Tokyo from Oni (demons) - the Magami students decide to use their power to protect the city from the onslaught of dark forces. -- -- Battling the demons alongside Hisui Kisaragi, the five unlikely friends discover that they may have to face a greater threat to Tokyo other than destroying a few malevolent, random monsters. The Ryumyaku had been disrupted by force, from someone invoking the Dark Arts - and that person has a wicked desire to unleash a long-dead evil. -- -- Can the teenagers overcome their own fears and flaws to fight against the Dark Arts? And soon they will also have to face their own destinies as they discover their Stars of Fate. -- -- This anime is based on a manga, which was based on the Nintendo role-playing video game originally released in 1998. -- 69,395 7.14
Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou -- -- AIC Spirits, BeSTACK -- 14 eps -- Game -- Action Horror Supernatural Drama Martial Arts Fantasy School -- Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpucho: Tou -- Something evil is stirring in the shadows of Tokyo... -- -- During the spring of his senior year in high school, quiet Tatsuma Hiyuu transfers to Magami Academy in Shinjuku. The mysterious boy's "outsider" status and his profound skills in martial arts quickly earn him the friendship of class delinquent Kyouichi Houraiji. Through an uncanny connection and a happenstance challenge, he also meets Yuuya Daigo of the wrestling club, the captain of the girls' archery club, Komaki Sakurai, and Aoi Misato, the Student Council President. -- -- During their encounter, there is a sudden, harsh disruption of the Ryumyaku (literally Dragon Pulse, otherwise known as Dragon Vein or Dragon Stream), the flow of arcane energy. The surge awakens within the five teenagers a latent power, giving them each a supernatural ability. Enlightened to their newly acquired gifts by Hisui, the young heir of the Kisaragi Clan who maintains his family's antiques shop - as well as their duty to protect Tokyo from Oni (demons) - the Magami students decide to use their power to protect the city from the onslaught of dark forces. -- -- Battling the demons alongside Hisui Kisaragi, the five unlikely friends discover that they may have to face a greater threat to Tokyo other than destroying a few malevolent, random monsters. The Ryumyaku had been disrupted by force, from someone invoking the Dark Arts - and that person has a wicked desire to unleash a long-dead evil. -- -- Can the teenagers overcome their own fears and flaws to fight against the Dark Arts? And soon they will also have to face their own destinies as they discover their Stars of Fate. -- -- This anime is based on a manga, which was based on the Nintendo role-playing video game originally released in 1998. -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films, Funimation -- 69,395 7.14
A Profound Hatred of Man
Lake Profound
Lost & Profound
Profound Decisions
Profound Desires of the Gods
Profound Lore Records
Shallow and Profound
The Profound Inner Principles
convenience portal:
recent: Section Maps - index table - favoritesSavitri --Savitri extended toc Savitri Section Map --1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
authors -- Crowley - Peterson - Borges - Wilber - Teresa -Aurobindo -Ramakrishna - Maharshi -Mother
places -- Garden - Inf. Art Gallery - Inf. Building - Inf. Library - Labyrinth - Library - School -Temple - Tower - Tower of MEM
powers -- Aspiration - Beauty - Concentration - Effort - Faith - Force - Grace - inspiration -Presence - Purity - Sincerity - surrender
difficulties -- cowardice - depres. - distract. - distress - dryness - evil - fear - forget - habits - impulse - incapacity - irritation - lost - mistakes - obscur. - problem - resist - sadness - self-deception - shame - sin - suffering
practices -- Lucid Dreaming - meditation - project - programming - Prayer - read Savitri - studysubjects -- CS - Cybernetics - Game Dev - Integral Theory - Integral Yoga - Kabbalah - Language - Philosophy - Poetry - Zen
6.01 books -- KC - ABA - Null -Savitri - SA O TAOC -SICP - The Gospel of SRK - TIC - The Library of Babel -TLD -TSOY - TTYODAS - TSZ - WOTM II
8 unsorted / add here -- Always - Everyday - Verbs