KEYS (10k)


NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   3 Charlotte Bront
   3 Anonymous
   3 Aeschylus
   2 Nir Eyal
   2 Karl Ove Knausg rd
   2 Herbert Hoover
   2 Christopher Morley

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Way to pronoun," Saunders says. ~ Mary Robison,

2:It's unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun. ~ Robin Black,

3:His use of the plural pronoun made me very suspicious. ~ Matthew Quick,

4:The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented. ~ John Fowles,

5:he—I do wish somebody would think up a new collective pronoun— ~ Charlotte MacLeod,

6:I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three. ~ Richard Ford,

7:I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship. ~ Fiona Maazel,

8:The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. ~ Henry James,

9:if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate? ~ John Green,

10:The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three. ~ Ulysses S Grant,

11:I remember that I wanted to kill It,' Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice. ~ Stephen King,

12:I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). ~ Chelsea Manning,

13:112 In another message he wrote, “I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three. ~ Ron Chernow,

14:me, pro. The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive. Each is all three. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

15:Looking back, one can almost imagine them stalking through the wild with specimen bottles and outsize nets, in determined pursuit of the Ojibwa adverb or the Cherokee pronoun. ~ Margalit Fox,

16:meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells in side of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate? ~ John Green,

17:Standard English usage is to use the male pronoun when talking about someone whose gender is not known,” Gwendolyn said. “When you avoid pronouns altogether, you really mean ‘she. ~ William Rabkin,

18:The stars dehisce. By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition, and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all. A pronoun disembowels his antecedent. Stop me if you've heard this one before. ~ Ben Lerner,

19:I say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face. ~ John Fowles,

20:A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: "they" does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays. ~ Karen Elizabeth Gordon,

21:A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: 'they' does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays. ~ Karen Elizabeth Gordon,

22:[After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard. ~ Marie de Rabutin Chantal marquise de Sevigne,

23:It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I. ~ Sloane Crosley,

24:Your boss is a woman, isn’t she?” He examined my face closely. “What makes you say that?” “You were careful to avoid a singular pronoun right there—you said ‘that person’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ even though it made your sentence awkward. ~ Melissa F Olson,

25:Another indication of the slug hieroglyph serving merely as a reference to its shell (i.e., Great Pyramid) is the fact that in the ancient Egyptian texts it can be found commonly [used as the possessive pronoun, namely as, his, hers, or its]. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,

26:Excuse me. I think you must’ve accidentally used the wrong pronoun.” The growl that rumbled up out of his chest was loud enough to rattle the water glass on the bedside table. “Fine, you can stand in the corner and cheer while I kill him. ~ Nalini Singh,

27:Part of the problem is words. The fact that there are separate words for HE and SHE, HIM and HER. I've never thought about it before, how divisive this is. Like maybe if there was just one pronoun for all of us, we wouldn't get so caught on that difference. ~ David Levithan,

28:Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (“Each man in their degree”). ~ John McWhorter,

29:The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus. ~ Robert Thurman,

30:The new image of God will not be same as the one that was toppled by science & philosophy. ‘He’ won’t return in the same way; pronoun ‘he’ might be dropped altogether, since we are no longer obliged to believe that God is a man, nor ‘masculine’ as a cosmic principle. ~ David Tacey,

31:As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position. ~ Sheila Jeffreys,

32:IT dehumanizes; THEY has too many confusing possible referents; no invented genderless pronoun has yet proved satisfactory. Our understanding of gender is still growing and changing. I hope and trust our wonderfully adaptable language will provide the usages we need. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

33:I love you.’ ‘Bravely said – though I had to screw it out of you like a cork out of a bottle. Why should that phrase be so difficult? I – personal pronoun, subjective case; L – O – V – E, love, verb, active, meaning – Well, on Mr Squeers’s principle, go to bed and work it out.’   ~ Dorothy L Sayers,

34:I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away...I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun 'we' itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces. ~ Jerry Spinelli,

35:The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?). ~ Herman Melville,

36:When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me. ~ Lawrence Wright,

37:Back home the election was over; the country had a new president: ‘Mr Roosevelt’ he was called at first, then ‘Roosevelt,’ then ‘that Roosevelt,’ and finally just ‘he’ or ‘him’ by mouths that twisted bitterly on the pronoun, for the westering boats were crowded with expatriates—“A traitor to his class,” they said. ~ Shelby Foote,

38:All this said, fussy grammarians need friends too, and so you may seek out and encourage them. Drop them a little note, telling them that they are your very favorite fussy grammarian, out with whom you like to hang. And if anybody winced there at my use of a plural pronoun for an indefinite singular, then may I suggest counseling? ~ Douglas Wilson,

39:My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

40:We teach them not to notice the different sense of the possessive pronoun .. . Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like. ~ C S Lewis,

41:I can't even say her name. She doesn't even have a name. She is she. She is her. She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not "no one". I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one's him. ~ Catherynne M Valente,

42:They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide's apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains." Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us. "My Sookie hid a corpse?" "I don't think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun." "Where did you learn that term, Northman?" "I took 'English as a Second Language' at a community college in the seventies. ~ Charlaine Harris,

43:It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work. ~ Terry Pratchett,

44:In the 1950s I rarely went to a community meeting without Jimmy and would usually just listen or ask questions. Now, having worked in the city and socialized with Jimmy’s friends and Correspondence readers for years, I felt I had something to contribute. I was beginning to feel comfortable with the we pronoun, so comfortable that in FBI records of that period I am described as Afro-Chinese. ~ Grace Lee Boggs,

45:They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide's apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains." Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us. "My Sookie hid a corpse?" "I don't think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun." "Where did you learn that term, Northman?" "I took 'English as a Second Language' at a community college in the seventies. ~ Charlaine Harris,

46:For example, the difference between Pierre believes he is intelligent and He believes Pierre is intelligent is due to what are called relations of “command”: co-reference is impossible if the pronoun is located “higher” in the phrase structure than its nonpronominal antecedent. Now in the second case Pierre is found in a subordinated position, thus “lower” than he, so that they cannot be co-referential in the relevant sense. ~ Noam Chomsky,

47:In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. ~ Samuel R Delany,

48:The Lord's Prayer On A Coin Upon this quarter-eagle's leveled face, The Lord's Prayer, legibly inscribed, I trace. 'Our Father which'-the pronoun there is funny, And shows the scribe to have addressed the money 'Which art in Heaven'-an error this, no doubt: The preposition should be stricken out. Needless to quote; I only have designed To praise the frankness of the pious mind Which thought it natural and right to join, With rare significancy, prayer and coin. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

49:Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation ~ Iain M Banks,

50:A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. ~ Alasdair Gray,

51:Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in ~ Iain M Banks,

52:In Buddhist ideology, the conventional self is that which is constructed in a way by the use of the pronoun, and when you realize there is no absolute ego there, no disconnected one, self, or ego, then that actually strengthens your conventional ego. It does so in the sense that then you realize it's a construction, and you can strengthen it in order to help others, or do whatever you're trying to do, it's not like you no longer know who you are. Then you can organize your behavior by using your ego, as it's now the pronoun. ~ Robert Thurman,

53:I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own. ~ Sufjan Stevens,

54:Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say. ~ Jos Saramago,

55:Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. ~ Jos Saramago,

56:I still use the pronoun she for my publicity materials, and for mainstream media stuff, for two reasons: the first is that I do a lot of work in public schools, and I want those young women and girls to see every kind of she there can be. I want them to see my biceps and my shorn hair and shirt and tie and for some of them to see me as a possibilityI want them to see me living outside of the boxes, because they might be asphyxiating in their own box and need to see there is air out here for them to breathe, that all they have to do is lift the lid a little. ~ Rae Spoon,

57:When each precedes the noun or pronoun to which it refers, the verb should be singular: ‘Each of us was …’. When it follows the noun or pronoun, the verb should be plural: ‘We each were …’. Each not only influences the number of the verb, it also influences the number of later nouns and pronouns. In simpler terms, if each precedes the verb, subsequent nouns and pronouns should be plural (e.g., ‘They each are subject to sentences of five years’), but if each follows the verb, the subsequent nouns and pronouns should be singular (‘They are each subject to a sentence of five years’). ~ Bill Bryson,

58:Western critics of the Qur’ān frequently point to the allegedly “incoherent” references to God – often in one and the same phrase – as “He,” “God,” “We,” or “I,” with the corresponding changes of the pronoun from “His” to “Ours” or “My,” or from “Him” to “Us” or “Me.” They seem to be unaware of the fact that these changes are not accidental, and not even what one might describe as “poetic licence,” but are obviously deliberate: a linguistic device meant to stress the idea that God is not a “person” and cannot, therefore, be really circumscribed by the pronouns applicable to finite beings. ~ Anonymous,

59:Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

60:Think about any foreign language you’ve learned (or attempted to). What’s the first thing you learn? Usually how to say “Hello, my name is [Kory]. How are you?” You don’t learn the word for “name,” and the learn the conjugation of “be” (and good thing, too, because it is stubbornly irregular in most languages). You don't learn the interrogative “how” and the various declensions of the second-person pronoun. All that comes later when you have a little something to hand that information on. You learn two complete, if rudimentary, sentences, and that gives you the confidence to keep moving forward—until you reach the subjunctive, anyway. ~ Kory Stamper,

61:Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. ~ Carl Sagan,

62:Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you. ~ Roland Barthes,

63:Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. ~ Terry Pratchett,

64:Since the Turing test is fundamentally about deception, it has been criticized for testing human gullibility more than true artificial intelligence. In contrast, a rival test called the Winograd Schema Challenge goes straight for the jugular, homing in on that commonsense understanding that current deep-learning systems tend to lack. We humans routinely use real-world knowledge when parsing a sentence, to figure out what a pronoun refers to. For example, a typical Winograd challenge asks what “they” refers to here: 1. “The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence.” 2. “The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence.” There’s an annual AI competition to answer such questions, and AIs still perform miserably. ~ Max Tegmark,

65:You do this pronoun shift. You may not even be aware of it. If it’s a ‘bold idea,’ it’s ‘ours.’ If it’s a ‘nutty idea,’ it’s ‘yours.’” “Grammar Nazi. Would it be enough to say I want to be president to . . .” “I’m listening.” Randy said, “I was about to say, ‘To give something back,’ but it sounds so pathetic. What it really boils down to is, I’d like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put the dignity back in government. Fix things. What else . . .? Can’t have Arabs blowing up our buildings, certainly, but I now know that we don’t need to be sending armies everywhere. Among other things, it’s expensive. . ..” “I’m sorry, were you talking? I went to sleep after ‘balance the books. ~ Christopher Buckley,

66:I arrived in Dallas two days before the party and planned on leaving the day after. I hated the city as much as I thought I would. All anyone could talk about were the Cowboys and their chances in the playoffs. Charlene was happy. Joe was not, or so it seemed to me, in spite of the fact that he had finally gotten exactly what he thought he wanted from a wife: she gave him an adorable boy, she did everything in their home including laundry, and most important, she did not embarrass him. Whenever I was alone with Joe during the two days I was there, Charlene would send her son into the room with us. The first time I carried him, Charlene made sure to mention how surprised she was that I had motherly instincts. She probably used the pronoun we more in one day than I have in my whole life. I did not blame her. Most plain women stake their claims clumsily. ~ Rabih Alameddine,

67:Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain. ~ Jos Saramago,

68:Little textual note for you here (bear with me). Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation. Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over. ~ Iain M Banks,

69:The insistence in Darcy's voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with 'In vain have I struggled. It will not do,' becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters. Now, please listen carefully to that 'you.' Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying 'you' when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love. ~ Azar Nafisi,

70:GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him— Tell him the page I did n’t write; Tell him I only said the syntax, And left the verb and the pronoun out. Tell him just how the fingers hurried, 5 Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow; And then you wished you had eyes in your pages, So you could see what moved them so. “Tell him it was n’t a practised writer, You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; 10 You could hear the bodice tug, behind you, As if it held but the might of a child; You almost pitied it, you, it worked so. Tell him—No, you may quibble there, For it would split his heart to know it, 15 And then you and I were silenter. “Tell him night finished before we finished, And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’ And you got sleepy and begged to be ended— What could it hinder so, to say? 20 Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious, But if he ask where you are hid Until to-morrow,—happy letter! Gesture, coquette, and shake your head! ~ Emily Dickinson,

71:Going To Him! Happy Letter! Tell Him-Going to him! Happy letter! Tell him-Tell him the page I didn't write; Tell him I only said the syntax, And left the verb and the pronoun out. Tell him just how the fingers hurried Then how they waded, slow, slow, slowAnd then you wished you had eyes in your pages, So you could see what moved them so. 'Tell him it wasn't a practised writer, You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; You could hear the bodice tug, behind you, As if it held but the might of a child; You almost pitied it, you, it worked so. Tell him--No, you may quibble there, For it would split his heart to know it, And then you and I were silenter. 'Tell him night finished before we finished And the old clock kept neighing 'day!' And you got sleepy and begged to be ended-What could it hinder so, to say? Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious But if he ask where you are hid Until to-morrow,--happy letter! Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!' ~ Emily Dickinson,

72:And here’s an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule:   Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”   This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

73:We go to great lengths to deny our animal heritage, and not just in scientific and philosophical discourse. You can glimpse the denial in the shaving of men’s faces; in clothing and other adornments; in the great lengths gone to in the preparation of meat to disguise the fact that an animal is being killed, flayed, and eaten. The common primate practice of pseudosexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is “Fuck you,” with the pronoun “I” implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet, with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions. ~ Carl Sagan,

74:How old are you, asked the girl with the dark glasses, Getting on for fifty, Like my mother, And her, Her, what, Is she still beautiful, She was more beautiful once, that's what happens to all of us, we were all more beautiful once, You were never more beautiful, said the wife of the first blind man. Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain. ~ Jos Saramago,

75:Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility ? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance and self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing ? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy ? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species. ~ Carl Sagan,

76:Joan Of Arc She and the fire fight adjectives. Their concreteness deflects reification by language. She simply is a pronoun. It may signify say, my wife (coming from me 'she' often does) or, yes a medieval French woman, her being so roughly abridged by the pronoun, as brutally fed to the fire. Regarding the fire dazzling, heaving, devouring won't do. It only suggests a familiar occurrence: ouch when flame touches skin. Indeed flame doesn't suffice (rhymes with lame) and a pyre, much more poetic, based on the transcripts based on wordy statements. So much reliance on the makeshift engine of abstraction, language. She did, I think, end in fire, but hero saint, witch, schizophrenic won't do. Will numbers rectify the flaws of alphabetical signs: 1412 to 1431? Historians can't be certain 56 about either: no records other than her reserved guess on the first day of trial apropos birth, and her famed death also contested by theorists of bad conspiracies. So I can't force the ephemeral stuff of her matter into a mould (a poem) with description, facts or even an attempted evocation. She floats and evades perhaps - if I may hazard a simile like her ashes, diffused by an English guard over the Seine. ~ Ali Alizadeh,

77:Some Consequences of the Made Thing The End. Above these words the sky closes. It closes by turning white. Not The white of all clouds or being within a cloud. White of worldless light. The End. Feel a silence there that reminds you of a scent. Crushed grass the hooves galloped through Or is it the binder’s glue? Some silence never not real finally can be Heard. Silence before the first words. Precedent chaos. Or marrow work. Or just the sound of the throat opening to speak. Like those scholars of pure water Who rode through mountains and meadows To drink from each fresh spring a glass And then with brush and ink wrote poems On the differences of sameness, You too feel yourself taste the silent page Of the end and the silent page of beginning. They taste so much of whiteness never more White than white that’s been lost. You have some sense of the book Altering, page sewn secretly next to page, Last page stitched to first. O, earth— It rolls around the solar scroll Turning nothing into years and years into Nothing. At The End you’re a witness to this work That wears the witness away. And who are you Anyway. Pronoun of the 2nd person. Lover, Stranger, God. Student, Child, Shade. Something similar gathers in you. Another way of saying I in a poem— Of saying I in a poem that realizes at the end That I am just a distance from myself. And so are you. That same distance. ~ Dan Beachy Quick,

78:What’s the verdict?” Kimmie asks, peering back at me. I stare down at the jumble of words. “I can’t quite tell yet.” “Give us a clue,” Wes says. “I love puzzles.” “That’s because you are one,” Kimmie jokes. I read them the list of words: ARE, ALONE, YOU, NEVER, EYE, WATCHING, ALWAYS, AM. Not five seconds later, Wes has the whole thing figured out. “YOU ARE NEVER ALONE. EYE AM ALWAYS WATCHING!” he says, making his voice all deep and throaty. “Wait, seriously?” I ask, completely bewildered by the idea that he’d be able to unravel the message so quickly. I look at the individual words, making sure they’re all included, and that he didn’t add any extra. “What can I say? I’m good at puzzles.” “Are you good at making them, too?” Kimmie asks. “Because it’s a little scary how you were able to figure that out so fast.” “Do you think it matters that the “eye” in the puzzle is the noun and not the pronoun?” I ask them. “Since when is it a requirement for psychos to be good in English?” Wes asks. “Only you would know.” Kimmie glares at him. “Plus, it’s a puzzle,” he says, ignoring her comment. “You have to expect a few quirks.” “I don’t know,” I say, still staring at the words. “Maybe there’s some other message here. Maybe we need to try unscrambling it another way.” “Such as ‘EYE AM NEVER ALONE. YOU ARE ALWAYS WATCHING,’” he suggests. “Or perhaps the ever-favorite. ‘YOU ARE NEVER WATCHING. EYE AM ALWAYS ALONE.’” Kimmie scoots farther away from him in her seat. “Okay, you really are starting to scare me. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz,

79:When Your Life Looks Back, When your life looks back-- As it will, at itself, at you--what will it say? Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool. Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from. Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many. Your life will carry you as it did always, With ten fingers and both palms, With horizontal ribs and upright spine, With its filling and emptying heart, That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return. You gave it. What else could do? Immersed in air or in water. Immersed in hunger or anger. Curious even when bored. Longing even when running away. "What will happen next?"-- the question hinged in your knees, your ankles, in the in-breaths even of weeping. Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in. Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face. No back of the world existed, No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for. This, your life had said, its only pronoun. Here, your life had said, its only house. Let, your life had said, its only order. And did you have a choice in this? You did-- Sleeping and waking, the horses around you, the mountains around you, The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts. Those of your own kind around you-- A few times, you stood on your head. A few times, you chose not to be frightened. A few times, you held another beyond any measure. A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure. Mortal, your life will say, As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy. Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving. ~ Jane Hirshfield,

80:Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere. There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.' This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. (From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") ~ Wendell Berry,

81:In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not. ~ Terry Eagleton,

82:Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available. ~ H P Lovecraft,

83:recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east. ~ Walter Isaacson,

84:Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared. ~ Jonathan Sacks,

85:Take the oft-repeated injunction to get “its” and “it’s” straight. Everyone claims it’s remarkably easy to remember that “its” is possessive and “it’s” is a contraction. But logic tells us that in English, ’s attached to a noun signals possession: the dog’s dish, the cat’s toy, the lexicographer’s cry. So if English is logical, and there are simple rules to follow, why doesn’t “it’s” signal possession? We know that ’s also signals a contraction, but we don’t have any problems with differentiating between “the dog’s dish” and “the dog’s sleeping”—why should we suddenly have problems with “it’s dish” and “it’s sleeping”? This type of grammar often completely ignores hundreds (and, in some cases, well over a thousand) years of established use in English. For “it’s,” the rule is certainly easy to memorize, but it also ignores the history of “its” and “it’s.” At one point in time, “it” was its own possessive pronoun: the 1611 King James Bible reads, “That which groweth of it owne accord…thou shalt not reape”; Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, “It had it head bit off by it young.” They weren’t the first: the possessive “it” goes back to the fifteenth century. But around the time that Shakespeare was shuffling off this mortal coil, the possessive “it” began appearing as “it’s.” We’re not sure why the change happened, but some commentators guess that it was because “it” didn’t appear to be its own possessive pronoun, like “his” and “her,” but rather a bare pronoun in need of that possessive marker given to nouns: ’s. Sometimes this possessive appeared without punctuation as “its.” But the possessive “it’s” grew in popularity through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until it was the dominant form of the word. It even survived into the nineteenth century: you’ll find it in the letters of Thomas Jefferson and Jane Austen and the speechwriting notes of Abraham Lincoln. This would be relatively simple were it not for the fact that “it’s” was also occasionally used as a contraction for “it is” or “it has” (“and it’s come to pass,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII, 1.2.63). Some grammarians noticed and complained—not that the possessive “it’s” and the contractive “it’s” were confusing, but that the contractive “it’s” was a misuse and mistake for the contraction “ ’tis,” which was the more standard contraction of “it is.” This was a war that the pedants lost: “ ’tis” waned while “it’s” waxed. ~ Kory Stamper,

86:Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else. Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter. Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed. Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter. The following must go into my finished Directives: when you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex. Our entire pattern of sociosexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? Yet you cannot think of a Gethenian as “it.” They are not neuters. They are potentials, or integrals. Lacking the Karhidish “human pronoun” used for persons in somer, I must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine. But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman. The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Back ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

87:Godwin on Fenelon and his Valet * Following is an excerpt from William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Book II, Chapter II: “Of Justice”: In a loose and general view I and my neighbour are both of us men; and of consequence entitled to equal attention. But, in reality, it is probable that one of us is a being of more worth and importance than the other. A man is of more worth than a beast; because, being possessed of higher faculties, he is capable of a more refined and genuine happiness. In the same manner the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his valet, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. But there is another ground of preference, beside the private consideration of one of them being further removed from the state of a mere animal. We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind. Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fenelon, suppose at the moment he conceived the project of his immortal Telemachus, should have been promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the perusal of that work of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend further than this; for every individual, thus cured, has become a better member of society, and has contributed in his turn to the happiness, information, and improvement of others. Suppose I had been myself the valet; I ought to have chosen to die, rather than Fenelon should have died. The life of Fenelon was really preferable to that of the valet. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the valet to have preferred the archbishop to himself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice. Suppose the valet had been my brother, my father, or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the valet; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expense of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth? My brother or my father may be a fool or a profligate, malicious, lying or dishonest. If they be, of what consequence is it that they are mine? ~ William Godwin,

88:There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away. Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality. They were in conversation without speaking. They didn't need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken. One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done? One said, It will have to be done. There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure. It said this with satisfaction. One said, Besides... there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact. One said, He has worked inefficiently? One said, No. We can't get him there. One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don't want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people? One said, Got a crush on them, that sort of thing? One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No. One said, Sorry. Just my little joke. One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Such speculation is dangerous. One said, No argument there. One said, Then we are agreed? One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. Did you not just use the singular pronoun "my?" Not developing a personality, are you? One said, guiltily, Who? Us? One said, Where there is personality, there is discord. One said, Yes. Yes. Very true. One said, All right. But watch it in future. One said, Then we are agreed? They looked up at the face of Azrael, outlined against the sky. In fact, it was the sky. Azrael nodded, slowly. One said, Very well. Where is this place? One said, It is the Discworld. It rides through space on the back of a giant turtle. One said, Oh, one of that sort. I hate them. One said, You're doing it again. You said "I." One said, No! No! I didn't! I never said "I!"... oh, bugger... It burst into flame and burned in the same way that a small cloud of vapor burns, quickly and with no residual mess. Almost immediately, another one appeared. It was identical in appearance to its vanished sibling. One said, Let that be a lesson. To become a personality is to end. And now... let us go. ~ Terry Pratchett,

89:But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence, which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead? — just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y — phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly. Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow. Egotism, monomania, the delusional traits of Blake or Smart or that guy who painted the electrically schizophrenic cats are all engaging qualities in the dead. ~ Nicholson Baker,

90:The Grammarians Funeral Eight Parts of Speech this Day wear Mourning Gowns Declin'd Verbs, Pronouns, Participles, Nouns. And not declined, Adverbs and Conjunctions, In Lillies Porch they stand to do their functions. With Preposition; but the most affection Was still observed in the Interjection. The Substantive seeming the limbed best, Would set an hand to bear him to his Rest. The Adjective with very grief did say, Hold me by strength, or I shall faint away. The Clouds of Tears did over-cast their faces, Yea all were in most lamentable Cases. The five Declensions did the Work decline, And Told the Pronoun Tu, The work is thine: But in this case those have no call to go That want the Vocative, and can't say O! The Pronouns said that if the Nouns were there, There was no need of them, they might them spare: But for the sake of Emphasis they would, In their Discretion do what ere they could. Great honour was confer'd on Conjugations, They were to follow next to the Relations. Amo did love him best, and Doceo might Alledge he was his Glory and Delight. But Lego said by me he got his skill, And therefore next the Herse I follow will. Audio said little, hearing them so hot, Yet knew by him much Learning he had got. O Verbs the Active were, Or Passive sure, Sum to be Neuter could not well endure. But this was common to them all to Moan Their load of grief they could not soon Depone. A doleful Day for Verbs, they look so moody, They drove Spectators to a Mournful Study. The Verbs irregular, 'twas thought by some, Would break no rule, if they were pleas'd to come. Gaudeo could not be found; fearing disgrace He had with-drawn, sent Maereo in his Place. Possum did to the utmost he was able, 17 And bore as Stout as if he'd been A Table. Volo was willing, Nolo some-what stout, But Malo rather chose, not to stand out. Possum and Volo wish'd all might afford Their help, but had not an Imperative Word. Edo from Service would by no means Swerve, Rather than fail, he thought the Cakes to Serve. Fio was taken in a fit, and said, By him a Mournful POEM should be made. Fero was willing for to bear a part, Altho' he did it with an aking heart. Feror excus'd, with grief he was so Torn, He could not bear, he needed to be born. Such Nouns and Verbs as we defective find, No Grammar Rule did their attendance bind. They were excepted, and exempted hence, But Supines, all did blame for negligence. Verbs Offspring, Participles hand-in-hand, Follow, and by the same direction stand: The rest Promiscuously did croud and cumber, Such Multitudes of each, they wanted Number. Next to the Corpse to make th' attendance even, Jove, Mercury, Apollo came from heaven. And Virgil, Cato, gods, men, Rivers, Winds, With Elegies, Tears, Sighs, came in their kinds. Ovid from Pontus hast's Apparrell'd thus, In Exile-weeds bringing De Tristibus: And Homer sure had been among the Rout, But that the Stories say his Eyes were out. Queens, Cities, Countries, Islands, Come All Trees, Birds, Fishes, and each Word in Um. What Syntax here can you expect to find? Where each one bears such discomposed mind. Figures of Diction and Construction, Do little: Yet stand sadly looking on. That such a Train may in their motion chord, Prosodia gives the measure Word for Word. 18 ~ Benjamin Tompson,

91:"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."    (David, Psalms 50.21) ['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head a pompion-plant, Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch, He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) And talks to his own self, howe'er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexesha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer than in winter-time. Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep In confidence he drudges at their task, And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.] Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! 'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon. 'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. 'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He. 'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize, But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks About their holeHe made all these and more, Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else? He could not, Himself, make a second self To be His mate; as well have made Himself: He would not make what He mislikes or slights, An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains: But did, in envy, listlessness or sport, Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while, Things He admires and mocks too,that is it. Because, so brave, so better though they be, It nothing skills if He begin to plague. Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss, Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme, And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. Put case, unable to be what I wish, I yet could make a live bird out of clay: Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban Able to fly?for, there, see, he hath wings, And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire, And there, a sting to do his foes offence, There, and I will that he begin to live, Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns Of grigs high up that make the merry din, Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not. In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, And he lay stupid-like,why, I should laugh; And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again, Well, as the chance were, this might take or else Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry, And give the mankin three sound legs for one, Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg And lessoned he was mine and merely clay. Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, Making and marring clay at will? So He. 'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. 'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea; 'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, And two worms he whose nippers end in red; As it likes me each time, I do: so He. Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main, Placable if His mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than His handiwork, be sure! Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than He who made them! What consoles but this? That they, unless through Him, do nought at all, And must submit: what other use in things? 'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue: Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt: Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth "I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!' Would not I smash it with my foot? So He. But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that, What knows,the something over Setebos That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought, Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance. There may be something quiet o'er His head, Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief, Since both derive from weakness in some way. I joy because the quails come; would not joy Could I bring quails here when I have a mind: This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. 'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch, But never spends much thought nor care that way. It may look up, work up,the worse for those It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos The many-handed as a cuttle-fish, Who, making Himself feared through what He does, Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar To what is quiet and hath happy life; Next looks down here, and out of very spite Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, These good things to match those as hips do grapes. 'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport. Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, And saith she is Miranda and my wife: 'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban; A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. 'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He. His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint Like an orc's armour? Ay,so spoil His sport! He is the One now: only He doth all. 'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him. Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why? 'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose, But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes. Also it pleaseth Setebos to work, Use all His hands, and exercise much craft, By no means for the love of what is worked. 'Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world When all goes right, in this safe summer-time, And he wants little, hungers, aches not much, Than trying what to do with wit and strength. 'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs, And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top, Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill. No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake; 'Shall some day knock it down again: so He. 'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof! One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope. He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why? So it is, all the same, as well I find. 'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck, Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue, And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite. 'Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies) Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade: Often they scatter sparkles: there is force! 'Dug up a newt He may have envied once And turned to stone, shut up Inside a stone. Please Him and hinder this?What Prosper does? Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He! There is the sport: discover how or die! All need not die, for of the things o' the isle Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees; Those at His mercy,why, they please Him most When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice! Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth. You must not know His ways, and play Him off, Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself: 'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears But steals the nut from underneath my thumb, And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence: 'Spareth an urchin that contrariwise, Curls up into a ball, pretending death For fright at my approach: the two ways please. But what would move my choler more than this, That either creature counted on its life To-morrow and next day and all days to come, Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, "Because he did so yesterday with me, And otherwise with such another brute, So must he do henceforth and always."Ay? Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means! 'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He. 'Conceiveth all things will continue thus, And we shall have to live in fear of Him So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change, If He have done His best, make no new world To please Him more, so leave off watching this, If He surprise not even the Quiet's self Some strange day,or, suppose, grow into it As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we, And there is He, and nowhere help at all. 'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. His dam held different, that after death He both plagued enemies and feasted friends: Idly! He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst,with which, an end. Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself, Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both. 'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball On head and tail as if to save their lives: Moves them the stick away they strive to clear. Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose This Caliban strives hard and ails no less, And always, above all else, envies Him; Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights, Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh, And never speaks his mind save housed as now: Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here, O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?" 'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off, Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste: While myself lit a fire, and made a song And sung it, "What I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?" Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. NOTES Form: unrhyming 1. The motto is from Psalms 1: 21. For the title character, see The Tempest, I, ii. The subtitle and the motto indicate much of Browning's intention in the poem. "Natural theology" is distinguished from (and here opposed to) "revealed theology"\; natural theology being that system of thought about God which man arrives at through the unaided use of his natural reason. To the Victorian secularists, all theology was "natural theology"--that is, man-made. Their favourite theory was that all religion was a projection by man of his own qualities. This is the theory which the text chosen as motto condemns, and which Caliban's musings illustrate. Throughout he looks at his own characteristics, and then ascribes them to his god, Setebos: "So he." What is conspicuous in the poem is that there is no glimpse of what to Browning is true theology: the theology of a God of Love. This comes to man (as to David in Saul) by revelation. The highest conception Caliban can achieve by natural reason is of the Quiet--an indifferent, absentee, Epicurean God. His Setebos is merely a God of arbitrary and jealous power. It is also noteworthy that Browning includes in Caliban's theology not merely most of the doctrines of primitive religions, but also some elements associated with branches of Christianity, particularly the narrower kind of Calvinist sect. He is by implication rejecting these elements as part of his own definition of true Christianity in terms of a God of Love. The passages in brackets at the beginning and end of the poem represent Caliban's silent thoughts. The main part of the poem is spoken aloud, and presents his attempt at a system. He is very much the "natural" man, but Browning gives him not only a quick and vivid imagination, but a mind that follows the general systematic pattern of thought used by writers on natural religion. He starts with the relation of his god to the universe, and the problem of cosmology, and then moves systematically to consider his god's attributes, and to try to evolve rules for worship and service. Caliban throughout speaks of himself in the third person, usually without the pronoun. Browning indicates the omission of the pronoun by an apostrophe. ~ Robert Browning, Caliban upon Setebos or, Natural Theology in the Island ,

  140 Integral Yoga
   55 Poetry
   37 Christianity
   27 Philosophy
   27 Fiction
   24 Occultism
   13 Psychology
   10 Yoga
   5 Hinduism
   5 Baha i Faith
   4 Science
   4 Mythology
   3 Theosophy
   1 Thelema
   1 Philsophy
   1 Mysticism
   1 Integral Theory
   1 Education
   1 Cybernetics
   1 Alchemy


   86 Sri Aurobindo
   49 The Mother
   29 Satprem
   25 H P Lovecraft
   22 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   16 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   11 William Wordsworth
   11 Robert Browning
   11 Carl Jung
   8 James George Frazer
   7 Plotinus
   7 Lucretius
   7 Friedrich Nietzsche
   6 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   6 Baha u llah
   6 Aleister Crowley
   6 A B Purani
   5 Walt Whitman
   5 Sri Ramakrishna
   5 Nirodbaran
   5 John Keats
   4 Vyasa
   4 Swami Vivekananda
   4 Jorge Luis Borges
   4 Aldous Huxley
   3 Plato
   3 George Van Vrekhem
   2 Saint John of Climacus
   2 Rudolf Steiner
   2 Percy Bysshe Shelley
   2 Ovid
   2 Joseph Campbell
   2 Jordan Peterson
   2 Henry David Thoreau
   2 Franz Bardon
   2 Anonymous
   2 Alice Bailey


   42 Record of Yoga
   25 Lovecraft - Poems
   16 City of God
   11 Wordsworth - Poems
   11 Browning - Poems
   8 The Golden Bough
   7 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
   7 Of The Nature Of Things
   7 Letters On Yoga IV
   6 The Secret Doctrine
   6 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   5 Whitman - Poems
   5 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
   5 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
   5 Letters On Yoga II
   5 Keats - Poems
   5 Agenda Vol 07
   4 Vishnu Purana
   4 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   4 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   4 The Perennial Philosophy
   4 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
   4 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   4 Agenda Vol 08
   4 Agenda Vol 01
   3 Words Of Long Ago
   3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   3 Questions And Answers 1956
   3 Questions And Answers 1954
   3 Preparing for the Miraculous
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
   3 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   3 Magick Without Tears
   3 Labyrinths
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   2 Walden
   2 Twilight of the Idols
   2 The Life Divine
   2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
   2 The Human Cycle
   2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
   2 The Future of Man
   2 The Book of Certitude
   2 The Bible
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   2 Some Answers From The Mother
   2 Shelley - Poems
   2 Questions And Answers 1955
   2 Prayers And Meditations
   2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
   2 Metamorphoses
   2 Maps of Meaning
   2 Liber ABA
   2 Letters On Poetry And Art
   2 Let Me Explain
   2 Isha Upanishad
   2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   2 Bhakti-Yoga
   2 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
   2 Anonymous - Poems
   2 Aion
   2 Agenda Vol 12
   2 Agenda Vol 11
   2 Agenda Vol 06
   2 Agenda Vol 04
   2 Agenda Vol 03
   2 Agenda Vol 02
   2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah

00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Man, however, is an epitome of creation. He embraces and incarnates the entire gamut of consciousness and comprises in him all beings from the highest Divinity to the lowest jinn or elf. And yet each human being in his true personality is a lineal descendant of one or other typal aspect or original Personality of the one supreme Reality; and his individual character is all the more pronounced and well-defined the more organised and developed is the being. The psychic being in man is thus a direct descent, an immediate emanation along a definite line of devolution of the supreme consciousness. We may now understand and explain easily why one chooses a particular Ishta, an ideal god, what is the drive that pushes one to become a worshipper of Siva or Vishnu or any other deity. It is not any rational understanding, a weighing of pros and cons and then a resultant conclusion that leads one to choose a path of religion or spirituality. It is the soul's natural call to the God, the type of being and consciousness of which it is a spark, from which it has descended, it is the secret affinity the spiritual blood-relation as it were that determines the choice and adherence. And it is this that we name Faith. And the exclusiveness and violence and bitterness which attend such adherence and which go "by the "name of partisanship, sectarianism, fanaticism etc., a;e a deformation in the ignorance on the physico-vital plane of the secret loyalty to one's source and origin. Of course, the pattern or law is not so simple and rigid, but it gives a token or typal pattern. For it must not be forgotten that the supreme source or the original is one and indivisible and in the highest integration consciousness is global and not exclusive. And the human being that attains such a status is not bound or wholly limited to one particular formation: its personality is based on the truth of impersonality. And yet the two can go together: an individual can be impersonal in consciousness and yet personal in becoming and true to type.    The number of gods depends on the level of consciousness on which we stand. On this material plane there are as many gods as there are bodies or individual forms (adhar). And on the supreme height there is only one God without a second. In between there are gradations of types and sub-types whose number and function vary according to the aspect of consciousness that reveals itself.

0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism    Dr. Sarkar arrived the following noon and pronounced that life had departed not more than half an hour before. At five o'clock the Masters body was brought downstairs, laid on a cot, dressed in ochre clothes, and decorated with sandal-paste and flowers. A procession was formed. The passers-by wept as the body was taken to the cremation ground at the Baranagore Ghat on the Ganges.    While the devotees were returning to the garden house, carrying the urn with the sacred ashes, a calm resignation came to their souls and they cried, "Victory unto the Guru!"

0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy     The name of THAT is not known; the pronoun      interprets, that is , misinterprets, It.   --     will observed upon pronouncing it.                    [29]

0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his Yoga. "The first was in relation to the Second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene."[2]    The second was with regard to Sir Stafford Cripps' proposal for the transfer of power to India.

0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   someone.) I regret having lost my temper while pronouncing these last sentences. I have noticed that even   when I am conscious, if I open my mouth I lose my selfcontrol. I get angrier and angrier from one sentence to   --   listening to words that are pronounced? A ready-made   sentence, "Write down what is there in the estimate",

0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    What was talked in the small group informally was not intended by Sri Aurobindo to be the independent expression of his views on the subjects, events or the persons discussed. Very often what he said was in answer to the spiritual need of the individual or of the collective atmosphere. It was like a spiritual remedy meant to produce certain spiritual results, not a philosophical or metaphysical pronouncement on questions, events or movements. The net result of some talks very often was to point out to the disciple the inherent incapacity of the human intellect and its secondary place in the search for the ultimate Reality.    But there were occasions when he did give his independent, personal views on some problems, on events or other subjects. Even then it was never an authoritarian pronouncement. Most often it appeared to be a logically worked out and almost inevitable conclusion expressed quite impersonally though with firm and sincere conviction. This impersonality was such a prominent trait of his personality! Even in such matters as dispatching a letter or a telegram it would not be a command from him to a disciple to carry out the task. Most often during his usual passage to the dining room he would stop on the way, drop in on the company of four or five disciples and, holding out the letter or the telegram, would say in the most amiable and yet the most impersonal way: "I suppose this has to be sent." And it would be for someone in the group instantly to volunteer and take it. The expression he very often used was "It was done" or "It happened", not "I did."    From 1918 to 1922, we gathered at No. 41, Rue Franois Martin, called the Guest House, upstairs, on a broad verandah into which four rooms opened and whose main piece of furniture was a small table 3' x 1' covered with a blue cotton cloth. That is where Sri Aurobindo used to sit in a hard wooden chair behind the table with a few chairs in front for the visitors or for the disciples.

01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.    It may be retorted that if Reason is condemned, it is condemned by itself and by no other authority. All argumentation against Reason is a function of Reason itself. The deficiencies of Reason we find out by the rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die, it is because it consents to commit suicide; there is no other power that kills it. But to this our answer is that Reason has this miraculous power of self-destruction; or, to put it philosophically, Reason is, at best, an organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ par excellence for that purpose. But criticism is one thing and creation another. And whether we know or act, it is fundamentally a process of creation; at least, without this element of creation there can be no knowledge, no act. In knowledge there is a luminous creativity, Revelation or Categorical Imperative which Reason does not and cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.

01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Both the poets were worshippers, idolaters, of beauty, especially of natural physical beauty, of beauty heaped on beauty, of beauty gathered, like honey from all places and stored and ranged and stalled with the utmost decorative skill. Yet the difference between the two is not less pronounced. A philosopher is reminded of Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality, in connection with certain aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is something moving, flowing, dancing, rippling; it is especially the beauty which music embodies and expresses. A Kalidasian beauty, on the contrary, is statuesque and plastic, it is to be appreciated in situ. This is, however, by the way.    Sri Aurobindo: "Ahana", Collected Poems & Plays, Vol. 2

0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   and pronounces the phrase, "Sri Aurobindo sharanam   mama", and the others, standing round the body, must

0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen    The first syllable of NAMO is pronounced with a short 'a,' as in nahmo. The final word is pronounced BHA-GAH-VA-TEH.    The tantric Swami.

0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen    In all religious and especially occult initiations, the ritual of the different ceremonies is prescribed in every detail; all the words pronounced, all the gestures made have their importance, and the least infraction of the rule, the least fault committed can have fatal consequences. It is the same in material lifeif one had the initiation into the true way of living, one could transform physical existence.    If we consider the body as the tabernacle of the Lord, then medical science, for example, becomes the initiatory ritual of the service of the temple, and doctors of all kinds are the officiating priests in the different rituals of worship. Thus, medicine is really a priesthood and should be treated as such.

0 1959-10-06 - Sri Aurobindos abode, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen    It is similar with this japa: an imperceptible little change, and one can pass from a more or less mechanical, more or less efficient and real japa, to the true japa full of power and light. I even wondered if this difference is what the tantrics call the power of the japa. For example, the other day I was down with a cold. Each time I opened my mouth, there was a spasm in the throat and I coughed and coughed. Then a fever came. So I looked, I saw where it was coming from, and I decided that it had to stop. I got up to do my japa as usual, and I started walking back and forth in my room. I had to apply a certain will. Of course, I could do my japa in trance, I could walk in trance while repeating the japa, because then you feel nothing, none of all the bodys drawbacks. But the work has to be done in the body! So I got up and started doing my japa. Then, with each word pronounced the Light, the full Power. A power that heals everything. I began the japa tired, ill, and I came out of it refreshed, rested, cured. So those who tell me they come out of it exhausted, contracted, emptied, it means that they are not doing it in the true way.    I understand why certain tantrics advise saying the japa in the heart center. When one applies a certain enthusiasm, when each word is said with a warmth of aspiration, then everything changes. I could feel this difference in myself, in my own japa.

0 1960-10-02b, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen    In this way we keep the word appel [call], which is strong. All I did was change the relative pronoun (at first you had translated it as qui, nos portes, attend notre appel2).    I dont know. Perhaps it is more incisive this way.

0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    I probably needed the experience. You remember that type of detachment I spoke of when I had that experiencewhen the BODY had that experience of January 24, 1961well, it has increased to such an extent that it now applies to anything and everything linked with action on earth. This detachment was probably necessary. It began with something like things dissolving (Mother makes a gesture of crumbling something between her fingers); certain kinds of links between my consciousness and the Work were dissolving (not links with me, because I dont have any, but with the body; the whole physical consciousness, all that attaches it to the things in its environment, to the Work and to the entourage I spoke to you about that in regard to physical immortality; well, thats what is happening now). Its like things dissolvingdissolving, dissolving, dissolving. And its more and more pronounced. During these last days, things have been becoming increasingly difficultdifficulties have been coming one after another, one after another. Formerly, I had the power to get a grip on them and hold them (Mother tightens her grip as though mastering circumstances); but now that this type of detachment has begun, things drift away everywhereeverywhere, everywhere.    So this episode with X is probably part of the same process. What has been affected is a certain confidence in the REALITY of the Power, the REALITY of spiritual action; there seems to be no communication between here (above) and there (below).

0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    In your case, it is very clear: each time he comes, everything seems to go askew. And the only reason for it is the conflict between the force he brings down (of course, when he comes I encourage it to come down!), and the inner resistances; and this creates the Contradiction, which becomes more and more pronounced.    It speeds up the work, but at the same time it makes it a bit taxing.

0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    To cherish in secret the sense of sin. No, I cant say Ive had that experience, in the sense that I have never had a very pronounced love of virtue.    Thats another thing I have noticed: even in my childhood I was already conscious of what Sri Aurobindo calls living divinely, that is, outside the sense of Good and Evil.

0 1962-11-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    The habit of not understanding something unless it can be mentally explained is disastrous, for instance. This feeling we have that we dont understand something unless we can explain it thats really disastrous. That half-hours experience was something absolute, you see, not for one second was there any concern to know what was going on (naturally!); it was absolute. And only when the time was up and I had to come out of it did I start wondering, What happened? What does it mean? It wasnt even that pronounced. Its simply an old habit, what we call understanding.    A bad habit.

0 1963-01-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    So I will go on. If there are corrections, they can only come through the same process, because at this point to correct anyhow would spoil it all. There is also the mixing (for the logical mind) of future and present tenses but that too is deliberate. It all seems to come in another way. And well, I cant say, I havent read any French for ages, I have no knowledge of modern literatureto me everything is in the rhythm of the sound. I dont know what rhythm they use now, nor have I read what Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Future Poetry. They tell me that Savitris verse follows a certain rule he explained on the number of stresses in each line (and for this you should pronounce in the pure English way, which somewhat puts me off), and perhaps some rule of this kind will emerge in French? We cant say. I dont know. Unless languages grow more fluid as the body and mind grow more plastic? Possible. Language too, maybe: instead of creating a new language, there may be transitional languages, as, for instance (not a particularly fortunate departure, but still), the way American is emerging from English. Maybe a new language will emerge in a similar way?    In my case it was from the age of twenty to thirty that I was concerned with French (before twenty I was more involved in vision: painting; and sound: music), but as regards language, literature, language sounds (written or spoken), it was approximately from twenty to thirty. The Prayers and Meditations were written spontaneously with that rhythm. If I stayed in an ordinary consciousness I would get the knack of that rhythm but now it doesnt work that way, it wont do!

0 1963-12-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    The thing that resists the most on the terrestrial level (perhaps even on the universal level) is that zone (which is more pronounced in the earths atmosphere), the emotive zone. I had the clear perception that it CLINGS to its emotions, it ENJOYS its emotions. This counteracts the effort towards perfection, towards perfect unity the pleasure of emotions.    There was an experience for a few seconds, with the clear vision and immediate action of the supreme Force over this [the emotive zone], but the experience wasnt sufficient so it could be noted down.

0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    We should use another word; what men call love is so many different things, with such different mixtures and such different vibrations that it cant be called love, it cant be given a single name. So its better simply to say, No, this isnt Love, thats all. And keep the word for the True Thing. The word amour [love] in French has a certain evocative power because, whenever I pronounce it, it makes contact; thats why Id rather keep it. As for all the rest: no, dont talk of love, it isnt love.    I said and wrote somewhere, Love is not sexual intercourse. Love is not attraction. Love is not and so on, and in the end I said, Love is an almighty vibration coming straight from the One.2 It was a first perception of That.

0 1965-05-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Thats why certain minds have postulated that the creation was the result of an error. But we find all the possible conceptions: the perfect creation, then a fault that introduced the error; the creation itself as a lower movement, which must end since it began; then the conception of the Vedas according to what Sri Aurobindo told us about it, which was a progressive and infinite unfolding or discoveryindefinite and infiniteof the All by Himself. Naturally, all these are human translations. For the moment, as long as we express ourselves humanly, its a human translation; but depending on the initial stand of the human translator (that is, a stand that accepts the primordial error, or the accident in the creation, or the conscious supreme Will since the beginning, in a progressive unfolding), the conclusions or the descents in the yogic attitude are different. There are the nihilists, the Nirvanists and the illusionists, there are all the religions (like Christianity) that accept the devils intervention in one form or another; and then pure Vedism, which is the Supremes eternal unfolding in a progressive objectification. And depending on your taste, you are here or there or here, and there are nuances. But according to what Sri Aurobindo felt to be the most total truth, according to that conception of a progressive universe, you are led to say that, every minute, what takes place is the best possible for the unfolding of the whole. The logic of it is absolute. And I think that all the contradictions can only stem from a more or less pronounced tendency for this or that position, that other position; all the minds that accept the intrusion of a fault or an error and the resulting conflict between forces pulling backward and forces pulling forward, can naturally dispute the possibility. But you are forced to say that for someone who is spiritually attuned to the supreme Will or the supreme Truth, what happens is necessarily, every instant, the best for his personal realizationthis is true in all cases. The unconditioned best can only be accepted by one who sees the universe as an unfolding, the Supreme growing more and more conscious of Himself.    (silence)

0 1965-07-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    The patient had been in convulsion, the whole right side of the body twitching horribly, speech impossible. There came an easing of it all, and I remember thinking, Why is that brain signaling that body to twitch sowhy? And I took hold of Montys right hand, seated there, on the edge of his bed. And the two right arms became like a big telephone switchboard hook-upyou know, the long cords. So, through the hook-up I called. I called to the Divine Mother, to You specifically, if I may say so, as is my wont. And this time, the You appeared, not above my head, as is usual, but above the patients head. And to that You I called three times, Mother, as you once taught me to do. That was all. Nothing more complicated than that. You were there, strategically positioned and I pronounced your Name three times. But there was a great current of Force that went through that telephone hook-up, so to speak, a great Power that came down the great long distance from the You through the little mans ailing brain and on down through his then quieting right arm and up through my long right arm to my think machine. And in that there was a deep peace and knowing. Miss Carter was seated on the other side of the bed, it so happened, at that moment, but she did not know that anything took place, even though I quietly closed my eyes for a bit. Odd, isnt it? It seems even odder as I write it. It was so normal as it took place. And it was so normal when, next morning, all trace of the tremor had vanished and all power of speech had returned to the delighted patient. And greater delight of all observers.    (11 July 1965)

0 1966-01-14, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    It was very pronounced, very pronounced. And there was in you an intensity (gesture of clenched fists), a need for things to change.    Ah, yes! Its pure hell. Its Falsehood in every detail.

0 1966-03-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    And the body always says yes, it does like this (gesture of surrender). No choice, no preference, no aspiration, even: a total, complete surrender. So then, things of that sort come to me; yesterday, all day long, it was: A dead person living on earth. With the perception (not a very pronounced perception yet, but clear enough) of a vast difference between the way of life [of this body] and that of other people, of all the others, the people who talk to me, the people with whom I live. It isnt clear-cut yet, or sharp or very precise, but its very clearvery clear, very perceptible. Its another way of life.    One would tend to say that its not a gain from the standpoint of consciousness, since things become blurred. I dont know, is that way of being a gain?

0 1966-03-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    But during the day, there are perpetual lessons, all the time, all the time, for everything, all the time. The lesson is least pronounced when I have to write something or see people; but there, too, the exact quality of peoples vibration (not their permanent vibration but the vibration in them at that minute), the quality of their consciousness is immediately made known to me through certain reactions in my body (gesture on different levels of the body). The nerves began only a few months ago their work of transfer of power. (What I call transfer of power is that instead of the nerves being moved by and obeying complex and organized forces of Nature, of the character, of the material consciousness in the body, they attune themselves to and directly obey the divine Will.) Its the transfer from one to the other thats difficult: there is the entire old habit, and then the new habit to be formed. It was a rather difficult moment. But now there remain enough old vibrations to be able to gauge exactly (and this has nothing to do with thought, it isnt expressed in words or thoughts or anything like all that: just vibrations), to know exactly the state people near me are in. From that point of view the lesson is going on, its very interesting. And whats wonderful is that more often than not the most receptive vibration, conforming the most to what it should be, is in children, but the very small ones, the tiny tots. I see lots of people, but now I understand why: I learn enormously that way, through that contact (with people whom I dont know, sometimes whom I see for the first time, or whom I havent seen for years). Its very interesting.    But when nobody is there or I am alone, or when I dont speak or I am not busy with other people, its the inner lesson: the whole change in the vibration and how the world is organized. This morning, it was really extraordinarily amusing to see the mass of things that lie behind this appearance, an appearance that seems complicated enough as it is, but its nothing! Its thin, flimsy, without complexity in comparison with the MASS of things behind, which (drilling gesture) which bore their way through to reach the surface. Its amusing. But certainly ninety-nine people in a hundred would be seized with panic if they knew, if they saw. I had always been told (I read it, Sri Aurobindo often said it to me, Thon too often said it to me, so did Madame Thon) that its the Grace that keeps people from knowing. Because if they knew, they would be terrified! All, but all the things that are constantly there, moving behindbehind the appearancesall the complexities that are the true causes of or the instruments for all those small events, which to us are absolutely unimportant, but because of which one day you feel everything is harmonious, and another day you feel it takes a labor to do anything at all. And thats how it is. And naturally, when you know, you have the key. But if you know before you have the key, its a little frightening. I think that when people take leave of their senses, its because they are put in contact with the vibrations before having the knowledge, the sufficient knowledge, the sufficient state of consciousness.

0 1966-09-24, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Oh, humans, yes, certainlycertainly, without any doubt, a very pronounced answer, strangely pronounced, from everywhere, just everywhere. A need for something, a dissatisfaction with what is, and the need for something higher. Its very, very pronounced, everywhere. I cant say the number is very large, I dont think it is, but its everywhere.    So there is progress?

0 1966-10-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Yes, its very striking on this one; its less pronounced on the others.    And its someone I know, but I cant put a name to him. I look like an old scientist there, no? Its strange (Mother looks at the photo again). Theres something strange: a sort of very keen knowledge [in the person in the photo] that stems from observation, but I cant find out the country and time its from.

0 1967-02-25, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    This distortion has been still more pronounced since the advent of the mind, which in its working, has taken the place of consciousness so much that it has substituted itself for consciousness as it were, and to the extent that the mind, in its ordinary working, cannot be distinguished from consciousness it doesnt know what consciousness is, and so (Mother makes a gesture expressing a shrinking or hardening).    Its becoming very, very precise, very clear, very visible in the developed human mind. For the functioning of the body, for example, the difference between the action and perception of the consciousness, and the action and perception of the mind. And in our world as its still organized, the mind is more (oh, it is a very interesting impression) much more concreteconcrete in the sense of what we are in the habit (the bad habit) of calling real and fixed. Its not translucent, not fluid; its not plastic, not fluid: its mental, concrete. And then, the mind needs acquired knowledge and all the contacts with the outside. Lets take a disorder in the bodys functioning (which may come for all kinds of reasons that are very interesting to observe, but anyhow, we cant speak of everything at the same time), the disorder is there and is expressed through a sense of discomfort; the way the consciousness behaves and acts and the way the mind behaves and acts are entirely, absolutely different (we cant say opposite, but absolutely different). Then there is the weakness (I am talking about the sensation of the body itself), the weakness arising from old habit. Its not a lack of faith, the body knows in an almost absolute way that there is only one salvation, one saviour: THE Consciousness. But there is a weakness that causes a sort of slackening, a letting go to habit, and thats where an intensity of faith is needed but an energy in the faithin order not to yield. This goes on in a very small sphere, you understand, its a question not even of minutesof seconds. And if there is a letting go, it means illness; while the other way (of the consciousness) means, little by little, little by little, the unreality of the disorder.

0 1967-08-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    I meet almost everyone there. I told you that you are there quite regularly, and we work. As for you, you dont remember. There are others who remember, but their memory is (Mother twists her finger slightly) just slightly off, that is, not identically what I saw. And when they tell me, my impression is, yes, its because of the transcription in their brain. The objective reality of the material world stems from the fact that if you see the same object ten times over, ten times it looks like itself, with differences that are logical, or that may be, for instance, differences of wear and tear but there too its like that! If you study carefully, even in the physical world no two people see things in exactly the same way. There, it may be more pronounced, but it seems to be a similar phenomenon.    The explanation becomes very simple and very easy when you enter the consciousness in which its the material reality that becomes an illusionits illusory, inexact: the inner reality is truer. Then, in that case, its simple. Maybe its only our mind that is astonished?

0 1967-09-16, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    You know, in olden days you were put through ordeals they were symbolic things, naturally, but you were aware that they were ordeals, so you were on your guard. But now I remember, in the very beginning, when I started working with Sri Aurobindo, he warned me (I had already noticed it long before) that the circumstances of life are at each minute organized in such a way that the one who is destined to do the work is confronted with his own difficulties, which he must conquer, and with the difficulties of the world he works in, which he must conquer too. If he has the necessary humility to see in himself what must be transformed so he can become capable of doing the Work, then all goes well. Naturally, if he is full of pride and vanity and believes the whole fault lies outside and there is none in him, then naturally things go wrong. And the difficulties become more pronounced. And for as long as I did the work, for (how many years?) the thirty years I worked with Sri Aurobindo and he was there, I was like this (gesture hidden behind Sri Aurobindo), so comfortable, you know I was in front, I seemed to be the one doing the work but for my part, I felt completely protected, behind him like this (same gesture); I was very tranquil, not trying to understand or know or anything I was simply attentive to what had to be done, what had to be done. It was rarely necessary to tell him; sometimes I was faced with a difficulty then I would tell him, but he didnt need to answer: it was immediately understoodthirty years like that.    And when he left, there was a whole part the most material part of the descent of the supramental body down to the mind that visibly came out of his body like that and entered mine, and it was so concrete that I felt the FRICTION of forces passing through the pores of the skin. I remember having said at the time, Well, anyone who has had this experience can, by this experience, bring the proof of afterlife to the world. It was it was as concrete as if it had been material. So naturally, after that it was there in the field of consciousness. But I have seen more and more, more and more, that all that happens, all the people we meet, all that happens to us personally (that is, taking this little body as being the person), all of that is ALWAYS a test: you stand firm or you dont; if you stand firm, you make a progress forward; if you dont, you have to go through it again.

0 1967-09-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    The opposition between the two things is becoming more pronounced every minute: one moment everything is divine, the next moment everything is detestableyet its the same thing.    Since the 15th of August, since that experience at the balcony,1 it has become very clear.

0 1969-01-18, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    There is a very pronounced change in those who were touched on the 1st of January: there is especially as I said, a precision and a certainty that have entered their way of thinking.    (before leaving, Satprem lays his forehead on Mothers knees)

0 1970-07-01, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    I saw it, it was like that. There were distinctive features, but not very pronounced, and it was clearly a being that was neither male nor female, that had features of both combined. And it was taller than her, it exceeded her on every side by about this much (gesture extending beyond the physical being by about eight inches). She was here, and it was like this (gesture). Its color was this color that, if it became very material, would be Aurovilles color [orange]. It was softer, as if behind a veil, it wasnt absolutely precise, but it was this color. And there was hair, but it was something else.    Another time maybe Ill see better.

0 1970-07-18, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Ill give you one example: he was with Z and asked Z how the syllable OM should be pronounced (he didnt know). Z told him. Then he repeated just that word, and he says that it suddenly became absolutely awesome, as if there were hundreds of amplifiers and all of Matter everywhere said OM.    Oh, hes sensitive.

0 1971-10-20, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Because I know this very well, I am content to work still on the spiritual and psychic plane, preparing there the ideas and forces, which may afterwards at the right moment and under the right conditions precipitate themselves into the vital and material field, and I have been careful not to make any public pronouncement as that might prejudice my possibilities of future action. What that will be will depend on developments. The present trend of politics may end in abortive unrest, but it may also stumble with the aid of external circumstances into some kind of simulacrum of self-government. In either case the whole real work will remain to be done. I wish to keep myself free for it in either case.    Aurobindo

0 1971-12-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    What is left is just the things that resistyou feel (I told you this) that its as if every minute (and its getting more and more pronounced), every minute: do you want life, do you want death; do you want life, do you want death? Thats how it is. And life is union with the Supreme. And consciousness, a COMPLETELY new consciousness is coming. Thats how it is, like this (Mother makes a gesture of swinging from one side to the other). But yesterday or the day before, I dont know, all of a sudden the body said, No! I am through I want life, I dont want anything else. And since then Ive felt better.    Oh, it would take volumes to narrate what is happening. Its remarkably interesting, and ENTIRELY new. Entirely new.

02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    We say that at the lowest level of involution, in Matter, where consciousness has zero magnitude, there is no personality or individuality. It is all a mechanical play of clashing particles that constantly fly apart or come together according to the force or the resultant of forces that act upon them. An individuality means a bounded form as its basis of reaction and a form that tends to persist and grow by assimilation; it means a centre of a definite manner and pattern of reaction. Individuality, in its literal sense, designates that which cannot be divided (in + dividus). Division is only another name for death for the particular entity. Even in the case of cell-division or self-division of some lower organisms, in the first instance the original living entity disappears and, secondly, the succeeding: entities, created by division, always re-form themselves again into integral wholes. A material particle, on the other hand, is divisible ad infinitum. We have been able to divide even an atom (which means also that which cannot be divided) to such an extent as to reduce it to a mere charge of energy, nay, we have sublimated it to a geometrical point. Individualisation starts with the coming of life. It is a ganglion of life-force round which a particular system of action and reaction weaves itself. The characteristic of individuality is that each one is unique, each relates itself to others and to the environment in its own way, each expresses itself, puts forth its energy, receives impacts from outside in a manner that distinguishes it from others. It is true this character of individuality is not very pronounced in the earlier or rudimentary forms of life. Still it is there: it grows and develops slowly along the ladder of evolution. Only in the higher animals it attains a clear and definite norm and form.    In man something else or something more happens. For man is not merely an individual, he is also a personality. He is the outcome of a twofold growth and revelation. He has outgrown the vital and climbed into Mind, and he has dived into the Heart and touched his inner soul, his true psychic centre. It is this soul that is the source of his personality.   --    These characters, it is true, are not clear and pronounced, do not lie in front, at the beginning of the human personality. The normal human person has his psyche very much behind; but it is still there as antarymin, as the secret Inner Controller. And whatever the vagaries of the outer instruments or their slavery to the mode of Ignorance, in and through all that, it is this Inner Guide that holds the reins and drives upward in the end.    Thus naturally there appear gradations of the human personality; as the consciousness in the human being rises higher and higher, the psychic centre organises a higher and higher a richer, wider, deeper personality. The first great conversion, the first turning of the human personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a conscious harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner nucleus of consciousness-force is formed, first, by the flaming aspiration, the upward drive within the developing and increasing psychic being itself, and secondly, by the descent, to a greater and greater degree, of the original Being from which it emanated. The final coalescence of the fully and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation returns to the point from which it started but with an added significance, a new fulfilment.

03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its profane and religious aspects, is all "humantoo human" as Nietzsche pronounced it; it was for this reason that the Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow, and rise to a superior status of culture and civilisation, of being and consciousness as we would say.    Indian spirituality precisely envisages such a transcendence. According to it, the liberated soul, one who lives in and with the Brahman or the Supreme Divine is he who 'has discarded the inferior human nature and has taken up the superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the apar prakti.Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism generally has no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human; his being and becoming are the spontaneous expression of a universal and transcendent consciousness. He does not always live and move externally in the non-human way; but even when he appears human in his life and action, his motives are not humanistic, his consciousness lies anchored somewhere else, in the Divine Will that makes him be and do whatever it chooses, human or not.

03.06 - Here or Otherwhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    "A question is often asked of us whether it is possible to do Yoga while remaining in the world. Some declare outright that it is not possible: world and Yoga are, like oil and water, absolutely different things, they do not go together. World means, to put it plainly, earning money and raising family. Well, these two are the very opposite of Yoga, for they involve, at their best, desire and attachment and, at their worst, dishonesty and deceit, lust and libertinage. There is the other school, on the contrary, that pronounces that a Yogic life must be lived in the world if it is not your intention to leave that world altogether and seek and merge in the Beyond, the otherwhere, the immutable transcendent Brahman. It is quite possible for one to be in the very midst of the worldly forces and yet remain unshaken by them. Therefore it has been said: When the causes of disturbance are there and still the mind is not disturbedhat indeed is the sign of a wise steadiness.    It can, however, be asked, what then is meant by being in the world? If it means merely sitting quiet, suffering and observing nonchalantly the impacts of the world something in the manner described by Matthew Arnold in his famous lines on the East, well, that stoic way, the way of indifference is a way of being in the world which is not very much unlike not being in the world; for it means simply erecting a wall of separation or isolation within one's consciousness without moving away physically. It is a psychological escapism. But if by living in the world we should mean participating in the movements of the worldnot only being but becoming, not merely standing as a witness but moving out as a doer then the problem becomes different. For the question we have to ask in that case is what happens to our dutieslife in the world being a series of duties, duty to oneself (self-preservation), duty to the family (race-preservation), duty to the country, to humanity and, finally, duty to God (which last belongs properly to the life in Yoga). Now, can all these duties dwell and flourish together? The Christ is categorical on the point. He says, in effect: Leave aside all else and follow Me and look not back. Christ's God seems to be a jealous God who does not tolerate any other god to share in his sovereign exclusiveness. You have to give up, if you wish to gain. They who lose life shall find it and they who stick to life shall as surely lose it.

05.19 - Lone to the Lone, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Some mystics and philosophers recently come into vogue (inspired or encouraged by the Christian or the Buddhist way of Realisation) have emphasised this outlook. But it has also been counterbalanced by another way of spiritual growth and fulfilment: we may call it the modern way, for it has been a pronounced characteristic of the modern consciousness. We referred in our previous essay to the Existentialist who has attracted so much attention in these days, the linchpin of whose philosophy is the value of the individual person, especially the individual personal in relation to each other. Kierkegaard, the Danish mystic, from whom this school is supposed to originate, speaks of the Absolute as the Single One that excludes and annuls all "others", the crowd. He lays especial emphasis upon complete solitariness and total renunciation as the very condition, sine qua non, of the soul's spiritual journey and yet characterises the singlenessof the one in terms that make of it an essential whole, an integer. Man must isolate himself from his phenomenal being, certainlyas the neti netiformula enjoins but also he must first find or become his real self, realise his true individuality before he can reach God, the Divine Self, identify himself with the Transcendent. It is only a freely and truly formed individual being that can give itself to the Divine or become one with it. This true individuality is indeed a solitary being away and apart from the crowd of personalities that surround itit has been called by the Indian mystics, the Purusha in the heart, no bigger than the thumb, the Dwarf Godhead (Vmana).    When one is a member of the crowd, he has no personality or individuality, he is an amorphous mass, moving helplessly in the current of life, driven by Nature-force as it pleases her: spiritual life begins by withdrawing oneself from this flow of Ignorance and building up or taking cognisance of one's true person and being. When one possesses oneself integrally, is settled in the armature of one's spirit self, he has most naturally turned away from the inferior personalities of his own being and the comradeship also of people in bondage and ignorance. But then one need not stop at this purely negative poise: one can move up and arrive at a positive status, a new revaluation and reaffirmation. For when the divine selfhood is attained, one is no longer sole or solitary. Indeed, the solitariness or loneliness that is attributed to the spiritual status is a human way of viewing the experience: that is the impression left on the normal mind consciousness when the Purusha soars out of it, upwards from the life of the world to the life of the Spirit. But the soul, the true spiritual being in the individual, is not and cannot be an isolated entity; the nature of the spiritual consciousness is first transcendence, no doubt, transcendence of the merely temporal and ephemeral, but it is also universalisation, that is to say, the cosmic realisation that has its classic expression in the famous mantra of the Gita, he who sees himself in other selves and other selves in his own self. In that status "own" and "other" are not distinct or contrary things, but aspects of the one and the same reality, different stresses in one rhythm.

06.35 - Second Sight, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Human contact has thus a harmful effect upon the animal's instinctive life. But in another way it may have an uplifting influence too. Some of the refined human sentimentssympathy, gratitude, faithfulness, self-sacrificein a pronounced human way find expression in animals that are domesticated and live close to man and within the human atmosphere. It is true many of these feelings are not totally absent in the animal kingdom (especially in the higher strata) in its natural or wild state, but they belong to the level of pure feeling or impulse and have not risen to the level of sentiments which have a mental element infused into their vital stuff. Indeed a strong mental element, a reasoning capacity sometimes very clearly develops in the domestic animal.    The animal acts by instinct, we say; that is to say, it goes straight to the thing to be done: in order to do a thing it does not make a choice between possibilities, there is no selective process in its consciousness. It is the human consciousness alone that says, this is not to be done, but that to be done, not this but that or puts the question, which one, to be or not to be? This is what we mean by discrimination or deliberation. Normally, this faculty is absent in the animal. We have said of refined feelings in man; refined here need not mean always ennobled or morally elevated; it may mean also more subtle, more complicated and be applied to some baseracutely perversefeelings which are perhaps peculiarly human. Domestic animals sometimes contract them from men: jealousy, spitefulness, vengeance, vindictiveness of an extreme degree are likely to be found more among animals living with men than those that are in the wild state. We have heard of elephants brooding over a hurt or even an insult for long months and taking revenge when occasion presents itself. And we have heard of a cat jumping out of a window into the street below and killing itself simply because it thought its mistress showed more love towards another cat.

07.40 - Service Human and Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Just an illustration of the quality of the spirit that animates humanitarianism. A charitable man will give generously for a thing that is known, recognised, appreciated; he will be liberal if he finds his name attached to the work, announced and pronounced, if there is fame for him in it. But ask him a dole for something genuine, comparatively modest or out of the way, something that is truly spiritual and divine, you will find his purse-strings tightened, his heart closed up. A gift that bears no value to the giver does not tempt the ordinary humanitarian. There is indeed another different category of givers, of the opposite kind, who want precisely to remain anonymous: they would be displeased if their names were announced. But the motive here too is not very different; in fact it is the same motive acting rebours, backward as it were. Here there is an additional element of self-glorification: one gives and people do not know who he is; it is something all the more to be proud of.    You must look into yourself, question yourself before you do a thing and not do it simply because it is the thing normally done and it is how things are normally done. You can do good to others, if you know what is that good and if you possess that in yourself. If you wish to help others, you must be on a higher level than that of theirs. If you are one with the others, level with them in nature and consciousness, what can you do but share in their ignorance and blind movements and perpetuate them? So it happens really that the first thing to do is to serve yourself.

1.007 - Initial Steps in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga   Whenever there is repeated persistence in one given direction with reference to any chosen point of attention, we will see that some sort of success results. If a laboratory scientist is to analyse the structure of an atom, he will analyse a particular atom repeatedly by bombarding it with various kinds of light rays, but he will not go on changing the atoms today this atom, tomorrow that atom, today a hydrogen atom, tomorrow some other thing. That will not lead to success. A particular object will be taken up for consideration, observation and analysis, and a repeated attempt will be made to go deep into its structure until its mystery is revealed. So for this, great leisure is necessary, persistence is necessary, energy and willpower are necessary, and there is no need to mention that we must be free from all other outward distractions. When one takes to the practice of yoga, there should be no distraction of any pronounced nature. Minor distractions may be there, but serious distractions which will divert our attention markedly from the point of attention should not be there.   A fixed place, a fixed time, and a fixed method of concentration are called for. In one of the aphorisms of the sutras of Patanjali, which is very relevant to this point, it is said that the practise should be for a long period: sa tu drghakla nairantarya satkra sevita dhabhmi (I.14). If we want to establish ourselves in yoga, some conditions are to be fulfilled. One condition he mentions is that the practice should be for a protracted period I said at least five years, and not less than five years. It should be repeatedly done every day, without missing even a single day. Even if we have a temperature, fever or a headache, we should not miss it, because these are obstacles. The more we try to exert our will in the practice of concentration, the more will the body also try to revolt. It will create all kinds of complications we will have indigestion, we will have a stomachache, we will have a headache, we will have fever all sorts of things will come. As a matter of fact, it is specifically mentioned in the Yoga Sutras that we will fall sick. It will be an obstacle, and we should not think, "Today I am sick; I will not meditate." That is what it wants, and then it has succeeded. So, first of all, a little guarded way of living may be called for to see, as far as possible, that we do not become so ill that we cannot even sit for a few minutes of meditation. By a regulation of diet and living in a climate that is not too extreme, etc., one can be somewhat free from the anxiety of falling ill to the extent that it would prevent us from doing anything at all in the spiritual field.

1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   Much thought has gone into the construction of your Motto. "I will become" can be turned neatly enough as "Let there be;" by avoiding the First pronoun one gets the idea of "the absorption of the Self in the Beloved," which is exactly what you want.   "The creative Force of the Universe" is quite ready-made.   --   One Gnostic secret way of spelling and pronouncing Jehovah is and this has the value 811. So has "Let there be," Fiat, transliterating into Greek.   Resuming all these ideas, it seems that you can express your aspiration very neatly, very fully, by choosing for your motto the words FIAT YOD.

1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   Numerous sects and religions do not understand the expression of magic otherwise than black art, witchcraft or conspiracy with evil powers. It is therefore not astonishing that many people are frightened by a certain horror, whenever the word magic is pronounced. Jugglers, conjurers, and charlatans have discredited this term and, considering this circumstance, there is no surprise that magic knowledge has always been looked upon with a slight disregard.   Even in the remotest times the MAGUS has been regarded as one of the highest adepts and it might be of interest to learn that, as a matter of fact, the word magic is derived from this word. The so called sorcerers are by no means initiates but only imitators to the mysteries, who counting partly on the ignorance and partly on the credulity of the individuality or a whole nation in order to reach their selfish aims by, lies and fraud. The true magician will always despise such practices.

1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism   In dealing with the second group, the human form transmits the emanative radiations to a much higher grade of deva. These devas are of a more pronounced hue, and after due assimilation of the human radiation, they transmit it principally to the animal kingdom, thus demonstrating the close relationship between the two kingdoms. If the above explanation of the intricate inter-relation between the sun and the planets, between the planets and the evolving forms upon them, between the forms themselves in ever descending importance demonstrates nothing more than the exquisite interdependence of all existences, then much will have been achieved.   Another fact which must also be brought out is the close relationship between all these evolutions of nature, from the celestial sun down to the humblest violet via the [97] deva evolution which acts as the transmitting transmuting force throughout the system.

1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism   As evolution proceeds, the other centres attain a more pronounced vibration and the fire (circulating triangularly) will bring them into greater prominence; the two above mentioned, however, are of prime importance at this time. These two, with the lesser triangle of our chain, constitute the focal point of energy viewed from our planetary standpoint.   In addition to these some hints in connection with the microcosmic and macrocosmic centres, we might here give the cosmic correspondences at which it is possible to hint.

1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy   I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something,I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good,I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What _good_ I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin   Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the mean while too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the suns chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.

1.01 - NIGHT, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry   (He seizes the book, and mysteriously pronounces the sign of   the Spirit. A ruddy flame flashes: the Spirit appears in

1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism   signified; then, when that symbol is pronounced, it recalled   the thing signified. The commentator says the manifesting   --   A, is the root sound, the key, pronounced without touching   32   --   I pronounce a word, cow. As soon as it enters through   46

1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   Disease is not cured by pronouncing the name of medicine, but by taking medicine. Deliverance is not achieved by repeating the word Brahman, but by directly experiencing Brahman.   The Atman is the Witness of the individual mind and its operations. It is absolute knowledge.   --   I live, yet not I, but Christ in me. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to use the verb transitively and say, I live, yet not I; for it is the Logos who lives melives me as an actor lives his part. In such a case, of course, the actor is always infinitely superior to the rle. Where real life is concerned, there are no Shakespearean characters, there are only Addisonian Catos or, more often, grotesque Monsieur Perrichons and Charlies Aunts mistaking themselves for Julius Caesar or the Prince of Denmark. But by a merciful dispensation it is always in the power of every dramatis persona to get his low, stupid lines pronounced and supernaturally transfigured by the divine equivalent of a Garrick.   O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee.

1.01 - The Unexpected, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga   Each gentle movement of the leg by the doctor made Sri Aurobindo let out a short "Ah!" which prompted the Mother to ask, "Is it hurting you?" Throughout the investigation he uttered very few words, only to answer the doctor's questions. Finally the doctor pronounced that there was a fracture of the thigh bone. Sri Aurobindo simply heard the verdict and made no comment.   A team of attendants was formed consisting of Dr. Manilal, three other medical men, Champaklal (Sri Aurobindo's personal attendant) and Purani, who had acquired the right by his past association with Sri Aurobindo to be included. One more hand was still needed. The Mother simply looked through the window shutters of Sri Aurobindo's room and seeing Dr. Satyendra below chatting in front of his Dental Clinic said, "Take Satyendra." A happy choice! A strong man with a genial bearing.

1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.   ***

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   however, still retains pronounced limitations. Specific behaviors retain their adaptive significance only   within particular, restricted environments (only within bounded frames of reference). If environmental   --   authority not his own was so transparent that the king accepted Elijahs pronouncement as just.   The same striking sequence recurred in the incident of David and Bathsheba. From the top of his roof

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped reign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self-regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low, while the old functions which might have justified at one time such a distribution of status are either not performed at all or badly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a part of caste pride. He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of authority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the comm and of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply, But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and not superstition and falsehood? When did God comm and it, or how do I know that this was the sense of His comm and and not your error or invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experience of reality? And if it does not, the revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other, because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.   But by what individual faculty or standard shall the innovator find out his new foundation or establish his new measures? Evidently, it will depend upon the available enlightenment of the time and the possible forms of knowledge to which he has access. At first it was in religion a personal illumination supported in the West by a theological, in the East by a philosophical reasoning. In society and politics it started with a crude primitive perception of natural right and justice which took its origin from the exasperation of suffering or from an awakened sense of general oppression, wrong, injustice and the indefensibility of the existing order when brought to any other test than that of privilege and established convention. The religious motive led at first; the social and political, moderating itself after the swift suppression of its first crude and vehement movements, took advantage of the upheaval of religious reformation, followed behind it as a useful ally and waited its time to assume the lead when the spiritual momentum had been spent and, perhaps by the very force of the secular influences it called to its aid, had missed its way. The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured by the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to withhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by moral authority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation of Sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment and imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others. In the East such a movement divorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social significance would have produced simply a series of religious reformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice; in the West atheism and secularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the priesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of Papal authority for the authority of the Scripture, it could not fail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all supernaturalism, religious belief or suprarational truth no less than outward creed and institute.

1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga   berg launch their pronouncements from the peaks of their   popular fame. A few years ago, Stephen Hawking summed

1.02 - The Magic Circle, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism   The magician who is also acquainted with Quabbalah can draw another snake-like circle within the inner circle and divide it into 72 fields, giving each of these fields the name of a genius. These names of genii, together with their analogies, must be drawn magically by pronouncing them correctly. If working with a circle embroidered into a piece of cloth, the names inserted into the various fields must either be in Latin or in Hebrew. I shall give exact details about the genii and their analogies, use and effect in my next work called "The Key to the True Quabbalah". An embroidered circle has the advantage that it can easily be laid out and folded -together again without having to be drawn and charged anew each time it is to be used. The snake presented in the centre is not only the copy of an inner circle, but, above that, it is the symbol of wisdom. Besides this, other meanings may be attributed to this snake-symbol, for example the snake's strength, the power of imagination, etc. It is not possible to give a full description of all this, for this would go far beyond the aim of this book.   A Buddhist magician drawing his Mandala, putting his five deities in the form of figures or diagrams on top of the relevant emanation, is, at that moment, meditating about each single deity whose influence he is trying to evoke. This magical ceremony, too, is, in our opinion, equivalent to the drawing of a magic circle, although it actually is a genuine prayer to the Buddhist deities. To say more about this matter in this book is quite unnecessary for enough material has already been published in Eastern literature about this kind of magical practice, either in exoteric or in secret manuscripts.

1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   9:A premiss so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away all that vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, denying or disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or obscurely or at worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate supraphysical phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and its movements and conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces. As soon as we begin to investigate the operations of mind and of supermind, in themselves and without the prejudgment that is determined from the beginning to see in them only a subordinate term of Matter, we come into contact with a mass of phenomena which escape entirely from the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist formula. And the moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels us to recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses, - that outer shell of our true and complete existence, - the premiss of materialistic Agnosticism disappears. We are ready for a large statement and an ever-developing inquiry.   10:But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.

1.03 - Japa Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism   21. pronounce the Mantra distinctly and without mistakes. Do not repeat it too fast or too slow.   22. Use not the index finger while rolling the beads. Use the thumb, the middle and the ring fingers. When counting of one Mala is over, revert it and come back again. Cross not the Meru. Cover your hand with a towel.

1.03 - Questions and Answers, #Book of Certitude, #unset, #Zen   ANSWER: This practice hath been pronounced unlawful by the Source of Authority, and it is unlawful to announce a marriage earlier than ninety-five days before the wedding.   44. QUESTION: If a person hath, for example, a hundred tumans, payeth the Huquq on this sum, loseth half the sum in unsuccessful transactions and then, through trading, the amount in hand is raised again to the sum on which Huquq is due-must such a person pay Huquq or not?

1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity   pelled to pronounce, implicitly or explicitly, by the very fact of   having been born. Without having willed it, without knowing why,

1.03 - The House Of The Lord, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga   Sri Aurobindo, we were told, used to take his bath about midnight with very hot water, all the year round mixing very little cold water, even for the head. The story is quite believable, for we were asked to pour extremely hot water on the fractured leg to cure the occasional itching he had. "A very drastic, but effective method," he pronounced with a smile, "but not many could bear such heat." Sometimes while returning from the bath, he was seen moving his lips as though murmuring something. It prompted Champaklal to suggest to him that if he wanted to dictate some lines of poetry, I would be willing to take them down. His intuition was correct. For a few days Sri Aurobindo did dictate verses and then stopped. Perhaps he felt that I must be given rest before I resumed my next round of duty.   There was another tiny operation he allowed us to do, the cutting of his nails. Satyendra used to clean them daily, but we cut them only every month or two after they had grown sufficiently long and could be preserved intact. It was a very delicate operation, for the knife or scissors would sometimes graze the skin, specially when the operator's eyesight was affected. When this did happen which was fortunately very rare he would give a quick shake to the leg! When a small bit of nail fell on the carpet and got lost, a search would start for the quarry in which Sri Aurobindo himself smilingly participated, asking, "Have you got it?" All these nails, like the hair, were the legitimate property of our custodian Champaklal.

1.03 - The Void, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry   And losing faith in these pronouncements mine.   There's place intangible, a void and room.

1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   "You may say that there are many errors and superstitions in another religion. I should reply: Suppose there are. Every religion has errors. Everyone thinks that his watch alone gives the correct time. It is enough to have yearning for God. It is enough to love Him and feel attracted to Him: Don't you know that God is the Inner Guide? He sees the longing of our heart and the yearning of our soul. Suppose a man has several sons. The older boys address him distinctly as 'Baba' or 'Papa', but the babies can at best call him 'Ba' or 'Pa'. Now, will the father be angry with those who address him in this indistinct way? The father knows that they too are calling him, only they cannot pronounce his name well. All children are the same to the father. Likewise, the devotees call on God alone, though by different names. They call on one Person only. God is one, but His names are many."   Thursday, August 24, 1882.

1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   successful man with a pronounced pleasure-principle psychology. When in   a quandary the resistances of the patient may be valuable signposts. I am   --   missionary who pronounces the gods of the poor hea then to be mere   illusion. Unfortunately we still go blundering along in the same dogmatic

1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga   I shall now give an example of the Mother's considerable courage in taking up the charge of a patient suffering from throat cancer. This man, a devotee, arrived from outside. He had refused all medical aid and turned down all entreaties of his relatives for the accepted treatment. He wanted only to be cured by the Mother or to die here. He was very thin, of a nervous type and his general health was poor. I was asked to supervise the case and give daily reports to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. We shall see in the chapter 'God Departs' another devotee seeking entire refuge in them and being cured of a mysterious illness that endangered her life. I must admit frankly that I was stunned by the Mother's boldness and could not have an unreserved faith. Either in this context or another, I had asked the Mother and Sri Aurobindo if they had cured cancer by their Force. The Mother replied firmly, "Not only cancer, other diseases too, pronounced incurable by the doctors. Isn't it so?" She asked Sri Aurobindo, as if looking for confirmation; he nodded. The Mother once said that there is hardly a disease that Yoga cannot cure. Sri Aurobindo also wrote, "Of course it [Yoga] can, but on condition of faith or openness or both. Even a mental suggestion can cure cancer with luck of course, as is shown by the case of the woman operated on unsuccessfully for cancer, but the doctors lied and told her it had succeeded. Result, cancer symptoms all ceased and she died many years afterwards of another illness altogether," Here was a patient, then, who came with faith in the Mother. I began to do my duty regularly. At first the patient came for Pranam to the Mother. I witnessed her intense concentration and preoccupation with the case. While listening to the report, she would suddenly go into a trance and Sri Aurobindo would intently watch over her. Once she was on the point of falling down. Sri Aurobindo stretched both his arms, exclaiming "Ah!" The Mother regained her control. Things seemed to be moving at a slow pace. If some symptoms improved, new ones appeared; the condition fluctuated from day to day. Some days passed in a comparative restfulness. Our help was mostly psychological: to give courage and instil faith. If some progress was noticed, I would with a cheerful face report it to the Mother. She would just listen quietly. Meanwhile letters from the relatives urged the patient to return. When the Mother heard about it, she replied, "If I can't cure it, there is none who can." The fight continued, it was a grim encounter, indeed. As a result of the Mother's steady Force, things looked bright and I felt we had turned the corner. The Mother kept her vigil and wasted no words. After the February Darshan, however, the picture changed for no apparent reason. The patient went gradually down-hill and in a month or two, life petered out. The patient was brought before the Mother to have her last blessings. She came down and with her soothing touch and the balm of her divine smile wiped away all his distress and made his passage peaceful. Later when I asked Sri Aurobindo the reason for this unaccountable reversal, he replied, "After the Darshan his faith got shaken and he could not get it back." Cancer of the throat is a scourge; one cannot eat, drink or speak; breathing becomes difficult. Let us remember Sri Ramakrishna's classical example. To keep a steady faith needs a heroic will which how many can have? Besides, the family surroundings also were not very congenial.   I remember Nishikanto, a sadhak-poet, who fell seriously ill after being cured of an equally serious illness. The Mother giving the occult reason told me that when he came to her on his birthday, she saw a definite crack in his faith. But a man of quite a different temperament, he pulled himself up, while the cancer-patient could not. "Why take up such a case at all?" one may ask. Well, it was the patient who made the choice; he had no faith in the usual medico-surgical treatment whose efficacy is at best doubtful. Here, he had at least the unique opportunity to live under the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's direct care and supervision. For a bhakta, there cannot be a greater boon. If he lives, it will be glorious; if he dies, he will have a better life in the next birth.

1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism   This is highly significant, for the letter when pronounced as   Aleph and spelt in full rjbs Anph, means an Ox or Bull, an admirable symbol to denote the generative power of   --   Now a Gimel is the letter given to this Path, and when pronounced boa Gimel, means a Camel. The Camel is the conventional " ship of the desert   The title of this Path is " The Uniting Intelligence ", and its Yetsiratic attri bution is the moon <=>. Its Tarot card is   --   This letter is pronounced Caph- meaning a spoon or the hollow of one's hand - receptive symbols, and therefore feminine. It is attri buted to 2). Jupiter, and as it connects   Chesed (the sphere of 2f) to Netsach, which latter is the sphere of 2 Venus, the Path of Caph partakes both of the magnanimous and generous expansive character of 2J. and the love nature of $ . It repeats on a considerably lower plane the attri butions of Jupiter, Zeus, Brahma, and Indra, already commented upon. Pluto is also attri buted, since he is the blind giver of wealth, symbolical of the infinite and abundant prodigality of Nature. In the Northern Sagas we   --   The Sepher Yetsirah denominates " Resh," a " double letter ", but I have been unable to discover any sound other than " R " for this letter ; nor is any other so recognized by modern Hebrew grammarians. Perhaps the French form of " R " - pronounced with a decided roll - is the sound in question.    fr-SII   --    latter is on the left side, viz., b (Sin), it is pronounced as an " S   Fire A is its Yetsiratic element (in Hebrew Esh is fire, the " sh " being most prominent in pronunciation), and is symbolized by this sibilant letter ts, because one char- acteristic of fire is its hissing sound ; and the equivalent in   --   This letter means a T-shaped Cross. When without a dogish is pronounced as an " S ".   This Path represents both (a) the lowest dregs of the

1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   for the world-wide pronouncements about the God within us   and above us, about Christ and the corpus mysticum, the per-   --   ically represents the thing, and that it is sufficient to pronounce   the name in order to posit the thing's existence. In the course

1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism   Bhagavn Ramakrishna used to tell a story of some men who went into a mango orchard and busied themselves in counting the leaves, the twigs, and the branches, examining their colour, comparing their size, and noting down everything most carefully, and then got up a learned discussion on each of these topics, which were undoubtedly highly interesting to them. But one of them, more sensible than the others, did not care for all these things. and instead thereof, began to eat the mango fruit. And was he not wise? So leave this counting of leaves and twigs and note-taking to others. This kind of work has its proper place, but not here in the spiritual domain. You never see a strong spiritual man among these "leaf counters". Religion, the highest aim, the highest glory of man, does not require so much labour. If you want to be a Bhakta, it is not at all necessary for you to know whether Krishna was born in Mathur or in Vraja, what he was doing, or just the exact date on which he pronounced the teachings of the Git. You only require to feel the craving for the beautiful lessons of duty and love in the Gita. All the other particulars about it and its author are for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have what they desire. Say "Shntih, Shntih" to their learned controversies, and let us "eat the mangoes".   The second condition necessary in the teacher is sinlessness. The question is often asked,

1.05 - Some Results of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy    further news which does not tally with the previous information. I am thereby obliged to reverse my previous judgment. The result is an unfavorable influence upon my sixteen-petalled lotus. Quite the contrary would have been the case had I, in the first place, suspended judgment, and remained silent both inwardly in thought and outwardly in word concerning the whole affair, until I had acquired reliable grounds for forming my judgment. Caution in the formation and pronouncement of judgments becomes, by degrees, the special characteristic of the student. On the other hand his receptivity for impressions and experiences increases; he lets them pass over him silently, so as to collect and have the largest possible number of facts at his disposal when the time comes to form his opinions. Bluish-red and reddish-pink shades color the lotus flower as the result of such circumspection, whereas in the opposite case dark red and orange shades appear. (Students will recognize in the conditions attached to the development of the sixteen-petalled lotus the instructions given by the Buddha to his disciples for the Path. Yet there is no question here of teaching Buddhism,    p. 146

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   really He or just a likeness of Him, but no later than tomorrow I shall pronounce You the wickedest of   all heretics and sentence You to be burned at the stake, and the very people who today were kissing

1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga   "Sri Aurobindo thinks it unnecessary to volunteer a personal pronouncement... His position is known. He has always stood for India's complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly and without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation. In 1910 he authorised the publication of his prediction that after a long period of wars, world-wide upheavals and revolutions beginning after four years, India would achieve her freedom. Lately he has said that freedom was coming soon and nothing could prevent it. He has always foreseen that eventually Britain would approach India for an amicable agreement, conceding her freedom. What he had foreseen is now coming to pass and the British Cabinet Mission is the sign. It remains for the nation's leaders to make a right and full use of the opportunity. In any case, whatever the immediate outcome, the Power that has been working out this event will not be denied, the final result, India's liberation, is sure."   We know the aftermath of the rejection of the Cripps' Proposals as well as the failure of the Cabinet Mission: confusion, calamity, partition, blood-bath, etc., and the belated recognition of the colossal blunder. Then when the partition had been accepted as a settled fact, Sri Aurobindo's "bardic" voice was heard once again, "But by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future." Past events have justified Sri Aurobindo's solemn warning and recent events point to the way to liquidation of that division.[4]   --   Today the achievement of India's freedom is attributed to various factors: the August movement, Non-cooperation, the Terrorist movement, the I. N. A. and others; the factor that played the decisive part is either not admitted or ignored altogether. From Sri Aurobindo's pronouncements we can assert that his Force was principally responsible for the success of the Allies and the defeat of the Japanese, thereby helping India to gain her freedom. In fact, India's freedom had been his constant dream from his very boyhood. Even during his intense sadhana in Pondicherry, it was always in his mind and he indefatigably worked for it in the yogic way till he became convinced that freedom was inevitable. As far back as 1935, when I asked him if he was working for India's freedom, he replied, "That is all settled, it is a question of working out only.... It is what she will do with her independence that is not arranged for and so it is that about which I have to bother."   The other causes then could be considered no more than contributory, even if indispensable factors. Out of all these, I may make some comment on the claims of the I. N. A. Whatever significance there may be in its claims, the role it played was fraught with most dangerous consequences. I wonder how our countrymen had no apprehension of them. It was a fatal game the I.N.A. played, thinking that the Japanese, after the conquest of India, would peacefully leave the country letting the I.N.A. enjoy the fruit of its victory, or that India would be able to fight and drive them out. Sri Aurobindo pointing out what would have been our condition, had Japan entered India, said, "Japan's imperialism being young and based on industrial and military power and moving westward, was a greater menace to India than the British imperialism which was old, which the country had learnt to deal with and which was on the way to elimination."

1.06 - A Summary of my Phenomenological View of the World, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity   more pronounced awakening in man, as it comes closer, of   the 'zest for evolution' and the 'will to live') ; and from these

1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga   lion years ago, is not taken into account. Such pronounce   ments do indeed substantiate the truth of the Mothers say   --   superstars, whose slightest pronouncements are regurgitat   ed by the media ad nauseam, is pathetic. About Hawkings

1.06 - BOOK THE SIXTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry   At once prevented, and pronounc'd her fate:   Live; but depend, vile wretch, the Goddess cry'd,

1.06 - Confutation Of Other Philosophers, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry   Than ever the Pythia pronounced for men   From out the tripod and the Delphian laurel,

1.06 - The Literal Qabalah, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism   One Qabalist of tremendous knowledge was endeavouring to transliterate into Hebrew the name of a preterhuman intelligence by the name of Aiwass. This is, of course neither the time nor the place to go into the reason for his desire to obtain this name in Hebrew, and yet have the numerical value of 418. Had this Qabalist, whom the writer greatly esteems, known of the remark made with regard to the letter of the thirty-second Path, n Tav, he would have been saved several years of effort. For that letter, when without a dSgish, is pronounced as an " S ". Aiwass should have been spelt :    n 400 +n 1 + ) 6 +' 10 +N 1 =418.

1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   tations. Four hundred years earlier we find similar pronounce-   ments; for instance, Rabbi Abraham ben Hiyya, who died about

1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset   In recent years, His Holiness has been very pronounced about ostentatious dress and behavior. He speaks unfavorably about those in pre-1959   Tibet who wore fancy costumes and rode ornamented horses. In the West,

1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga   not manifest. These pronouncements reflect the truth of   the Divine essence and its manifestation. There is no dif-

1.07 - On Dreams, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   However, it is noteworthy that a chance circumstance, an impression received, a word pronounced, is sometimes enough to bring suddenly back to the consciousness a whole long dream of which we had no recollection a moment before.   We can infer from this simple fact that the conscious activity has taken only a very minor part in the phenomena of the sleeping state, since in the normal state of things they would have remained lost for ever in the subconscient memory.

1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga   The Mother has pronounced the last word on Savitri. I quote some extracts from a long talk on it to a young aspirant:   "He has crammed the whole universe in a single book. It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.

1.07 - The Mantra - OM - Word and Wisdom, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism   Now, as every word-symbol, intended to express the inexpressible Sphota, will so particularise it that it will no longer be the Sphota, that symbol which particularises it the least and at the same time most approximately expresses its nature, will be the truest symbol thereof; and this is the Om, and the (A.U.M.), pronounced in combination as Om, may well be Om only; because these three letters the generalised symbol of all possible sounds. The letter A is the least differentiated of all sounds, therefore Krishna says in the Gita "I am A among the letters". Again, all articulate sounds are produced in the space within the mouth beginning with the root of the tongue and ending in the lips the throat sound is A, and M is the last lip sound, and the U exactly represents the rolling forward of the impulse which begins at the root of the tongue till it ends in the lips. If properly pronounced, this Om will represent the whole phenomenon of sound-production, and no other word can do this; and this, therefore, is the fittest symbol of the Sphota, which is the real meaning of the Om.   And as the symbol can never be separated from the thing signified, the Om and the Sphota are one.

1.07 - The Psychic Center, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga   marvelously fresh and crystalline purity, as it exists irresistibly outside all the traps we set for it, outside all our ideas, feelings, and pronouncements, we must create a transparency within ourselves.   Beethoven, the sea, or our churches were only instruments for achieving that transparency. Because it is always the same: the moment we are clear. Truth, vision, joy emerge spontaneously; it is all there without the least effort, because Truth is the most natural thing in the world; it's the rest that clouds everything the mind and vital with their unruly vibrations and erudite complications. All spiritual disciplines worthy of the name, all tapasya, must ultimately tend toward that completely natural point where no effort is necessary; for effort is yet another clouding, another layer of complication. So the seeker will not attempt to enter the muddle of the moral mind, or try the impossible task of sorting out good from evil in order to bring the psychic to light, for, actually, the purpose of good and evil is intimately linked to their mutual harmfulness. (My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me79 .) He will simply try to let everything settle in the silence, for silence is clean in itself; it is lustral water. "Do not try to wash off one by one the stains on the robe," a very ancient Chaldean tradition exhorts, "change it altogether." This is what Sri Aurobindo calls a change of consciousness. In that transparency, the old habits of the being will indeed quietly lose their hold, and we will feel a new poise of consciousness within ourselves not an intellectual poise, but a new center of gravity. At heart level, but deeper than the vital center of the heart (which covers and imitates the psychic), we will feel a region of concentration more intense than the others, as if they had all converged there; this is the psychic center. We had already felt the onset of a current of consciousness-force within us, taking on a life of its own, moving in the body, and becoming increasingly intense as it gradually freed itself from its mental and vital activities. Now,

1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   The word intellect is used by Eckhart in the scholastic sense of immediate intuition. Intellect and reason, says Aquinas, are not two powers, but distinct as the perfect from the imperfect. The intellect means, an intimate penetration of truth; the reason, enquiry and discourse. It is by following, and then abandoning, the rational and emotional path of word and discrimination that one is enabled to enter upon the intellectual or intuitive path of realization. And yet, in spite of the warnings pronounced by those who, through selflessness, have passed from letter to spirit and from theory to immediate knowledge, the organized Christian churches have persisted in the fatal habit of mistaking means for ends. The verbal statements of theologys more or less adequate rationalizations of experience have been taken too seriously and treated with the reverence that is due only to the Fact they are intended to describe. It has been fancied that souls are saved if assent is given to what is locally regarded as the correct formula, lost if it is withheld. The two words, filioque, may not have been the sole cause of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches; but they were unquestionably the pretext and casus belli.   The overvaluation of words and formulae may be regarded as a special case of that overvaluation of the things of time, which is so fatally characteristic of historic Christianity. To know Truth-as-Fact and to know it unitively, in spirit and in truth-as-immediate-apprehensionthis is deliverance, in this standeth our eternal life. To be familiar with the verbalized truths, which symbolically correspond to Truth-as-Fact insofar as it can be known in, or inferred from, truth-as-immediate-apprehension, or truth-as-historic-revelationthis is not salvation, but merely the study of a special branch of philosophy. Even the most ordinary experience of a thing or event in time can never be fully or adequately described in words. The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say blue or pain, in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning. God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order. To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa. Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect symbols. But to anyone who really wants to reach a given destination, a map is indispensably useful as indicating the direction in which the traveller should set out and the roads which he must take.   --   In connection with the Mahayanist view that words play an important and even creative part in the evolution of unregenerate human nature, we may mention Humes arguments against the reality of causation. These arguments start from the postulate that all events are loose and separate from one another and proceed with faultless logic to a conclusion that makes complete nonsense of all organized thought or purposive action. The fallacy, as Professor Stout has pointed out, lies in the preliminary postulate. And when we ask ourselves what it was that induced Hume to make this odd and quite unrealistic assumption that events are loose and separate, we see that his only reason for flying in the face of immediate experience was the fact that things and happenings are symbolically represented in our thought by nouns, verbs and adjectives, and that these words are, in effect, loose and separate from one another in a way which the events and things they stand for quite obviously are not. Taking words as the measure of things, instead of using things as the measure of words, Hume imposed the discrete and, so to say, pointilliste pattern of language upon the continuum of actual experiencewith the impossibly paradoxical results with which we are all familiar. Most human beings are not philosophers and care not at all for consistency in thought or action. Thus, in some circumstances they take it for granted that events are not loose and separate, but co-exist or follow one another within the organized and organizing field of a cosmic whole. But on other occasions, where the opposite view is more nearly in accord with their passions or interests, they adopt, all unconsciously, the Humian position and treat events as though they were as independent of one another and the rest of the world as the words by which they are symbolized. This is generally true of all occurrences involving I, me, mine. Reifying the loose and separate names, we regard the things as also loose and separatenot subject to law, not involved in the network of relationships, by which in fact they are so obviously bound up with their physical, social and spiritual environment. We regard as absurd the idea that there is no causal process in nature and no organic connection between events and things in the lives of other people; but at the same time we accept as axiomatic the notion that our own sacred ego is loose and separate from the universe, a law unto itself above the moral dharma and even, in many respects, above the natural law of causality. Both in Buddhism and Catholicism, monks and nuns were encouraged to avoid the personal pronoun and to speak of themselves in terms of circumlocutions that clearly indicated their real relationship with the cosmic reality and their fellow creatures. The precaution was a wise one. Our responses to familiar words are conditioned reflexes. By changing the stimulus, we can do something to change the response. No Pavlov bell, no salivation; no harping on words like me and mine, no purely automatic and unreflecting egotism. When a monk speaks of himself, not as I, but as this sinner or this unprofitable servant, he tends to stop taking his loose and separate selfhood for granted, and makes himself aware of his real, organic relationship with God and his neighbours.   In practice words are used for other purposes than for making statements about facts. Very often they are used rhetorically, in order to arouse the passions and direct the will towards some course of action regarded as desirable. And sometimes, too, they are used poetically that is to say, they are used in such a way that, besides making a statement about real or imaginary things and events, and besides appealing rhetorically to the will and the passions, they cause the reader to be aware that they are beautiful. Beauty in art or nature is a matter of relationships between things not in themselves intrinsically beautiful. There is nothing beautiful, for example, about the vocables, time, or syllable. But when they are used in such a phrase as to the last syllable of recorded time, the relationship between the sound of the component words, between our ideas of the things for which they stand, and between the overtones of association with which each word and the phrase as a whole are charged, is apprehended, by a direct and immediate intuition, as being beautiful.   --   This truth is to be lived, it is not to be merely pronounced with the mouth.   There is really nothing to argue about in this teaching;

1.08 - BOOK THE EIGHTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry   He pleads in vain, and I pronounce his doom:   My brothers, though unjustly, shall o'ercome.

1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics   of the carcinogens. I do not care to pronounce an opinion on   this matter; I leave it as an interesting speculation.

1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy   In what prayers do men allow themselves! Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity is vicious. [True] Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not a unity in nature and consciousness.39 God's "supernatural" intervention in "nature": this bears no relation to the contemplative view of the psychic and subtle stages. God or Spirit is not set apart from nature, but rather is the Ground of nature, and indeed of all manifestation-as Teresa puts it, "God is in all things by presence and power and essence." "Supernatural," in this usage, simply means that the natural union of Spirit with all things becomes a conscious realization in some, and that conscious realization is called supernatural, not because the union is present only in them and not in nature, but because they are directly realizing it. Teresa's spiritual friend and collaborator, the extraordinary John of the Cross, explains it thus:   This union between God and creatures always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union would end they would cease to exist [Spirit as Ground of Being]. Consequently, in discussing union with God, we are not discussing the substantial union which is always existing, but the union and transformation of the soul in God. This transformation is supernatural, the other natural.40

1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   In all cases and as a general rule, the less one speaks of others, even to praise them, the better. It is already so difficult to know exactly what is happening in oneselfhow can one know with certainty what is happening in others?So you must totally abstain from pronouncing upon anybody one of those final judgments which cannot but be foolish if not spiteful.   When a thought is expressed in speech, the vibration of the sound has a considerable power to bring the most material substance into contact with the thought, thus giving it a concrete and effective reality. That is why one must never speak ill of people or things or say things which go against the progress of the divine realisation in the world. This is an absolute general rule. And yet it has one exception. You should not criticise anything unless at the same time you have the conscious power and active will to dissolve or transform the movements or things you criticise. For this conscious power and active will have the capacity of infusing Matter with the possibility to react and refuse the bad vibration and ultimately to correct it so that it becomes impossible for it to go on expressing itself on the physical plane.

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   The effectual motive for Sayanas admission of Saraswatis double rle in this Sukta is the expression maho arnas, the great water, of the third rik. Only in her capacity as a river-goddess has Saraswati anything to do with material water; an abundance of liquid matter is entirely irrelevant to her intellectual functions. If therefore we accept arnah in a material sense, the entrance of the river into the total physiognomy of Saraswati is imposed upon us by hard necessity in spite of the resultant incoherence. But if on the other hand, arnah can be shown to bear other than a material significance or intention, then no other necessity exists for the introduction of a deified Aryan river. On the contrary, there is an extraordinary accumulation of expressions clearly intellectual in sense. Pvak, dhiyvasuh, chodayitr snritnm, chetant sumatnm, prachetayati ketun, dhiyo vsv vi rjati are all expressions of this stamp; for they mean respectively purifying, rich in understanding, impeller of truths, awakening to good thoughts, perceives or makes conscious by perception, governs variously all the ideas or mental activities. Even yajnam vashtu and yajnam dadhe refer, plainly, to a figurative moral upholding,if, indeed, upholding be at all the Rishis intention in vashtu. What is left? Only the name Saraswati thrice repeated, the pronoun nah, and the two expressions vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnah. The rest is clearly the substance of a passage full of strong intellectual and moral conceptions. I shall suggest that these two expressions vjebhir vjin vat and maho arnah are no exception to the intellectuality of the rest of the passage. They, too, are words expressing moral or intellectual qualities or entities.   The word vja, usually rendered by Sayana, food or ghee,a sense which he is swift to foist upon any word which will at all admit that construction, as well as on some which will not admit it,has in other passages another sense assigned to it, strength, bala. It is the latter significance or its basis of substance & solidity which I propose to attach to vja in every line of the Rigveda where it occursand it occurs with an abundant frequency. There are a number of words in the Veda which have to be rendered by the English strength,bala, taras, vja, sahas, avas, to mention only the most common expressions. Can it be supposed that all these vocables rejoice in one identical connotation as commentators and lexicographers would lead us to conclude, and are used in the Veda promiscuously & indifferently to express the same idea of strength? The psychology of human language is more rich and delicate. In English the words strength, force, vigour, robustness differ in their mental values; force can be used in offices of expression to which strength and vigour are ineligible. In Vedic Sanscrit, as in every living tongue, the same law holds and a literary and thoughtful appreciation of its documents, whatever may be the way of the schools, must take account of these distinctions. In the brief list I have given, bala answers to the English strength, taras gives a shade of speed and impetuosity, sahas of violence or force, avas of flame and brilliance, vja of substance and solidity. In the philological appendix to this work there will be found detailed reasons for concluding that strength is in the history of the word vja only a secondary sense, like its other meanings, wealth and food; the basic idea is a strong sufficiency of substance or substantial energy. Vja is one of the great standing terms of the Vedic psychology. All states of being, whether matter, mind or life and all material, mental & vital activities depend upon an original flowing mass of Energy which is in the vivid phraseology of the Vedas called a flood or sea, samudra, sindhu or arnas. Our power or activity in any direction depends first on the amount & substantiality of this stream as it flows into, through or within our own limits of consciousness, secondly, on our largeness of being constituted by the wideness of those limits, thirdly, on our power of holding the divine flow and fourthly on the force and delight which enter into the use of our available Energy. The result is the self-expression, ansa or vyakti, which is the objective of Vedic Yoga. In the language of the Rishis whatever we can make permanently ours is called our holding or wealth, dhanam or in the plural dhanni; the powers which assist us in the getting, keeping or increasing of our dhanni, the yoga, s ti & vriddhi, are the gods; the powers which oppose & labour to rob us of this wealth are our enemies & plunderers, dasyus, and appear under various names, Vritras, Panis, Daityas, Rakshasas, Yatudhanas. The wealth itself may be the substance of mental light and knowledge or of vital health, delight & longevity or of material strength & beauty or it may be external possessions, cattle, progeny, empire, women. A close, symbolic and to modern ideas mystic parallelism stood established in the Vedic mind between the external & the internal wealth, as between the outer sacrifice which earned from the gods the external wealth & the inner sacrifice which brought by the aid of the gods the internal riches. In this system the word vja represents that amount & substantial energy of the stuff of force in the dhanam brought to the service of the sacrificer for the great Jivayaja, our daily & continual life-sacrifice. It is a substantial wealth, vjavad dhanam that the gods are asked to bring with them. We see then in what sense Saraswati, a goddess purely mental in her functions of speech and knowledge, can be vjebhir vjinvat. Vjin is that which is composed of vja, substantial energy; the plural vj h or vj ni the particular substantialities of various composed. For the rest, to no other purpose can a deity of speech & knowledge be vjebhir vjinvat. In what appropriateness or coherent conceivable sense can the goddess of knowledge be possessed of material wealth or full-stored with material food, ghee & butter, beef & mutton? If it be suggested that Speech of the mantras was believed by these old superstitious barbarians to bring them their ghee & butter, beef & mutton, the answer is that this is not what the language of the hymns expresses. Saraswati herself is said to be vjinvat, possessed of substance of food; she is not spoken of as being the cause of fullness of food or wealth to others.

1.09 - Concentration - Its Spiritual Uses, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset   Every idea that you have in the mind has a counterpart in a word; the word and the thought are inseparable. The external part of one and the same thing is what we call word, and the internal part is what we call thought. No man can, by analysis, separate thought from word. The idea that language was created by men certain men sitting together and deciding upon words, has been proved to be wrong. So long as man has existed there have been words and language. What is the connection between an idea and a word? Although we see that there must always be a word with a thought, it is not necessary that the same thought requires the same word. The thought may be the same in twenty different countries, yet the language is different. We must have a word to express each thought, but these words need not necessarily have the same sound. Sounds will vary in different nations. Our commentator says, "Although the relation between thought and word is perfectly natural, yet it does not mean a rigid connection between one sound and one idea." These sounds vary, yet the relation between the sounds and the thoughts is a natural one. The connection between thoughts and sounds is good only if there be a real connection between the thing signified and the symbol; until then that symbol will never come into general use. A symbol is the manifester of the thing signified, and if the thing signified has already an existence, and if, by experience, we know that the symbol has expressed that thing many times, then we are sure that there is a real relation between them. Even if the things are not present, there will be thousands who will know them by their symbols. There must be a natural connection between the symbol and the thing signified; then, when that symbol is pronounced, it recalls the thing signified. The commentator says the manifesting word of God is Om. Why does he emphasise this word? There are hundreds of words for God. One thought is connected with a thousand words; the idea "God" is connected with hundreds of words, and each one stands as a symbol for God. Very good. But there must be a generalization among all time words, some substratum, some common ground of all these symbols, and that which is the common symbol will be the best, and will really represent them all. In making a sound we use the larynx and the palate as a sounding board. Is there any material sound of which all other sounds must be manifestations, one which is the most natural sound? Om (Aum) is such a sound, the basis of all sounds. The first letter, A, is the root sound, the key, pronounced without touching any part of the tongue or palate; M represents the last sound in the series, being produced by the closed lips, and the U rolls from the very root to the end of the sounding board of the mouth. Thus, Om represents the whole phenomena of sound-producing. As such, it must be the natural symbol, the matrix of all the various sounds. It denotes the whole range and possibility of all the words that can be made. Apart from these speculations, we see that around this word Om are centred all the different religious ideas in India; all the various religious ideas of the Vedas have gathered themselves round this word Om. What has that to do with America and England, or any other country? Simply this, that the word has been retained at every stage of religious growth in India, and it has been manipulated to mean all the various ideas about God. Monists, dualists, mono-dualists, separatists, and even atheists took up this Om. Om has become the one symbol for the religious aspiration of the vast majority of human beings. Take, for instance, the English word God. It covers only a limited function, and if you go beyond it, you have to add adjectives, to make it Personal, or Impersonal, or Absolute God. So with the words for God in every other language; their signification is very small. This word Om, however, has around it all the various significances. As such it should be accepted by everyone.   28. The repetition of this (Om) and meditating on its meaning (is the way).   --   It is by the practice of meditation of these three that we come to the state where these three do not mix. We can get rid of them. We will first try to understand what these three are. Here is the Chitta; you will always remember the simile of the mind-stuff to a lake, and the vibration, the word, the sound, like a pulsation coming over it. You have that calm lake in you, and I pronounce a word, "Cow". As soon as it enters through your ears there is a wave produced in your Chitta along with it. So that wave represents the idea of the cow, the form or the meaning as we call it. The apparent cow that you know is really the wave in the mind-stuff that comes as a reaction to the internal and external sound vibrations. With the sound, the wave dies away; it can never exist without a word. You may ask how it is, when we only think of the cow, and do not hear a sound. You make that sound yourself. You are saying "cow" faintly in your mind, and with that comes a wave. There cannot be any wave without this impulse of sound; and when it is not from outside, it is from inside, and when the sound dies, the wave dies. What remains? The result of the reaction, and that is knowledge. These three are so closely combined in our mind that we cannot separate them. When the sound comes, the senses vibrate, and the wave rises in reaction; they follow so closely upon one another that there is no discerning one from the other. When this meditation has been practiced for a long time, memory, the receptacle of all impressions, becomes purified, and we are able clearly to distinguish them from one another. This is called Nirvitarka, concentration without question.

1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   First, it is a great exaggeration to deduce from your difficulties any idea of unfitness or of going away or being sent away or giving up the Yoga. I am certainly not going to pronounce you unfit because you want the Ananda; on such grounds I would have to pronounce myself unfit, because I have myself wanted it and many other things besides. And if I were to send you away because you are not entirely disinterested in the approach to the Divine, I should have, to be consistent, to send practically the whole Asram packing. I do not know why you are allowing yourself to indulge in such black and despondent thoughts - there is no ground for them at all, and I do not think I gave any grounds for them in my letter. Whatever your difficulties, the Mother and I have every intention of seeing you through them, and I think that you too, whatever suggestions your vital depression may make to you at the moment, have every intention of going through to the end of the Path. I imagine you have gone too far on it to go back and, if you wanted to, your psychic being which has persistently pushed you towards it, would not allow such a retreat.   Next, it was not my intention to say that it was wrong to aspire for the Ananda. What I wanted to point out was the condition for the permanent possession of the Ananda (intimations, visits, downrushes of it one can have before); the essential condition for it is a change of consciousness, the coming of peace, light, etc., all that brings about the transition from the normal to the spiritualised nature. And that being so, it is better to make this change of consciousness the first object of the sadhana. On

11.03 - Cosmonautics, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    The incidence of illness, of disequilibrium among human beings, is a pronounced phenomenon in modern age. Stability, steadiness, measure, all the qualities that made for a balanced sober life in the past are on the decline, have almost disappeared. Ill-health, malaise, imbalance, physical and mental, are reigning supreme. And the million doctors upon earth are finding it difficult to heal their patients or even themselves.    Is that the reason why man has now become so eager to quit earthly atmosphere and soar up into starry spaces? In any case, the human body is now, at least by way of experiment, being shifted to other atmospheres, other modes of living. The important, the most significant thing however is not so much the discovery of new regions of the universe but new dimensions of the human body itself. No doubt this is just the beginning, but there are indications, pointers towards unthinkable possibilities in the future. Men are now training themselves to be inhabitants not of earth only but of distant places. It is a demonstration of developments on unusual lines for the body. At present to dwell or even to stay in unearthly regions, the earthly body has to be protected, buttressed, propped up, with much care and skill by a mechanical outfitcrude scaffolding after all. In the future, other simpler and natural ways will surely be found.

1.10 - THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy   _pain_ was pronounced holy: the "pains of childbirth" sanctify pain in   general,--all becoming and all growth, everything that guarantees the   --   to life itself, procreation, is pronounced _holy,_ ... It was only   Christianity which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made

1.12 - Brute Neighbors, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy   Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a winged cat in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Bakers. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun,) but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her wings, which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poets cat be winged as well as his horse?   In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult and ba the in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain.

1.12 - Dhruva commences a course of religious austerities, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism   The gods, being thus pacified by the supreme, saluted him respectfully and retired, and, preceded by Indra, returned to their habitations: but Hari, who is all things, assuming a shape with four arms, proceeded to Dhruva, being pleased with his identity of nature, and thus addressed him: "Son of Uttānapāda, be prosperous. Contented with thy devotions, I, the giver of boons, am present. Demand what boon thou desirest. In that thou hast wholly disregarded external objects, and fixed thy thoughts on me, I am well pleased with thee. Ask, therefore, a suitable reward." The boy, hearing these words of the god of gods, opened his eyes, and beholding that Hari whom he had before seen in his meditations actually in his presence, bearing in his hands the shell, the discus, the mace, the bow, and scimetar, and crowned with a diadem, the bowed his head down to earth; the hair stood erect on his brow, and his heart was depressed with awe. He reflected how best he should offer thanks to the god of gods; what he could say in his adoration; what words were capable of expressing his praise: and being overwhelmed with perplexity, he had recourse for consolation to the deity. "If," he exclaimed, "the lord is contented with my devotions, let this be my reward, that I may know how to praise him as I wish. How can I, a child, pronounce his praises, whose abode is unknown to Brahmā and to others learned in the Vedas? My heart is overflowing with devotion to thee: oh lord, grant me the faculty worthily to lay mine adorations at thy feet."   Whilst lowly bowing, with his hands uplifted to his forehead, Govinda, the lord of the world, touched the son of Uttānapāda with the tip of his conch-shell, and immediately the royal youth, with a countenance sparkling with delight, praised respectfully the imperishable protector of living beings. "I venerate," exclaimed Dhruva, "him whose forms are earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, the first element (Aha

1.12 - On lying., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset   Let no one with right principles suppose that the sin of lying is a small matter, for the All-Holy Spirit pronounced the most awful sentence of all against it above all sins. If Thou wilt destroy all who tell lies, as David says to God, what will they suffer who stitch an oath on to a lie?   I have seen some who, priding themselves on their skill in lying, and exciting laughter by their jests and twaddle, have pitiably destroyed in their hearers the habit of mourning.

1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   After regaining partial consciousness he uttered only the sound 'Ka! Ka! Ka!' He could not fully pronounce 'Kli'."   A DEVOTEE: "Sir, you met Pundit Vidyasagar. What did you think of him?"

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga   There exists in India a secret knowledge based upon sounds and the differences of vibratory modes found on different planes of consciousness. If we pronounce the sound OM, for example, we clearly feel its vibrations enveloping the head centers, while the sound RAM affects the navel center. And since each of our centers of consciousness is in direct contact with a plane, we can, by the repetition of certain sounds (japa), come into contact with the corresponding plane of consciousness.200 This is the basis of an entire spiritual discipline, called "tantric" because it originates from sacred texts known as Tantra. The basic or essential sounds that have the power to establish the contact are called mantras. The mantras, usually secret and given to the disciple by his Guru,201 are of all kinds (there are many levels within each plane of consciousness), and may serve the most contradictory purposes. By combining certain sounds, one can at the lower levels of consciousness generally at the vital level come in contact with the corresponding forces and acquire many strange powers: some mantras can cause death (in five minutes, with violent vomiting), some mantras can strike with precision a particular part or organ of the body, some mantras can cure, some mantras can start a fire, protect, or cast spells. This type of magic, or chemistry of vibrations, derives simply from a conscious handling of the lower vibrations. But there is a higher magic, which also derives from handling vibrations, on higher planes of consciousness. This is poetry, music, the spiritual mantras of the Upanishads and the Veda, the mantras given by a Guru to his disciple to help him come consciously into direct contact with a special plane of consciousness, a force or a divine being. In this case, the sound holds in itself the power of experience and realization it is a sound that makes one see.   Similarly, poetry and music, which are but unconscious processes of handling these secret vibrations, can be a powerful means of opening up the consciousness. If we could compose conscious poetry or music through the conscious manipulation of higher vibrations, we would create masterpieces endowed with initiatory powers. Instead of a poetry that is a fantasy of the intellect and a nautch-girl of the mind,202 as Sri Aurobindo put it, we would create a mantric music or poetry to bring the gods into our life. 203 For true poetry is action; it opens little inlets in the consciousness we are so walled in, so barricaded! through which the Real can enter. It is a mantra of the Real,204 an initiation. This is what the Vedic rishis and the seers of the Upanishads did with their mantras, which have the power of communicating illumination to one who is ready. 205 This is what Sri Aurobindo has explained in his Future Poetry and what he has accomplished himself in Savitri.

1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression c the coloured peoples. For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Christian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant. Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organization. Moreover their eternity-philosophy preserved them from the materialistic apocalypticism of that progress-worship which in recent times has justified every kind of iniquity from war and revolution to sweated labour, slavery and the exploitation of savages and childrenhas justified them on the ground that the supreme good is in future time and that any temporal means, however intrinsically horrible, may be used to achieve that good. Because Quaker theology was a form of eternity-philosophy, Quaker political theory rejected war and persecution as means to ideal ends, denounced slavery and proclaimed racial equality. Members of other denominations had done good work for the African victims of the white mans rapacity. One thinks, for example, of St. Peter Claver at Cartagena. But this heroically charitable slave of the slaves never raised his voice against the institution of slavery or the criminal trade by which it was sustained; nor, so far as the extant documents reveal, did he ever, like John Woolman, attempt to persuade the slave-owners to free their human chattels. The reason, presumably, was that Claver was a Jesuit, vowed to perfect obedience and constrained by his theology to regard a certain political and ecclesiastical organization as being the mystical body of Christ. The heads of this organization had not pronounced against slavery or the slave trade. Who was he, Pedro Claver, to express a thought not officially approved by his superiors?   Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Christianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of mans temporal ends. Even St. Francis attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick mans craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciples intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property. It was not until the nineteenth century, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruthless with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex hypothesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically.

1.1.3 - Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Then for the tumultuous activity of the mind which prevents your concentration. But that or else a more tiresome obstinate grinding mechanical activity is always the difficulty when one tries to concentrate and it takes a long time to get the better of it. That or the habit of sleep which prevents either the waking concentration or the conscious samadhi or the absorbed and all-excluding trance which are the three forms that Yogic concentration takes. But it is surely ignorance of Yoga, its processes and its difficulties that makes you feel desperate and pronounce yourself unfit for ever because of this quite ordinary obstacle. The insistence of the ordinary mind and its wrong reasonings, sentiments and judgments, the random activity of the thinking mind in concentration or its mechanical activity, the slowness of response to the veiled or the initial touch are the ordinary obstacles the mind imposes just as pride, ambition, vanity, sex, greed, grasping of things for ones own ego are the difficulties and obstacles offered by the vital. As the vital difficulties can be fought down and conquered, so can the mental. Only one has to see that these are the inevitable obstacles and neither cling to them nor be terrified or overwhelmed because they are there. One has to persevere till one can stand back from the mind as from the vital and feel the deeper and larger mental and vital Purushas within one which are capable of silence, capable of a straight receptivity of the true Word and Force as of the true silence. If the nature takes the way of fighting down the difficulties first, then the first half of the way is long and tedious and the complaint of the want of the response of the Divine arises. But really the Divine is there all the time, working behind the veil as well as waiting for the recognition of his response and for the response to the response to be possible.   ***

1.13 - Posterity of Dhruva, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism   The mighty Prithu, the son of Veda, being thus invested with universal dominion by those who were skilled in the rite, soon removed the grievances of the people whom his father had oppressed, and from winning their affections he derived the title of Rāja, or king[6]. The waters became solid, when he traversed the ocean: the mountains opened him a path: his banner passed unbroken (through the forests): the earth needed not cultivation; and at a thought food was prepared: all kine were like the cow of plenty: honey was stored in every flower. At the sacrifice of the birth of Prithu, which was performed by Brahmā, the intelligent Sūta (herald or bard) was produced, in the juice of the moon-plant, on the very birth-day[7]: at that great sacrifice also was produced the accomplished Māgadha: and the holy sages said to these two persons, "Praise ye the king Prithu, the illustrious son of Veṇa; for this is your especial function, and here is a fit subject for your praise." But they respectfully replied to the Brahmans, "We know not the acts of the new-born king of the earth; his merits are not understood by us; his fame is not spread abroad: inform us upon what subject we may dilate in his praise." "Praise the king," said the Ṛṣis, "for the acts this heroic monarch will perform; praise him for the virtues he will display." The king, hearing these words, was much pleased, and reflected that persons acquire commendation by virtuous actions, and that consequently his virtuous conduct would be the theme of the eulogium which the bards were about to pronounce: whatever merits, then, they should panegyrize in their encomium, he determined that he would endeavour to acquire; and if they should point out what faults ought to be avoided, he would try to shun them. He therefore listened attentively, as the sweet-voiced encomiasts celebrated the future virtues of Prithu, the enlightened son of Veṇa.   "The king is a speaker of truth, bounteous, an observer of his promises; he is wise, benevolent, patient, valiant, and a terror to the wicked; he knows his duties; he acknowledges services; he is compassionate and kind-spoken; he respects the venerable; he performs sacrifices; he reverences the Brahmans; he cherishes the good; and in administering justice is indifferent to friend or foe."

1.14 - Noise, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   We are really trying to discuss something totally different; something practical in daily life. Very well, then; you remark that Goetia actually means "howling", that we use officially the Bell, the Tom-Tom, the Incantations, the Mantras and so on. All quite true, about Magick; but none of it applies to Yoga, for even with the Mantra the practice is to go faster and more quietly as one proceeds, until it becomes "Mental Muttering." M is the letter that is pronounced with the lips firmly closed; and Silence is the meaning of the MU root of Mystery.   However, we must admit the value of rhythmical, one-pointed sound; that is very different from Noise. Old French has noise, nose, a debate, quarrel, noise; Provenal noisa, nausa, nueiza. But Diez claims the derivation from nausea and by the Living Jingo, I consider Diez a hundred per cent white man!

1.15 - The Value of Philosophy, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy   Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish the truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such attempts, it is necessary to take a survey of human knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; but if the investigations of our previous chapters have not led us astray, we shall be compelled to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious beliefs. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of philosophy any definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.   The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

1.15 - The world overrun with trees; they are destroyed by the Pracetasas, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism   ga, Padma, Agni, and Bhāgavata Purāṇas tell the story much as in the text, and not unfrequently in the same words. In general they merely refer to the imprecation denounced upon Nārada, as above. The Bhāgavata specifies the imprecation to be perpetual peripateticism. Dakṣa says to him, 'There shall not be a resting-place for thee in all these regions.' The Kūrma repeats the imprecation merely to the effect that Nārada shall perish, and gives no legend. In the Brahma Vaivartta, Nārada is cursed by Brahmā, on a similar occasion, to become the chief of the Gandharvas, whence his musical propensities: but the Bhāgavata, VI. 7, has the reverse of this legend, and makes him first a Gandharva, then a Śūdra, then the son of Brahmā. The Brāhma P., and after it the Hari Vaṃśa and the Vāyu P., have a different and not very intelligible story. Dakṣa, being about to pronounce an imprecation upon Nārada, was appeased by Brahmā and the Ṛṣis, and it was agreed between them that Nārada should be again born, as the son of Kaśyapa, by one of Dakṣa's daughters. This seems to be the gist of the legend, but it is very confusedly told. The version of the Brāhma P., which is the same as that of Hari Vaṃśa, may be thus rendered: "The smooth-speaking Nārada addressed the sons of Dakṣa for their destruction and his own; for the Muni Kaśyapa begot him as a son, who was the son of Brahmā, on the daughter of Dakṣa, through fear of the latter's imprecation. He was formerly the son of Parameṣṭhī (Brahmā), and the excellent sage Kaśyapa next begot him, as if he were his father, on Asiknī, the daughter of Vīraṇa. Whilst he was engaged in beguiling the sons of the patriarch, Dakṣa, of resistless power, determined on his destruction; but he was solicited by Brahmā, in the presence of the great sages, and it was agreed between them that Nārada, the son of Brahmā, should be born of a daughter of Dakṣa. Consequently Dakṣa gave his daughter to Parameṣṭhī, and by her was Nārada born." Now several difficulties occur here. Asiknī is the wife, not the daughter, of Dakṣa; but this may be a blunder of the compiler, for in the parallel passage of the Vāyu no name occurs. In the next place, who is this daughter? for, as we shall see, the progeny of all Dakṣa's daughters are fully detailed, and in no p. 119 authority consulted is Nārada mentioned as the son of either of them, or as the son of Kaśyapa. Dakṣa, too, gives his daughter, not to Kaśyapa, but to Parameṣṭhī, or Brahmā. The commentator on the Hari Vaṃśa solves this by saying he gives her to Brahmā for Kaśyapa. The same bargain is noticed in the Vāyu, but Nārada is also said there to be adopted by Kaśyapa. Again, however, it gives Dakṣa's imprecation in the same words as the Hari Vaṃśa; a passage, by the way, omitted in the Brāhma: 'Nārada, perish (in your present form), and take up your abode in the womb.' Whatever may be the original of this legend, it is evidently imperfectly given by the authorities here cited. The French translation of the passage in the Hari Vaṃśa can scarcely be admitted as correct: assuredly is not 'le Devarchi Dakcha, epoux d''Asiknī, fille de Virāna, fut l'aïeul de cet illustri mouni ainsi régénéré.' ### is more consistently said by the commentator to mean Kaśyapa. The Vāyu P. in another part, a description of the different orders of Ṛṣis, states that the Devarṣis Parvata and Nāreda were sons of Kaśyapa: In the account of Kārttavīrya, in the Brāhma P. and Hari Vaṃśa, Nārada is introduced as a Gandharva, the son of Varidāsa; being the same, according to the commentator on the latter, as the Gandharva elsewhere called Upavarhana.   [11]: The prior specification (p. 115) was fifty. The Mahābhārata, Adi P. 113, and, again, Mokṣa Dharma, has the same number. The Bhāgavata, Kūrma, Padma, Li

1.16 - ON LOVE OF THE NEIGHBOUR, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy   The you is older than the l; the you has been pronounced holy, but not yet the 1: so man crowds toward   his neighbor.

1.17 - Religion as the Law of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   But here comes in an ambiguity which brings in a deeper source of divergence. For by spirituality religion seems often to mean something remote from earthly life, different from it, hostile to it. It seems to condemn the pursuit of earthly aims as a trend opposed to the turn to a spiritual life and the hopes of man on earth as an illusion or a vanity incompatible with the hope of man in heaven. The spirit then becomes something aloof which man can only reach by throwing away the life of his lower members. Either he must abandon this nether life after a certain point, when it has served its purpose, or must persistently discourage, mortify and kill it. If that be the true sense of religion, then obviously religion has no positive message for human society in the proper field of social effort, hope and aspiration or for the individual in any of the lower members of his being. For each principle of our nature seeks naturally for perfection in its own sphere and, if it is to obey a higher power, it must be because that power gives it a greater perfection and a fuller satisfaction even in its own field. But if perfectibility is denied to it and therefore the aspiration to perfection taken away by the spiritual urge, then it must either lose faith in itself and the power to pursue the natural expansion of its energies and activities or it must reject the call of the spirit in order to follow its own bend and law, dharma. This quarrel between earth and heaven, between the spirit and its members becomes still more sterilising if spirituality takes the form of a religion of sorrow and suffering and austere mortification and the gospel of the vanity of things; in its exaggeration it leads to such nightmares of the soul as that terrible gloom and hopelessness of the Middle Ages in their worst moment when the one hope of mankind seemed to be in the approaching and expected end of the world, an inevitable and desirable Pralaya. But even in less pronounced and intolerant forms of this pessimistic attitude with regard to the world, it becomes a force for the discouragement of life and cannot, therefore, be a true law and guide for life. All pessimism is to that extent a denial of the Spirit, of its fullness and power, an impatience with the ways of God in the world, an insufficient faith in the divine Wisdom and Will that created the world and for ever guide it. It admits a wrong notion about that supreme Wisdom and Power and therefore cannot itself be the supreme wisdom and power of the spirit to which the world can look for guidance and for the uplifting of its whole life towards the Divine.   The Western recoil from religion, that minimising of its claim and insistence by which Europe progressed from the mediaeval religious attitude through the Renascence and the Reformation to the modern rationalistic attitude, that making of the ordinary earthly life our one preoccupation, that labour to fulfil ourselves by the law of the lower members, divorced from all spiritual seeking, was an opposite error, the contrary ignorant extreme, the blind swing of the pendulum from a wrong affirmation to a wrong negation. It is an error because perfection cannot be found in such a limitation and restriction; for it denies the complete law of human existence, its deepest urge, its most secret impulse. Only by the light and power of the highest can the lower be perfectly guided, uplifted and accomplished. The lower life of man is in form undivine, though in it there is the secret of the divine, and it can only be divinised by finding the higher law and the spiritual illumination. On the other hand, the impatience which condemns or despairs of life or discourages its growth because it is at present undivine and is not in harmony with the spiritual life, is an equal ignorance, andha tama. The world-shunning monk, the mere ascetic may indeed well find by this turn his own individual and peculiar salvation, the spiritual recompense of his renunciation and Tapasya, as the materialist may find by his own exclusive method the appropriate rewards of his energy and concentrated seeking; but neither can be the true guide of mankind and its law-giver. The monastic attitude implies a fear, an aversion, a distrust of life and its aspirations, and one cannot wisely guide that with which one is entirely out of sympathy, that which one wishes to minimise and discourage. The sheer ascetic spirit, if it directed life and human society, could only prepare it to be a means for denying itself and getting away from its own motives. An ascetic guidance might tolerate the lower activities, but only with a view to persuade them in the end to minimise and finally cease from their own action. But a spirituality which draws back from life to envelop it without being dominated by it does not labour under this disability. The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it.

1.20 - RULES FOR HOUSEHOLDERS AND MONKS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   "The grace of God falls alike on all His children, learned and illiteratewhoever longs for Him. The father has the same love for all his children. Suppose a father has five children. One calls him 'Baba', some 'Ba', and some 'Pa'. These last cannot pronounce the whole word. Does the father love those who address him as 'Baba' more than those who call him 'Pa'? The father knows that these last are simply too young to say 'Baba'   correctly.

1.20 - Visnu appears to Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism   Whilst with mind intent on Viṣṇu, he thus pronounced his praises, the divinity, clad in yellow robes, suddenly appeared before him. Startled at the sight, with hesitating speech Prahlāda pronounced repeated salutations to Viṣṇu, and said, "Oh thou who removest all worldly grief, Keśava, be propitious unto me; again sanctify me, Achyuta, by thy sight." The deity replied, "I am pleased with the faithful attachment thou hast shown to me: demand from me, Prahlāda, whatever thou desirest." Prahlāda replied, "In all the thousand births through which I may be doomed to pass, may my faith in thee, Achyuta, never know decay; may passion, as fixed as that which the worldly-minded feel for sensual pleasures, ever animate my heart, always devoted unto thee." Bhagavān answered, "Thou hast already devotion unto me, and ever shalt have it: now choose some boon, whatever is in thy wish." Prahlāda then said, "I have been hated, for that I assiduously proclaimed thy praise: do thou, oh lord, pardon in my father this sin that he Bath committed. Weapons have been hurled against me; I have been thrown into the flames; I have been bitten by venomous snakes; and poison has been mixed with my food; I have been bound and cast into the sea; and heavy rocks have been heaped upon me: but all this, and whatever ill beside has been wrought against me; whatever wickedness has been done to me, because I put my faith in thee; all, through thy mercy, has been suffered by me unharmed: and do thou therefore free my father from this iniquity." To this application Viṣṇu replied, "All this shall be unto thee, through my favour: but I give thee another boon: demand it, son of the Asura." Prahlāda answered and said, "All my desires, oh lord, have been fulfilled by the boon that thou hast granted, that my faith in thee shall never know decay. Wealth, virtue, love, are as nothing; for even liberation is in his reach whose faith is firm in thee, root of the universal world." Viṣṇu said, "Since thy heart is filled immovably with trust in me, thou shalt, through my blessing, attain freedom from existence." Thus saying, Viṣṇu vanished from his sight; and Prahlāda repaired to his father, and bowed down before him. His father kissed him on the forehead[1], and embraced him, and shed tears, and said, "Dost thou live, my son?" And the great Asura repented of his former cruelty, and treated him with kindness: and Prahlāda, fulfilling his duties like any other youth, continued diligent in the service of his preceptor and his father. After his father had been put to death by Viṣṇu in the form of the man-lion[2], Prahlāda became the sovereign of the Daityas; and possessing the splendours of royalty consequent upon his piety, exercised extensive sway, and was blessed with a numerous progeny. At the expiration of an authority which was the reward of his meritorious acts, he was freed from the consequences of moral merit or demerit, and obtained, through meditation on the deity, final exemption from existence.   Such, Maitreya, was the Daitya Prahlāda, the wise and faithful worshipper of Viṣṇu, of whom you wished to hear; and such was his miraculous power. Whoever listens to the history of Prahlāda is immediately cleansed from his sins: the iniquities that he commits, by night or by day, shall be expiated by once hearing, or once reading, the history of Prahlāda. The perusal of this history on the day of full moon, of new moon, or on the eighth or twelfth day of the lunation[3], shall yield fruit equal to the donation of a cow[4]. As Viṣṇu protected Prahlāda in all the calamities to which he was exposed, so shall the deity protect him who listens constantly to the tale[5].

1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   obsidian knife with which the hair was cut; another was pronounced   to avert the thunder and lightning which hair-cutting was believed

1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   hear his name pronounced. Hence the names of infants, who are   especially exposed to the assaults of evil sprits, are never spoken;   --   evinces the strongest reluctance to pronounce his own name, while at   the same time he makes no objection at all to other people   --   may pronounce the names of the absent warriors; they must be   referred to as birds. Should a child so far forget itself as to   --   Alfoors of Poso in Celebes will not pronounce their own names. Among   them, accordingly, if you wish to ascertain a person's name, you   --   forbidden, not only to pronounce each other's names, but even to   utter ordinary words which resemble or have a single syllable in   --   Further, a Caffre wife is forbidden to pronounce even mentally the   names of her father-in-law and of all her husband's male relations   --   mention the name of his mother-in-law, nor may she pronounce his;   but he is free to utter words in which the emphatic syllable of her   name occurs. A Kirghiz woman dares not pronounce the names of the   older relations of her husband, nor even use words which resemble   --   their husband's name or to pronounce it even in a dream would bring   him to an untimely end. Among the Sea Dyaks a man may not pronounce   the name of his father-in-law or mother-in-law without incurring the   --   members are not only forbidden to pronounce each other's names; they   may not even look at each other, and the rule gives rise to the most   --   each other's names; they may not even pronounce ordinary words which   chance to be either identical with these names or to have any   --   compelled to do so, they pronounce it in a very low whisper, so   faint that they imagine the spirit cannot hear their voice." Amongst   --   death, ceasing for ever to pronounce the name of the departed, and   eschewing everything that might be regarded as an evocation or   --   person is pronounced, his spirit will return, and as they have no   wish to see it back among them the mention of his name is tabooed   --   the person of the infant, he pronounces which of his progenitors has   reappeared in him, and the child generally, at least among the   --   his life becomes sacred and may not be pronounced under pain of   death. Further, words in the common language which bear any   --   not be uttered in their lifetime. To pronounce them was a legal   offence The pedant in Lucian tells how he fell in with these august

1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity   This astonishing pronouncement on the part   of science seemed at first to do no more than stim-   --   tion the yes or no as an answer to God, pronounced individually   by beings in each one of whom the sense of human freedom and

1.2.2 - The Place of Study in Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   It depends on what you want to do with the language. If it is only to read the literature, then to learn to read, pronounce and understand accurately is sufficient. If it is a complete mastery one wants, then conversation and writing have to be thoroughly learned in that language.   ***

1.23 - On mad price, and, in the same Step, on unclean and blasphemous thoughts., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset   39. During the Holy Liturgy, at the very moment when the Mysteries are being accomplished, this vile enemy often blasphemes the Lord and the holy events that are being enacted. This shows clearly that it is not our soul that pronounces these unspeakable, godless and unthinkable words within us, but the God-hating fiend who fled from heaven for uttering blasphemies against the Lord there too, as it would seem. For if these shameless and disgraceful words are my own, how could I worship after receiving the gift? How can I praise and revile at one and the same time?   40. This deceiver and corrupter of souls has often driven many out of their mind. No other thought is so difficult to tell in confession as this. That is why it often remains with many to the very end of their lives. For nothing gives the demons and bad thoughts such power over us as nourishing and hiding them in our heart unconfessed.

1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy   For twelve years I was the smith of my soul. I put it in the furnace of austerity and burned it in the fire of combat, I laid it on the anvil of reproach and smote it with the hammer of blame until I made of my soul a mirror. Five years I was the mirror of myself and was ever polishing that mirror with divers acts of worship and piety. Then for a year I gazed in contemplation. On my waist I saw a girdle of pride and vanity and self-conceit and reliance on devotion and approbation of my works. I laboured for five years more until that girdle became worn out and I professed Islam anew. I looked and saw that all created things were dead. I pronounced four akbirs over them and returned from the funeral of them all, and without intrusion of creatures, through Gods help alone, I attained unto God.   Bayazid of Bistun   --   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.

1.28 - The Killing of the Tree-Spirit, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   wand as his badge of office, pronounces a verdict of "Guilty," or   "Not guilty." If the verdict is "Guilty," the judge breaks his wand,   --   The judge then pronounces the word "Guilty" thrice in a loud voice,   and orders the crier to behead the King. The crier obeys by striking   --   burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct Pau Pi,   and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and his   --   tree, at which lads disguised as soldiers pronounce sentence of   death. The two old men try to rescue the straw-man and to fly with

1.39 - The Ritual of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   at the bottom of the grave, and the sheikh pronounces these words,   "The old man is dead." Earth is afterwards thrown in to cover the

1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    worth a cent, that is for others to pronounce). That is sufficient to blow the rest of your Jeremiad into smithereens; it proves that the force was and is there and at work and it is only your sweating Herculean labour that prevents you feeling it. Also it is the trickle that gives assurance of the possibility of the downpour. One has only to go on and by one's patience deserve the downpour or else, without deserving, stick on till one gets it. In Yoga itself the experience that is a promise and foretaste but gets shut off till the nature is ready for the fulfilment is a phenomenon familiar to every Yogin when he looks back on his past experience. Such were the brief visitations of Ananda you had some time before. It does not matter if you have not a leechlike tenacity - leeches are not the only type of Yogins.   If you can stick anyhow or get stuck that is sufficient. The fact that you are not Sri Aurobindo (who said you were?) is an inept irrelevance. One needs only to be oneself in a reasonable way and shake off the hump when it is there or allow it to be shaken off without clinging to it with a "leechlike tenacity" worthy of a better cause.

1.4.03 - The Guru, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   But as to what lay behind Ramakrishna's saying and whether he himself meant it to be a general and absolute statement - I do not pronounce.   All that is popular Yoga.3 The Guru's touch or grace may open something, but the difficulties have always to be worked out still.

1.53 - The Propitation of Wild Animals By Hunters, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   orator pronounced a funeral oration over the dead beavers. He   praised their spirit and wisdom. "You will hear no more," said he,

1.54 - Types of Animal Sacrament, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   the threshold, pronounced a blessing on the family in these words:   "May God bless the house and all that belongs to it, cattle, stones,

1.55 - The Transference of Evil, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   and then tied to the victims. After that the army was pronounced   clean and was allowed to return to the capital. So on his accession

1.68 - The God-Letters, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   Maybe it was Devanagri that began it! This "sacred" character, used rightly for Sanskrit alone, is supposed (so Allan Bennett told me) to be constructed on can one call them ideographic? principles. The upright line is the soft palate; the horizontal the hard; and the line between them shows the position of the tongue when one pronounces the letter. He demonstrated this most elegantly for the letter T (); but I was never able to follow this up with most of the other fifty- five (isn't it?) letters.   However, it did start me thinking (why?) about the possibility of a direct relation between the sound of a letter and its meaning in some primitive manner of speech.   --   I put to myself this question: when I pronounce the letter so-and-so, what thought or class of thought tends to arise in my mind? (If you practise this in public, people may wonder!)   With the vowels, one does seem to find a natural correspondence. (I wrote a ballet "The Blind Prophet" on these lines, long before it struck me to investigate on scientific lines). The Hindus knew this with their A-U-M: A is the open breath, U the controlled force, M no breath at all. (See Magick, pp. 45-49). To me I is a shrill feminine sound, as O is the roar of the male. U is pursed, E hardly significant.   --   You will note that either Jupiter or Luna occurs in every case; in two, doubly. Guttur, moreover, is the Latin word for throat. Both planets emphasize the soft open expansive aspects of Nature; they both refer accordingly to the feminine throat, the tube either of present or of future Life. (Jupiter, when in Sagittarius, has an aggressive, masterful, male side; but his letter when there is Samekh.) Now pronounce these letters; observe the motions of opening and expulsion of the breath. Well, then, you will no longer wonder at that list we had in another letter of the words Cwm, coombe, quean, queen, and so on; also (?) quill, queer, quaintest, curious, (?) quick, (?) quince: especially with the U vowel, which sounds prehensile, ready to suck. Kupris (or Ctytto) the Greek or Syrian Aphrodite-Venus, is the outstanding example in Theogony.   But, you ask, what has all this to do with the Gods? Patience, child; this will develop as we proceed. Let us look at the dentals. These, for the profane scholar, include the "sibilants," and "liquids."   --   But that comes later: meanwhile, practise pronouncing these names, as also English words such as Do, Deed, Dare, Drive, Doubt, Dig, Dog, Dive, Duck, Dub while exploring the Abyss of your mind, and see whether you do not soon associate the D-sound with a swift, hard, definite, fertile and completed act. For a fair test, take only the oldest and simplest words, words which might naturally be wanted in the Stone Age.   The next sound-group to be considered may conveniently be N. Here at once we have innumberable Gods and Goddesses flocking up: Nu, Nuit, Ann, Noah, John, Oannes, On, Jonah, et al. With the exception of On, a special case, all these divine or semi-divine Beings refer to the Night, the Starry Heavens, the Element of Water, the North, the Mother-Goddess, as appears when we consider their legends and rituals. N, Nun, means a fish and refers to the water sign of Scorpio. (Note, later when we reach Sh, that Joshua was the Son of Nun.) To me the sound gives the idea of a continuum, an eternal movement; and this is of course our Thelemic conception of the Universe, the "Star Sponge," of which I have elsewhere written at such length.   --   Before cursing my way to dinner oh! how I hate the need of food unless I am practising the "Ninth Art" and disguise myself as a gourmet I must mention the letter M. This is the only letter that can be pronounced with the lips firmly closed; it is the beginning of speech, and so the Mother of the Alphabet. (Distinguish from N, the letter of the Female). Look up Magick again; Chapter VII (pp. 45-49) gives a good account of M in discussing AUM. Note, too, the root MU "to be silent," form which we have the words Mystic, Mystery and others. As the letter of the Mother it appears to this day in nature everywhere, the first call of the child to "Mamma." In nearly every language, moreover, the word for Mother is based on M. Madar, Mere, Mutter, Umm, AMA or AIMA and the rest.   The vibrant R suggests light-rays: Ra, the Sun; the labials bring to mind the curves in Natureyou will soon discover the words with a few little experiments; the T is a D, only lighter, quicker and younger and so Good-night!

1.68 - The Golden Bough, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism   tree three times sunwise, and pronouncing a certain spell, was a   sure charm against all glamour or witchery, and an infallible guard

17.08 - Last Hymn, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Common Mantra have all these, a common gathering to union, one mind common to all, they are together in one knowledge; pronounce for you a common Mantra, I do sacrifice for you with a common offering. [3]    One and common be your aspiration, united your hearts, common to you be your mind,so that close companionship may be yours. [4]

1912 11 19p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    I said yesterday to that young Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious. All my thoughts go towards Thee, all my acts are consecrated to Thee; Thy Presence is for me an absolute, immutable, invariable fact, and Thy Peace dwells constantly in my heart. Yet I know that this state of union is poor and precarious compared with that which it will become possible for me to realise tomorrow, and I am as yet far, no doubt very far, from that identification in which I shall totally lose the notion of the I, of that I, which I still use in order to express myself, but which is each time a constraint, like a term unfit to express the thought that is seeking for expression. It seems to me indispensable for human communication, but all depends on what this I manifests; and how many times already, when I pronounce it, it is Thou who speakest in me, for I have lost the sense of separativity.    But all this is still in embryo and will continue to grow towards perfection. What an appeasing assurance there is in this serene confidence in Thy All-Might!

1916 12 08p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Thou didst wake up the vital being with the magic wand of Thy impulsion and say to it: Awake, bend the bow of thy will, for soon the hour of action will come. Suddenly awakened, the vital being rose up, stretched itself and shook off the dust of its long torpidity; from the elasticity of its members it realised that it was still vigorous and fit for action. And with an ardent faith it answered the sovereign call: Here I am, what dost Thou want of me, O Lord? But before another word could be pronounced, the mind intervened in its turn and, having bowed down to the Master as a mark of obedience, spoke to him thus: Thou knowest, O Lord, that I am surrendered to Thee and that I try my best to be a faithful and pure intermediary of Thy supreme Will. But when I turn my gaze to the earth, I see that however great men may be, their field of action is always terribly restricted. A man, who in his mind and even in his vital being is as vast as the universe or at least as vast as the earth, as soon as he begins to act, becomes enclosed in the narrow bounds of a material action, very limited in its field and results. Whether he be the founder of a religion or a political reformer, he who acts becomes a petty little stone in the general edifice, a grain of sand in the immense dune of human activities. So I do not see any realisable action worthy of the whole beings concentrating on it and making it its purpose of existence. The vital being delights in adventure; but should it be allowed to fling itself into some lamentable adventure unworthy of an instrument conscious of Thy Presence?Fear nothing, was the reply. The vital being will not be allowed to set itself in motion, it will not be asked of thee to contri bute all the effort of thy organising faculties, except when the action proposed is vast and complete enough to fully and usefully employ all the qualities of the being. What exactly this action will be, thou wilt know when it comes to thee. But I am warning thee even now so that thou mayst be prepared not to reject it. I also warn both thee and the vital being that the time for the small, quiet, uniform and peaceful life will be over. There will be effort, danger, the unforeseen, insecurity, but also intensity. Thou wert made for this role. After having accepted for long years to forget it completely, because the time had not come and thou too wert not ready, wake up now to the consciousness that this is indeed thy true role, that it was for this thou wert created.    The vital being was the first to awake to consciousness and, with the enthusiasm natural to it, exclaimed: I am ready, O Lord, Thou mayst rely upon me! The mind, weaker and more timid, though more docile too, added: What Thou willest, I will. Thou knowest well, O Lord, that I belong entirely to Thee. But shall I be able to prove equal to the task, shall I have the power of organising what the vital being has the capacity to realise?It is to prepare thee for this that I am working at the moment; this is why thou art undergoing a discipline of plasticity and enrichment. Do not worry about anything: power comes with the need. Not because thou hast been confined, even as the vital being, to very small activities at a time when this was useful, to allow things which had to be prepared the time for preparationnot because of this, I say, art thou incapable of living outside these smallnesses in a field of action consonant with thy true stature. I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou wilt be.

1951-01-20 - Developing the mind. Misfortunes, suffering; developed reason. Knowledge and pure ideas., #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Above the thoughts, there are pure ideas; thoughts serve to express pure ideas. And Knowledge is well above the domain of pure ideas, as these are well above thought. One must hence know how to climb from thought to pure idea, and pure idea is itself nothing but a translation of Knowledge. And Knowledge can be obtained only by a total identification. So, when you put yourself in your small human mentality, the mentality of the physical consciousness which is at work all the time, which looks at everything, judges everything from the height of its derisive superiority, which says, That is bad, it should not be like that, you are sure to be always mistaken, without exception. The best is to keep silent and look well at things, and little by little you make notes within yourself and keep the record without pronouncing any judgment. When you are able to keep all that within you, quietly, without agitation and present it very calmly before the highest part of your consciousness, with an attempt to maintain an attentive silence, and wait, then perhaps, slowly, as if coming from a far distance and from a great height, something like a light will manifest and you will know a little more of truth.   But as long as you excite your thoughts and cut them up into little bits, you will never know anything. I shall repeat this to you a hundred times if necessary, but I can assure you that so long as you are not convinced of this you will never come out of your ignorance.

1951-03-10 - Fairy Tales- serpent guarding treasure - Vital beings- their incarnations - The vital being after death - Nightmares- vital and mental - Mind and vital after death - The spirit of the form- Egyptian mummies, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Let me explain: in the physical form is found the spirit of the form and this spirit of the form persists for a certain time even when outwardly the person is pronounced dead. And as long as the spirit of the form persists, the body is not destroyed. In ancient Egypt they had this knowledge; they knew that if they prepared the body in a certain way, the spirit of the form would not leave it and the body would not disintegrate. In some cases they have succeeded wonderfully; and if one violates the repose of beings who have remained thus for thousands of years, it is understandable that they may not be very pleased, especially when their repose is violated out of an unhealthy curiosity, legitimised in the cause of science.    In the Muse Guimet in Paris, there are two mummies. Of one practically nothing is left, but in the other the spirit of the form has remained very conscious, conscious to such an extent that one can make contact with the consciousness. Evidently when a bunch of idiots come to stare at you with their blank, saucer-eyes which understand nothing, and say, Oh, it is like this, it is like that, it cannot give much pleasure.

1951-03-14 - Plasticity - Conditions for knowing the Divine Will - Illness - microbes - Fear - body-reflexes - The best possible happens - Theories of Creation - True knowledge - a work to do - the Ashram, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    That is why some thinkers have postulated that the creation was the result of an error. But one finds all possible concepts: perfect creation, then a fault which introduced error; the creation itself as a lower movement which must have an end since it had a beginning; then the Vedic concept, as Sri Aurobindo has explained it, of an unfolding or a progressive and infinite discoveryindefinite and infiniteof the All by Himself. Naturally, all these, these are human interpretations. For the moment, as long as you express yourself in human terms, it is a human translation. But according to the initial position of the human translator (that is to say, whether it is the position which admits original sin or an accident in the creation or a supreme conscious Will from the beginning in a progressive unfolding), in the yogic attitude, the conclusions or descents are different. There are Nihilists, Nirvanists, Illusionists; there are all the religions which admit the devils intervention under one form or another; then there is the pure Vedism which is the eternal unfolding of the Supreme in a progressive objectification. And according to taste, one places himself here, another there or elsewhere, with all the nuances between. But according to what Sri Aurobindo has felt to be the most total truth, according to this conception of a progressive universe, one is led to say that at every minute what happens is the best possible for the unfolding of the whole. It is absolutely logical. And I believe that all contradictions can arise only from a more or less pronounced tendency towards this or that, for one position or another. All who admit the intrusion of a sin or an error and the conflict resulting from it between forces which pull back and those which pull forward, may naturally contest the possibility. But one has to say that for him who is spiritually linked with the supreme Will or the supreme Truth, for him it is necessarily, at every instant, the best that happens for his personal realisation. In all instances it is like that. An unconditional best can be admitted only by one who sees the universe as an unrolling, as the Supremes self-awareness of Himself.    (Silence)

1951-04-09 - Modern Art - Trend of art in Europe in the twentieth century - Effect of the Wars - descent of vital worlds - Formation of character - If there is another war, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    It must be said that the art of the end of the last century, the art of the Second Empire, was bad. It was an age of businessmen, above all an age of bankers, financiers, and taste, upon my word, had gone very low. I dont believe that businessmen are people necessarily very competent in art, but when they wanted their portrait, they wanted a likeness! One could not leave out the least detail, it was quite comic: But you know I have a little wrinkle there, dont forget to put it in! and the lady who said, You know, you must make my shoulders quite round, and so on. So the artists made portraits which indeed turned into photography. They were flat, cold, without soul and without vision. I can name a number of artists of that period, it was truly a shame for art. This lasted till about the end of the last century, till about 1875. Afterwards, there started the reaction. Then there was an entire very beautiful period (I dont say this because I myself was painting) but all the artists I then knew were truly artists, they were serious and did admirable things which have remained admirable. It was the period of the impressionists; it was the period of Manet, it was a beautiful period, they did beautiful things. But people tire of beautiful things as they tire of bad ones. So there were those who wanted to found the Salon dAutomne. They wanted to surpass the others, go more towards the new, towards the truly anti-photographic. And my goodness, they went a little beyond the limit (according to my taste). They began to depreciate RembrandtRembrandt was a dauber, Titian was a dauber, all the great painters of the Italian Renaissance were daubers. You were not to pronounce the name of Raphael, it was a shame. And all the great period of the Italian Renaissance was not worth very much; even the works of Leonardo da Vinci; You know, you must take them and leave them. Then they went a little further; they wanted something entirely new, they became extravagant. And then, from there, there was only one more step to take for the palette-scrapings and then it was finished.    This is the history of art as I knew it.

1954-04-07 - Communication without words - Uneven progress - Words and the Word, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Yes, one may try an experiment. For instance, when two people have attuned their minds, if one thinks, Why, that object ought to be here instead of being there, the other goes quite naturally looking for the object and puts it in its place. He understands quite clearly, he doesnt need to be told. Or else one thinks, It is time to go out, or else, I need such and such a thing, the other will understand perfectly well and does not need to be told. Before reaching so far, something happen very frequently I am speaking of those who exercise a control over themselves and are conscious, people living togetherone answers a question that the other has not pronounced. He had it in his mind, and the other answers: Why, yes, thats how it is; no, that was not done. The other person has not asked but he has heard, has understood, received the message. That happen often, doesnt it? And then, even in things where it is necessary to pronounce words, well, instead of saying ten you may say one, and it is sufficient, the rest is understood, known. And this direct communication is an experience, which may be had very easily. If you speak with a new person and dont have a sufficient mental contact with him, he will use words, which you are accustomed, to use in a particular see and you wont understand him at all, it is as though you did not speak the same language. After a while, if you meet several times and are attuned mentally, you begin to understand each other.   Indeed, words serve only as a vehicle for something that is beyond words and can be expressed without words for those who have a sufficiently developed and precise instrument. When one is truly in the realm of thought, words diminish the meaning. They reduce it, make it narrow, limited, they take away its power. Thought which is projected directly is much more powerful than that expressed through words. Words reduce, limit, harden, take away the suppleness and true strength the life. It is simply because mens apparatus is ill adjusted that we cant have telegraphy without words. If the sets were very well tuned in, one would not have to say even ten words in the whole day, and yet be understood all the while.   --   Thats something else. The Wordit is not pronounced speech and words. There are old traditions, which speak of Let there be light and there was light. The Word is the Mantra. But it is something quite exceptional, it is when the will formulated in the spirit wants to come down into matter and act directly upon matter that it makes use of the soundnot only of the word but of the sound, the vibrations of the soundto act directly upon matter itself, in matter. It is the opposite movement. You are in the region of thought formulated in words, then from there you may rise higher and get an expression of the silent idea; again from there you may rise yet higher and have the Force: the Force is the Consciousness which is the very source of that thought. And so it becomes a total consciousness instead of something formulatedexpressed and formulated. That is, you climb right back to the source. From there, once you possess this light in itself, this consciousness in itself and want to act upon matter to produce a result, this will comes down from plane to plane, and as it becomes more and more material, it defines itself clearly in words or even in a single word, and when it touches matter, instead of its being a silent word, it becomes a word articulated with sounds: a vibrations that will act directly upon matter. But one must first have gone high up above in order to be able to come down again. One must have reached the silent consciousness to be able to descend and do this. It must come from above, the source of this word must be up there, not in any intermediary domain. That then is the Word. And one must do what I have saidit is not an easy thing.   What I have said there (Mother shows The Four Austerities) is that one must keep the right attitude and be mentally silent: an attitude not expressed through words or through formulated thoughts, but through a living state of consciousness. An attitude of aspiration, you understand. I am obliged to put it in words because it must be printed on paper (this is why all this loses three-fourths of its force), but still otherwise it would not be acceptable at all; if I gave you a blank sheet, you would not know exactly what I have put there! I am obliged to put it into words.

1954-06-02 - Learning how to live - Work, studies and sadhana - Waste of the Energy and Consciousness, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Let us take simply a question about your class, shall we?the school class. Even as an undisciplined, disobedient and ill-willed child can disorganise the classand this is why at times one is obliged to put him out, because simply by his presence he can completely disorganise the classso too, if there is a student who has the absolutely right attitude, the will to learn in everything, so that not a word is pronounced, not a gesture made, but it becomes for him an opportunity to learn somethinghis presence can have the opposite effect and help the class to rise in education. If, consciously, he is in this state of intensity of aspiration to learn and correct himself, he communicates this to the others. It is true that in the present state of things the bad example is much more contagious than the good one! It is much easier to follow the bad example than the good, but the good too is useful, and a class with a true student who is there only because he wants to learn and apply himself, who is deeply interested in every opportunity to learn,this creates a solid atmosphere.   You can help.

1954-07-07 - The inner warrior - Grace and the Falsehood - Opening from below - Surrender and inertia - Exclusive receptivity - Grace and receptivity, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Handle victoriously! You dont know what this means? (Pavitra re-reads the sentence which had been incorrectly pronounced.) Opening from below that is, something which comes from above and forces itself up from below, forces its way, makes a kind of road, a path through the resistance thats below, by opening a way, as when one enters a virgin forest and cuts down trees, one opens up a way. Well, it is like that, you see; there is a resistance in the lower levels of matter, and by the pressure from above, it opens the road and makes a passage through the resistance. And then, do you understand what follows?   No. That can victoriously handle.

1955-05-25 - Religion and reason - true role and field - an obstacle to or minister of the Spirit - developing and meaning - Learning how to live, the elite - Reason controls and organises life - Nature is infrarational, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Look, my children, if there are words which you dont understand, take a dictionary and look them up. Because that will teach you the language and at the same time you will learn a little French. But, these words are the same in English; you ought to know them. They are written a little differently, pronounced a little differently, but they are exactly the same words.   Mother, here Sri Aurobindo says: In its own sphere of finite knowledge, science, philosophy, the useful arts, its right, one would think, must be indisputable. But this does not turn out in the end to be true

1955-10-26 - The Divine and the universal Teacher - The power of the Word - The Creative Word, the mantra - Sound, music in other worlds - The domains of pure form, colour and ideas, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   There are all kinds of old traditions, old Hindu traditions, old Chaldean traditions in which the Divine, in the form of the Creator, that is, in His aspect as Creator, pronounces a word which has the power to create. So it is this And it is the origin of the mantra. The mantra is the spoken word which has a creative power. An invocation is made and there is an answer to the invocation; or one makes a prayer and the prayer is granted. This is the Word, the Word which, in its sound it is not only the idea, it is in the sound that theres a power of creation. It is the origin, you see, of the mantra.   In Indian mythology the creator God is Brahma, and I think that it was precisely his power which has been symbolised by this flower, The Creative Word. And when one is in contact with it, the words spoken have a power of evocation or creation or formation or transformation; the words sound always has a power; it has much more power than men think. It may be a good power and it may be a bad power. It creates vibrations which have an undeniable effect. It is not so much the idea as the sound; the idea too has its own power, but in its own domainwhereas the sound has a power in the material world.

1956-01-04 - Integral idea of the Divine - All things attracted by the Divine - Bad things not in place - Integral yoga - Moving idea-force, ideas - Consequences of manifestation - Work of Spirit via Nature - Change consciousness, change world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Instinctively, and without even being aware of it, people persist in wanting the Divine to suit their own conceptions. For, without thinking, quite spontaneously, they tell you, Oh, this is divine, this is not divine! What do they know about it? And then there are those who have not yet set foot on the path, who come here and see things or people, and tell you, This Ashram has nothing to do with the Divine, it is not at all divine. But if you ask them, What is divine?, they would be hard put to it to answer; they know nothing about it. And the less one knows, the more one judges; thats an absolute fact. The more one knows, the less can one pronounce judgments on things.   And there comes a time when all one can do is observe, but to judge is impossible. One can see things, see them as they are, in their relations and in their place, with an awareness of the difference between the place they now are in and the one they ought to occupy for this the great disorder in the world but one does not judge. One simply observes.

1956-05-23 - Yoga and religion - Story of two clergymen on a boat - The Buddha and the Supramental - Hieroglyphs and phonetic alphabets - A vision of ancient Egypt - Memory for sounds, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   They dont know how it used to be pronounced.   Is the language of ancient Egypt contemporaneous with the earliest Sanskrit, or is it earlier still? And then, something else: was the cuneiform script of Assyria phonetic or hieroglyphic?   --   Yes, that seems strange to me. For a book came to my hands in which the names had been restored, and had become a little queer! But still, there must have been a certain way of pronouncing them. I mean, does any other human language go back further than the earliest Sanskrit?   I dont know the dates of the earliest language.   --   I always admire those mediumsusually very simple peoplewho have the exact memory of the sound, who can tell you, Look, I said this and this. In that way one would have the phonetic notation. If I could remember the sounds I pronounced, we would have the notation, but I dont.   I remember this conversation; suddenly I said to myself, It would be so interesting if one could hear that language, and then, from curiosity, How did they discover the pronunciation? How? Besides, all the names we were taught as children, in ancient history, have been changed today. They say they have discovered the sounds, or at least they claim to have discovered them. But I dont know.

1956-11-28 - Desire, ego, animal nature - Consciousness, a progressive state - Ananda, desireless state beyond enjoyings - Personal effort that is mental - Reason, when to disregard it - Reason and reasons, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Ah! no, you are playing with words. That word, as you use it here, has altogether another meaning, altogether; they are two very different things. Reason is a faculty of discernment. You are speaking of the reasons you give yourself for doing one thing or another these are excuses the mind gives itself; but the meaning of the word reason is quite different there, it is not the same word at all, though it is pronounced and written in the same way. You can look it up in your dictionary, it will give you two completely different definitions of the word reason. The reasons one gives oneself that is, the excuses or explanations one gives oneselfare always tinged with egoism and a need to delude oneself that one is indeed a reasonable being. Ninety-nine and a half times out of a hundred this is the way to convince oneself that one is very good, what one does is very good, what one feels is very good, what one thinks is very good; it is to give oneself the impression that one is truly quite satisfactory. So, whatever you do, if you begin to reflect a little, you will tell yourself, But certainly, I did that because it was like that, thats the real reason; I felt like that, but it was because of this, thats an excellent reason and so on. But that has nothing to do with being reasonable; quite the contrary. It is an excellent means of deceiving oneself and keeping oneself from progressing. It is justifying oneself in ones own eyes.   Moreover, these are always reasons which whitewash you and blacken others; it is a means of keeping your conscience very comfortable, isnt it? What happens to you is the fault of circumstances, if you have made a mistake it is the fault of others, if you have a bad reaction it is others who are responsible, etc.; you emerge white as snow from the judgment of your mind.

1957-06-26 - Birth through direct transmutation - Man and woman - Judging others - divine Presence in all - New birth, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Unless your vision is constantly the vision of the Divine in all things, you have not only no right but no capacity to judge the state which others are in. And to pronounce a judgment on someone without having this vision spontaneously, effortlessly, is precisely an example of the mental presumptuousness of which Sri Aurobindo always spoke. And it so happens that one who has the vision, the consciousness, who is capable of seeing the truth in all things, never feels the need to judge anything whatever. For he understands everything and knows everything. Therefore, once and for all, you must tell yourselves that the moment you begin to judge things, people, circumstances, you are in the most total human ignorance.   In short, one could put it like this: when one understands, one no longer judges and when one judges, it means that one doesnt know.

1958-03-05 - Vibrations and words - Power of thought, the gift of tongues, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   The illustration of this power of thinking is what used to be called the gift of tongues. And in fact this phenomenon did take place and can still do so. You think that is to say, what I call thinkingquite independently of words, with the clear vision of things and the power to communicate this vision, this phenomenon of consciousness which can be transmitted; now, you are with a large number of people or with a few people, who speak different languages and are used to thinking only in one particular language, for they have been brought up like that; but you project the vibration of your vision, of your understanding, of your experience of things. To attract the attention of the audience you pronounce some wordsany language at all, the one most familiar to you, thats of no importance but your vision and your emanation are precise enough to be transmitted directly to the brain of the others, and in their brain to be automatically translated into their own language. So, outwardly, you are speaking in French or in English, but each one understands in his own language. People think this is a legendit is not a legend. And it is quite understandable, it is something almost elementary when one goes into the region which I call the region of thought. I am not speaking of supramental things, mind you; it is not a supramental power, it is simply the true realm of thought. That is, you begin to think.   And if you had an audience which also thinks, the phenomenon would take place automatically; only there are very few people who really think. But when they do it powerfully enough, it breaks down the obstacle in the altogether superficial and down-to-earth perception, it rises up like this (gesture showing a curve), it goes up into a higher region of perception, and then, in each one, it falls back into the domain of his own language. And each one says with all the sincerity of his experience, Oh! This person is speaking this language, and another says, Excuse me, he is speaking that one! and the third one says, No, no! He is speaking that other one. And in fact each one is telling the truth; he probably does not speak any of them except the one he normally uses, or one or two others. But, its that, it does this (same gesture) and then falls back like radio-waves.

1958-09-10 - Magic, occultism, physical science, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Magic? It is a knowledge that has been reduced to purely material formulas. They are some kind of words or numbers or combinations of words and numbers, which, if they are simply pronounced or written, even by someone who has no inner power, must act. In occultism, this is what corresponds to chemical formulas in science. You see, in science you have chemical formulas for combining certain elements and producing others from them; even if you do not have any mental or vital or even physical power, if you just follow to the letter the formula you have, you obtain the required resultit is enough simply to have a memory. Well, the same thing has been tried in occultism, making combinations of sounds, letters, numbers, words, which, by their inherent qualities, have the power to obtain a certain result. In this way, any fool, if he learns this and does exactly what he is told, obtainsor believes he will obtain the result he wants. While let us take the mantra, for instance, which is a form of occultism; unless the mantra is given by a guru and the guru transmits his occult or spiritual power to you with the mantra, you may repeat your mantra thousands of times, it will have no effect.   That is to say, in true occultism, one must have the quality, the ability, the inner gift in order to use it, and that is the safeguard. True occultism cannot be practised by any fool. And this is no longer magicnei ther white magic nor black nor goldenis not magic at all, it is a spiritual power which must be acquired by long discipline; and finally, it is given to you only by a divine grace.

1964 02 05 - 98, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    But then, when you have had the experience very sincerely that is, when you are not fooling yourselfit is necessarily only one point, one way of saying the thing, thats all. And it cannot be more than that. Besides, it is very easy to observe that when you are in the habit of using a particular language, it comes in that language; for me it always comes either in English or in French, it does not come in Chinese or in Japanese! The words are inevitably English or French; and sometimes there is a Sanskrit word but that is because, physically, I learnt Sanskrit. I have occasionally heardnot physicallySanskrit pronounced by another being; but it does not crystallise, it remains nebulous; and when I come back to an entirely material consciousness, I remember a vague sound, not a precise word. Therefore, it is always an individual angle from the very moment it is formulated.    You must have a kind of very austere sincerity. You are seized with enthusiasm, because the experience brings an extraordinary power: the Power is there it is there, before the words, and it diminishes with the words but the Power is there and with this Power you feel very universal, you have the feeling: It is a universal revelationyes, it is a universal revelation, but when you put it into words, it is no longer universal; then it is relevant only for minds that are built to understand this way of speaking. The Force is behind, but you have to go beyond the words.

1.anon - Less profitable, #Anonymous - Poems, #unset, #Zen   When Enkidu heard this pronouncement of Ishtar,   he wrenched off the Bull's hindquarter and flung it in her face:

1.anon - The Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet X, #Anonymous - Poems, #unset, #Zen   After Enlil had pronounced the blessing,'"   the Anunnaki, the Great Gods, assembled.

1f.lovecraft - Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen    was more pronounced directly in front of meand my chair faces the    southeast wing; away from the road, directly in line with the swamp at

1f.lovecraft - Herbert West-Reanimator, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen    the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution    inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try

1f.lovecraft - In the Walls of Eryx, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen    pronounced fit for duty.    Leaving the Crystal Companys post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I

1f.lovecraft - Medusas Coil, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen    The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marcelines name. At the    same time I saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the

1f.lovecraft - Sweet Ermengarde, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen    speak! Ermengarde, my ideal [he pronounced it i-deel!], life has become    an empty thing without you. Beloved of my spirit, behold a suppliant