--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

100

   9 Occultism
   8 Philosophy
   2 Integral Theory
   1 Integral Yoga
   1 Christianity


   13 Sri Aurobindo
   12 The Mother
   8 Aleister Crowley
   6 Sri Ramakrishna
   3 Friedrich Nietzsche
   3 Carl Jung
   2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   2 Jean Gebser


   11 The Mothers Agenda
   9 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   7 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   5 Magick Without Tears
   5 Essays On The Gita
   4 The Secret Doctrine
   4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
   4 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
   3 Twilight of the Idols
   3 The Life Divine
   3 Liber ABA
   3 Aion
   2 Words Of Long Ago
   2 The Ever-Present Origin
   2 Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   2 Talks
   2 Isha Upanishad
   2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

0.06_-_1956, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   What if the human is too heavy, too narrow, too obscure to follow you?   No, it is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. It is not that the Divine in his divinity is opposed to his own manifested self - He is very far beyond, beyond the necessity for Grace; He perceives his unique and exclusive responsibility, and that it is He and He alone who must change in His Manifestation so that all may change.

1.00_-_Gospel, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      Within a very short time Sri Ramakrishna attracted the notice of Mathur Bbu, who was impressed by the young man's religious fervour and wanted him to participate in the worship in the Kli temple. But Sri Ramakrishna loved his freedom and was indifferent to any worldly career. The profession of the priesthood in a temple founded by a rich woman did not appeal to his mind. Further, he hesitated to take upon himself the responsibility for the ornaments and jewellery of the temple. Mathur had to wait for a suitable occasion.      --      One day Girish felt depressed because he was unable to submit to any routine of spiritual discipline. In an exalted mood the Master said to him: "All right, give me your power of attorney. Henceforth I assume responsibility for you. You need not do anything." Girish heaved a sigh of relief. He felt happy to think that Sri Ramakrishna had assumed his spiritual responsibilities. But poor Girish could not then realize that he also, on his part, had to give up his freedom and make of himself a puppet in Sri Ramakrishna's hands. The Master began to discipline him according to this new attitude.      One day Girish said about a trifling matter, "Yes, I shall do this." "No, no!" the Master corrected him. "You must not speak in that egotistic manner. You should say, 'God willing, I shall do it'." Girish understood. Thenceforth he tried to give up all idea of personal responsibility and surrender himself to the Divine Will. His mind began to dwell constantly on Sri Ramakrishna. This unconscious meditation in time chastened his turbulent spirit.

1.00_-_Gospel_Preface, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      Sri Ramakrishna was a teacher for both the Orders of mankind, Sannysins and householders. His own life offered an ideal example for both, and he left behind disciples who followed the highest traditions he had set in respect of both these ways of life. M., along with Nag Mahashay, exemplified how a householder can rise to the highest level of sagehood. M. was married to Nikunja Devi, a distant relative of Keshab Chander Sen, even when he was reading at College, and he had four children, two sons and two daughters. The responsibility of the family, no doubt, made him dependent on his professional income, but the great devotee that he was, he never compromised with ideals and principles for this reason. Once when he was working as the headmaster in a school managed by the great Vidysgar, the results of the school at the public examination happened to be rather poor, and Vidysgar attributed it to M's preoccupation with the Master and his consequent failure to attend adequately to the school work. M. at once resigned his post without any thought of the morrow. Within a fortnight the family was in poverty, and M. was one day pacing up and down the verandah of his house, musing how he would feed his children the next day. Just then a man came with a letter addressed to 'Mahendra Babu', and on opening it, M. found that it was a letter from his friend Sri Surendra Nath Banerjee, asking whether he would like to take up a professorship in the Ripon College. In this way three or four times he gave up the job that gave him the wherewithal to support the family, either for upholding principles or for practising spiritual Sadhanas in holy places, without any consideration of the possible dire worldly consequences; but he was always able to get over these difficulties somehow, and the interests of his family never suffered. In spite of his disregard for worldly goods, he was, towards the latter part of his life, in a fairly flourishing condition as the proprietor of the Morton School which he developed into a noted educational institution in the city. The Lord has said in the Bhagavad Git that in the case of those who think of nothing except Him, He Himself would take up all their material and spiritual responsibilities. M. was an example of the truth of the Lord's promise.

1.01_-_Fundamental_Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral      We shall therefore beginwith the evidence and not with idealistic constructions; in the face of present-day weapons of annihilation, such constructions have less chance of survival than ever before. But as we shall see, weapons and nuclear fission are not the only realities to be dealt with; spiritual reality in its intensified form is also becoming effectual and real. This new spiritual reality is without question our only security that the threat of material destruction can be averted. Its realization alone seems able to guarantee mans continuing existence in the face of the powers of technology, rationality, and chaotic emotion. If our consciousness, that is, the individual persons awareness, vigilance, and clarity of vision, cannot master the new reality and make possible its realization, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us have been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.

1.01_-_The_Ego, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   psychic facts are conscious or not - for instance, in adjudging the   question of responsibility.

1.02.1_-_The_Inhabiting_Godhead_Life_and_Action, #Isha Upanishad, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Cosmic Will, one can act with the divine freedom. Our actions   are given up to the Lord and our personal responsibility ceases   in His liberty.

1.02_-_The_7_Habits_An_Overview, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset      The little understood concept of interdependence appears to many to smack of dependence, and therefore, we find people often for selfish reasons, leaving their marriages, abandoning their children, and forsaking all kinds of social responsibility -- all in the name of independence.      --      Either way -- authoritarian or permissive -- you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage years, the identity crises, will he know from his experience with you that you will listen without judging, that you really, deeply care about him as a person, that you can be trusted, no matter what? Will the relationship be strong enough for you to reach him, to communicate with him, to influence him?   Suppose you want your daughter to have a clean room -- that's P, production, the golden egg. And suppose you want her to clean it -- that's PC, Production Capability. Your daughter is the goose, the asset, that produces the golden egg.

1.02_-_The_Stages_of_Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Occultism    p. 95    to say anything. No other person, no being exacts an oath from him with this intent. Everything is left to his own responsibility, and he learns in every situation to discover within himself what he has to do, and an oath means nothing more than that he has been found qualified to be entrusted with such a responsibility.

1.02_-_The_Three_European_Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral      When Petrarch's glance spatially isolated a part of "nature" from the whole, the allencompassing attachment to sky and earth and the unquestioned, closed unperspectival ties are severed. The isolated part becomes a piece of land created by his perception. It may well be that with this event a part of the spiritual, divine formative principle of heaven and earth (and nature in its all-encompassing sense) was conveyed to man. If this is indeed so, then from that day of Petrarch's discovery onward man's responsibility was increased. Yet regarded from our vantage point, it is doubtful whether man has been adequate to this responsibility. Be that as it may, the consequences of Petrarch's discovery remain unaltered; we are still able to sense his uneasiness about his discovery, and the grave responsibility arising from it as documented in his letter.

1.03_-_A_Sapphire_Tale, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Meotha bowed respectfully before his father, who seated him at his side and spoke to him in these words:   "My son, I have ruled this country for more than a hundred and seventy years and although, to this day, all men of goodwill have seemed content with my guidance, I fear that my great age will soon no longer allow me to bear so lightly the heavy responsibility of maintaining order and watching over the well-being of all. My son, you are my hope and my joy. Nature has been very generous to you; she has showered you with her gifts and by a wise and model education you have developed them most satisfactorily. The whole nation, from the humblest peasant to our great philosophers, has a complete and affectionate trust in you; you have been able to win their affection by your kindness and their respect by your justice. It is therefore quite natural that their choice should fall on you when I ask for leave to enjoy a well-earned repose. But as you know, according to age-old custom, no one may ascend the throne who is not biune, that is, unless he is united by the bonds of integral affinity with the one who can bring him the peace of equilibrium by a perfect match of tastes and abilities. It was to remind you of this custom that I called you here, and to ask you whether you have met the young woman who is both worthy and willing to unite her life with yours, according to our wish."   "It would be a joy to me, my father, to be able to tell you, `I have found the one whom my whole being awaits', but, alas, this is yet to be. The most refined maidens in the kingdom are all known to me, and for several of them I feel a sincere liking and a genuine admiration, but not one of them has awakened in me the love which can be the only rightful bond, and I think I can say without being mistaken that in return none of them has conceived a love for me. Since you are so kind as to value my judgment, I will tell you what is in my mind. It seems to me that I should be better fitted to rule our little nation if I were acquainted with the laws and customs of other countries; I wish therefore to travel the world for a year, to observe and to learn. I ask you, my father, to allow me to make this journey, and who knows? - I may return with my life's companion, the one for whom I can be all happiness and all protection."

1.04_-_Reality_Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   13:If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony - and on what other can harmony be founded? - the various conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them representing a truth beyond conception, must be understood as far as possible in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual Maya. If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, - a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil, - an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure.   14:For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself, since no such thing exists. Nor can we suppose that It submits unwillingly to something partial within Itself which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradiction of an All and something other than the All. Even if we say that the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.   15:If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream originated and willed by the Self in its totality and not only originated and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Moreover, it is a dream existing in a Reality and the stuff of which it is made is that Reality, for Brahman must be the material of the world as well as its base and continent. If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage? We see that these words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative consciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great truth, but they also misrepresent it. Just as Non-Being turns out to be other than mere nullity, so the cosmic Dream turns out to be other than mere phantasm and hallucination of the mind. Phenomenon is not phantasm; phenomenon is the substantial form of a Truth.

1.04_-_The_Conditions_of_Esoteric_Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Occultism    p. 120    an attitude of mind, for instance, alters the way I regard a criminal. I suspend my judgment and say to myself: "I am, like him, only a human being. Through favorable circumstances I received an education which perhaps alone saved me from a similar fate." I may then also come to the conclusion that this human brother of mine would have become a different man had my teachers taken the same pains with him they took with me. I shall reflect on the fact that something was given to me which was withheld from him, that I enjoy my fortune precisely because it was denied him. And then I shall naturally come to think of myself as a link in the whole of humanity and a sharer in the responsibility for everything that occurs. This does not imply that such a thought should be immediately translated into external acts of agitation. It should be cherished in stillness within the soul. Then quite gradually it will set its mark on the outward demeanor of the student. In such matters each can only begin by reforming himself. It is of no avail, in the sense of the foregoing thoughts, to make general demands on the whole of humanity. It is easy to decide what men ought to be; but the student    p. 121

1.04_-_To_the_Priest_of_Rytan-ji, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #Hakuin Ekaku, #Zen      It is the third letter you have written and the third time your emissary has made a trip all this way to deliver it to me. I have been extremely negligent in failing to respond to your requests, but the reason I have not answered is because I find the responsibility involved in accepting such an invitation so intimidating. I know only too well how dim my prospects are for carrying it out. A hedge-parson such as myself is totally unfit for such a momentous task. It's like trying to make an earthworm roar like a dragon, or make a jackass perform tricks like a fine riding horse.

1.05_-_Christ,_A_Symbol_of_the_Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   foremost the author merely of judgments; in relation to the facts   judged, his responsibility is not so easy to determine. In order   to do this, we would have to give a clear definition of the extent

1.06_-_THE_FOUR_GREAT_ERRORS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy   to you only the psychology of the whole process of inculcating the   sense of responsibility. Wherever men try to trace responsibility   home to anyone, it is the instinct of punishment and of the desire   --   restored.... The concept "God" has been the greatest objection to   existence hitherto.... We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: thus   alone do we save the world.--

1.07_-_A_Song_of_Longing_for_Tara,_the_Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset   prevent people from thinking that all we have to do is pray for something, but   we dont have to take responsibility for making it happen. In Tibetan Buddhism we make long life pujas with elaborate offerings for our teachers. Once   some people in the West wanted to do this after a series of teachings, and   --   before taking him or her as our spiritual mentor cannot be emphasized   enough, especially in the age of the spiritual supermarket. It is our responsibility to examine people before considering them our spiritual teachers in   order to see if they have some or all of the above qualities. Instead of being   --   need all the things that middle-class people have. The question then arises,   Is it the responsibility of the Dharma students to pay for the teachers kids   to have new Nike shoes? To pay for the teachers spouse to go to the gym to

1.08_-_The_Splitting_of_the_Human_Personality_during_Spiritual_Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Occultism    p. 224    would have spurred him on to action, as though of its own accord. He can perform actions through resolutions of the will for which there is not the slightest reason for anyone not having undergone esoteric training. The student's great achievement is the attainment of complete mastery over the combined activity of the three soul forces; but at the same time the responsibility for this activity is placed entirely in his own hands.

1.08_-_The_Supreme_Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   14:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subcon- scious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, ansa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti.   15:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine.   16:But even before that highest approach to identity is achieved, something of the supreme Will can manifest in us as an imperative impulsion, a God-driven action; we then act by a spontaneous self-determining Force but a fuller knowledge of meaning and aim arises only afterwards. Or the impulse to action may come as an inspiration or intuition, but rather in the heart and body than in the mind; here an effective sight enters in but the complete and exact knowledge is still deferred and comes, if at all, later. But the divine Will may descend too as a luminous single command or a total perception or a continuous current of perception of what is to be done into the will or into the thought or as a direction from above spontaneously fulfilled by the lower members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character. We may indeed distinguish three stages of a growing progress by which, first, the personal will is occasionally or frequently enlightened or moved by a supreme Will or conscious Force beyond it, then constantly replaced and, last, identified and merged in that divine Power-action. The first is the stage when we are still governed by the intellect, heart and senses; these have to seek or wait for the divine inspiration and guidance and do not always find or receive it. The second is the stage when human intelligence is more and more replaced by a high illumined or intuitive spiritualised mind, the external human heart by the inner psychic heart, the senses by a purified and selfless vital force. The third is the stage when we rise even above spiritualised mind to the supramental levels.

1.09_-_Equality_and_the_Annihilation_of_Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   10:If we can pass through these two stages of the inner change without being arrested or fixed in either, we are admitted to a greater divine equality which is capable of a spiritual ardour and tranquil passion of delight, a rapturous, all-understanding and all-possessing equality of the perfected soul, an intense and even wideness and fullness of its being embracing all things. This is the supreme period and the passage to it is through the joy of a total self-giving to the Divine and to the universal Mother For strength is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace deepens into bliss, the possession of the divine calm is uplifted and made the ground for the possession of the divine movement. But if this greater perfection is to arrive, the soul's impartial high-seatedness looking down from above on the flux of forms and personalities and movements and forces must be modified and change into a new sense of strong and calm submission and a powerful and intense surrender. This submission will be no longer a resigned acquiescence but a glad acceptance: for there will be no sense of suffering or of the bearing of a burden or cross; love and delight and the joy of self-giving will be its brilliant texture. And this surrender will be not only to a divine Will which we perceive and accept and obey, but to a divine Wisdom in the Will which we recognise and a divine Love in it which we feel and rapturously suffer, the wisdom and love of a supreme Spirit and Self of ourselves and all with which we can achieve a happy and perfect unity. A lonely power, peace and stillness is the last word of the philosophic equality of the sage; but the soul in its integral experience liberates itself from this self-created status and enters into the sea of a supreme and allembracing ecstasy of the beginningless and endless beatitude of the Eternal. Then we are at last capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful equality, because we feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and Delight, the happiness absolute that hides ever in the heart of things. The gain of this culmination in a universal and equal rapture is the soul's delight and the opening gates of the Bliss that is infinite, the Joy that surpasses all understanding.   11:Before this labour for the annihilation of desire and the conquest of the soul's equality can come to its absolute perfection and fruition, that turn of the spiritual movement must have been completed which leads to the abolition of the sense of ego. But for the worker the renunciation of the egoism of action is the most important element in this change. For even when by giving up the fruits and the desire of the fruits to the Master of the Sacrifice we have parted with the egoism of rajasic desire, we may still have kept the egoism of the worker. Still we are subject to the sense that we are ourselves the doer of the act, ourselves its source and ourselves the giver of the sanction. It is still the "I" that chooses and determines, it is still the "I" that undertakes the responsibility and feels the demerit or the merit.   12:An entire removal of this separative ego-sense is an essential aim of our Yoga. If any ego is to remain in us for a while, it is only a form of it which knows itself to be a form and is ready to disappear as soon as a true centre of consciousness is manifested or built in us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one Existence. A support for the individual manifestation and action of the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti.2

1.09_-_SKIRMISHES_IN_A_WAY_WITH_THE_AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy   should no longer prepare prescriptions, but should every day administer   a fresh dose of _disgust_ to their patients. A new responsibility   should be created, that of the doctor--the responsibility of ruthlessly   suppressing and eliminating _degenerate_ life, in all cases in which   --   imperative, which cannot be otherwise than antiliberal to the point of   wickedness: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility   for centuries to come, to _solidarity_ in long family lines forwards   --   for the present, the live at top speed,--they certainly live without   any sense of responsibility; and this is precisely what they call   "freedom." Everything in institutions which makes them institutions,   --   no objection to matrimony itself but to modernity. The rational basis   of marriage--it lay in the exclusive legal responsibility of the man:   by this means some ballast was laid in the ship of matrimony, whereas   --   the face of the accident of sentiment, passion and momentary impulse:   it lay also in the fact that the responsibility of choosing the parties   to the contract, lay with the families. By showing ever more and more

1.09_-_The_Guardian_of_the_Threshold, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Occultism      "Yet my Threshold is fashioned out of all the timidity that remains in thee, out of all the dread of the strength needed to take full responsibility for all thy thoughts and actions. As long as there remains in thee a trace of fear of becoming thyself the guide of thine own destiny, just so long will this Threshold lack what still remains to be built into it. And as long as a single stone is found missing, just so long must thou remain standing as though transfixed; or else stumble. Seek not, then, to cross this Threshold until thou dost feel thyself entirely free from fear and ready for the highest responsibility. Hitherto I only emerged from thy personality when death recalled thee from an earthly life; but even then my form was veiled from thee. Only the powers of destiny who watched over thee beheld me and could thus, in the intervals between death and a new birth, build    p. 236   --    p. 239    preparation must aim at enabling him to endure the terrible sight without a trace of timidity and, at the moment of the meeting, to feel his strength so increased that he can undertake fully conscious the responsibility for transforming and beautifying the Guardian.

1.09_-_The_Secret_Chiefs, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy      Our business is solely to obey orders: our responsibility ends when we have satisfied ourselves that they emanate from a source which has the right to command.

1.11_-_Oneness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga   pervading egoism? Or that villainy, concealed or flaunted? God is innocent of all these crimes. He is perfect. He cannot be a party to this neti neti God is so pure that He is not of this world. There is simply no place for Him in all this suffocating squalor! We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated. . . . This world of our battle and labor is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward,   whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as a part of Nature,   making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and Godnature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices. . . . We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God . . . . We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in His being and that so He has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children,   Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra136 forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only 136

1.13_-_The_Divine_Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   5:It is so that the ancient and eternal truth of Vedanta receives into itself and illumines, justifies and shows us all the meaning of the modern and phenomenal truth of evolution in the universe. And it is so only that this modern truth of evolution which is the old truth of the Universal developing itself successively in Time, seen opaquely through the study of Force and Matter, can find its own full sense and justification, - by illuminating itself with the Light of the ancient and eternal truth still preserved for us in the Vedantic Scriptures. To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.   6:Still, when we have found that all things are Sachchidananda, all has not yet been explained. We know the Reality of the universe, we do not yet know the process by which that Reality has turned itself into this phenomenon. We have the key of the riddle, we have still to find the lock in which it will turn. For this Existence, Conscious-Force, Delight does not work directly or with a sovereign irresponsibility like a magician building up worlds and universes by the mere fiat of its word. We perceive a process, we are aware of a Law.   7:It is true that this Law when we analyse it, seems to resolve itself into an equilibrium of the play of forces and a determination of that play into fixed lines of working by the accident of development and the habit of past realised energy. But this apparent and secondary truth is final to us only so long as we conceive of Force solely. When we perceive that Force is a selfexpression of Existence, we are bound to perceive also that this line which Force has taken, corresponds to some self-truth of that Existence which governs and determines its constant curve and destination. And since consciousness is the nature of the original Existence and the essence of its Force, this truth must be a self-perception in Conscious-Being and this determination of the line taken by Force must result from a power of selfdirective knowledge inherent in Consciousness which enables it to guide its own Force inevitably along the logical line of the original self-perception. It is then a self-determining power in universal consciousness, a capacity in self-awareness of infinite existence to perceive a certain Truth in itself and direct its force of creation along the line of that Truth, which has presided over the cosmic manifestation.

1.15_-_Index, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   resistances, shadow and, 9   responsibility, in jurisprudence, 5   Revelation of St. John: (5 : 5), 105;

1.18_-_The_Divine_Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      Arjuna, still in the ignorance, may feel in his heart the call of right and justice and may argue in his mind that abstention from battle would be a sin entailing responsibility for all the suffering that injustice and oppression and the evil karma of the triumph of wrong bring upon men and nations, or he may feel in his heart the recoil from violence and slaughter and argue in his mind that all shedding of blood is a sin which nothing can justify. Both of these attitudes would appeal with equal right to virtue and reason and it would depend upon the man, the circumstances and the time which of these might prevail in his mind or before the eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by his heart and his honour to support his friends against his enemies,      --      And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gun.as. "The man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal), 'I am doing nothing'; when he sees, hears, touches, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses." He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the grip of the three gunas, trigun.atta; he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it, this traigun.attya, is also a high sign of the divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and irresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in the end Nature which mechanically determines its own action; it is the will of the Supreme which inspires her; he who has already slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the human instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the master of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all, sarva-loka-mahesvara. "With a consciousness identified with the   Self, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvan.i karman.i

1.19_-_GOD_IS_NOT_MOCKED, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy      Horizontally and vertically, in physical and temperamental kind as well as in degree of inborn ability and native goodness, human beings differ profoundly one from another. Why? To what end and for what past causes? Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. The man of science, on the contrary, would say that the responsibility rested with the parents who had caused the blindness of their child either by having the wrong kind of genes, or by contracting some avoidable disease. Hindu or Buddhist believers in reincarnation according to the laws of karma (the destiny which, by their actions, individuals and groups of individuals impose upon themselves, one another and their descendants) would give another answer and say that, owing to what he had done in previous existences, the blind man had predestined himself to choose the sort of parents from whom he would have to inherit blindness.

1.2.07_-_Surrender, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      Usually there cannot but be a mixture of these two ways until the consciousness is ready to be entirely open, entirely submitted to the Divine's origination of all its action. It is then that all responsibility disappears and there is no personal burden on the shoulders of the sadhak.

1.240_-_1.300_Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism   M.: "All right. What need be said has been said. Well. What is destiny?   There is no destiny. Surrender, and all will be well. Throw all the responsibility on God. Do not bear the burden yourself. What can destiny do to you then?"   D.: Surrender is impossible.

1.240_-_Talks_2, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   M.: All right. What need be said has been said. Well. What is destiny?   There is no destiny. Surrender, and all will be well. Throw all the responsibility on God. Do not bear the burden yourself. What can destiny do to you then?   D.: Surrender is impossible.

1.46_-_Selfishness, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy      P.P.S. The day after I had written the above postscript I came upon a copy of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear after a long search. He points out that pity is a mature emotion; adolescents do not feel it. Exactly; one step further, and he would have reached my own position as set forth above. It is the twin of "moral responsibility," of the sense of guilt or sin. The Hebrew fable of Eden and the "Fall" is clearly constructed. But remember that the serpent Nechesh {Nun-Cheth-Shin} is equivalent to Messiach, {Mem-Shin-Yod-Cheth}, the Messiah. The M is the "Hanged Man," the sinner; and is redeemed by the insertion of the Phallic Yod.

1.48_-_Morals_of_AL_-_Hard_to_Accept,_and_Why_nevertheless_we_Must_Concur, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy      * [AC42] The "Master" roughly denotes the able, the adventurous, welcoming responsibility. The "slave:" his motto is "Safety first," with all that this implies. Race, birth, breeding etc. are important but not absolutely essential factors.

1.70_-_Morality_1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy      Of course, there must be certain courses of action which, generally speaking, will be right for pretty well everybody. Some, per contra, will be generally barred, as interfering with another's equal right. Some cases will be so difficult that only a Magister Templi can judge them, and a Magus carry them wisely into effect. Fearsome responsibility, I should say, that of the Masters who began the building-up of the New Aeon by bringing about these Wars!

1.79_-_Progress, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy      Then, somehow, as large a number of the most promising rebels should be selected to lead a life of luxury and leisure. Let every country, by dint of honouring its old traditions, be as different as possible from every other. Restore the "Grand tour," or rather, the roving Englishman of the Nineteenth Century. Entrust them with the secrets of discipline, of authority, or power. Hardship and danger in full measure: and responsibility.

1.A_-_ANTHROPOLOGY,_THE_SOUL, #Philosophy of Mind, #G. W. F. Hegel, #Philosophy   'idealized' in the former, remains as a fixed element in self-feeling. Mind as such is free, and therefore not susceptible of this malady. But in older metaphysics mind was treated as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. as something natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity - the settled fixture of some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e. a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to start from the one more than the other, and so also may the cure.   The self-possessed and healthy subject has an active and present consciousness of the ordered whole of his individual world, into the system of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea, desire, inclination, etc., as it arises, so as to insert them in their proper place, He is the dominant genius over these particularities. Between this and insanity the difference is like that between waking and dreaming: only that in insanity the dream falls within the waking limits, and so makes part of the actual self- feeling. Error and that sort of thing is a proposition consistently admitted to a place in the objective interconnection of things. In the concrete, however, it is often difficult to say where it begins to become derangement. A violent, but groundless and senseless outburst of hatred, etc., may, in contrast to a presupposed higher self-possession and stability of character, make its victim seem to be beside himself with frenzy. But the main point in derangement is the contradiction which a feeling with a fixed corporeal embodiment sets up against the whole mass of adjustments forming the concrete consciousness. The mind which is in a condition of mere being, and where such being is not rendered fluid in its consciousness, is diseased. The contents which are set free in this reversion to mere nature are the self-seeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the passions - fancies and hopes - merely personal love and hatred. When the influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock and key, the, earthly elements are set free - that evil which is always latent in the heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and selfish. It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in insanity, but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more intelligent part, which is there also. Hence this state is mental derangement and distress. The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in view the truth that insanity is not an abstract loss of reason (neither in the point of intelligence nor of will and its responsibility), but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason; - just as physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health (if it were that, it would be death), but a contradiction in it. This humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of Pinel towards which deserve the highest acknowledgement), presupposes the patient's rationality, and in that assumption has the sound basis for dealing with him on this side - just as in the case of bodily disease the physician bases his treatment on the vitality which as such still contains health.

2.01_-_Habit_1_Be_Proactive, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset      Even the most intelligent animals have none of these endowments. To use a computer metaphor, they are programmed by instinct and/or training. They can be trained to be responsible, but they can't take responsibility for that training; in other words, they can't direct it. They can't change the programming. They're not even aware of it.      --      We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.      Look at the word responsibility -- "response-ability" -- the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.      --   Our basic nature is to act, and not be acted upon. As well as enabling us to choose our response to particular circumstances, this empowers us to create circumstances   Taking initiative does not mean being pushy, obnoxious, or aggressive. It does mean recognizing our responsibility to make things happen.      --      It takes initiative to create the P/PC Balance of effectiveness in your life. It takes initiative to develop the Seven Habits. As you study the other six habits, you will see that each depends on the development of your proactive muscles. Each puts the responsibility on you to act. If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon. And growth and opportunity consequences attend either road.      --      The language of reactive people absolves them of responsibility.      --      That language comes from a basic paradigm of determinism. And the whole spirit of it is the transfer of responsibility. I am not responsible, not able to choose my response.      --      They're driven by feelings. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.      --   Though they may have to prioritize the use of their influence, proactive people have a Circle of   Concern that is at least as big as their Circle of Influence, accepting the responsibility to use their influence effectively.      --   Most people have only three or four of these methods in their repertoire, starting usually with reasoning, and, if that doesn't work, moving to flight or fight. How liberating it is to accept the idea that I can learn new methods of human influence instead of constantly trying to use old ineffective methods to "shape up" someone else!   No control problems involve taking the responsibility to change the line on the bottom on our face -to smile, to genuinely and peacefully accept these problems and learn to live with them, even though we don't like them. In this way, we do not empower these problems to control us. We share in the spirit embodied in the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, "Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference."   Whether a problem is direct, indirect, or no control, we have in our hands the first step to the solution. Changing our habits, changing our methods of influence and changing the way we see our no control problems are all within our Circle of Influence.   --      The net effect was that he alienated almost the entire executive team surrounding him. They would gather in the corridors and complain to each other about him. Their discussion was all very sophisticated, very articulate, as if they were trying to help the situation. But they did it endlessly, absolving themselves of responsibility in the name of the president's weaknesses.      --      It's the nature of reactive people to absolve themselves of responsibility. It's so much safer to say, "I am not responsible." If I say "I am responsible," I might have to say, "I am irresponsible." It would be very hard for me to say that I have the power to choose my response and that the response I have chosen has resulted in my involvement in a negative, collusive environment, especially if for years I have absolved myself of responsibility for results in the name of someone else's weaknesses.      --      It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise -- and keep it. Or we can set a goal -- and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.

2.01_-_The_Yoga_and_Its_Objects, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      "Abandon all dharmas (all law, rule, means and codes of every kind whether formed by previous habit and belief or imposed from outside) and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, - do not grieve." "I will deliver", - you have not to be troubled or struggle yourself as if the responsibility were yours or the result depended on your efforts, a mightier than you is busy with the matter. Neither disease nor calamity nor the rising of sin and impurity in you should cause any alarm.      --      The best foundation for the surrender of action is the realisation that Prakriti is doing all our actions at God's command and God through our svabhava determines the action. From that moment the action belongs to him, it is not yours nor the responsibility yours; there is indeed no responsibility, no bondage of   Karma, for God has no responsibility, but is in every way master and free. Our actions become not only like the Shastric man's svabhavaniyata, regulated by nature and therefore dharma, but the svabhava itself is controlled like a machine by God. It is not easy for us, full as we are of the Sanskaras of ignorance, to arrive at this stage of knowledge, but there are three stages by

2.02_-_Habit_2_Begin_with_the_End_in_Mind, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset      To the extent to which we understand the principle of two creations and accept the responsibility for both, we act within and enlarge the borders of our Circle of Influence. To the extent to which we do not operate in harmony with this principle and take charge of the first creation, we diminish it.      --      He finally admitted that this individual had had such an impact on him, but he denied that he himself had made all these choices. He attributed the responsibility for the unhappy situation to the administrator. He, himself, he declared, was not responsible.      As we talked, little by little, he came to realize that he was indeed responsible, but that because he did not handle this responsibility well, he was being irresponsible.      --      In seeking to give verbal expression to that uniqueness, we are again reminded of the fundamental importance of proactivity and of working within our Circle of Influence. To seek some abstract meaning to our lives out in our Circle of Concern is to abdicate our proactive responsibility, to place our own first creation in the hands of circumstance and other people.      Our meaning comes from within. Again, in the words of Frankl, "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."   Personal responsibility, or proactivity, is fundamental to the first creation. Returning to the computer metaphor, Habit 1 says "You are the programmer." Habit 2, then, says, "Write the program."   Until you accept the idea that you are responsible, that you are the programmer, you won't really invest in writing the program.   --      We each have a number of different roles in our lives -- different areas or capacities in which we have responsibility. I may, for example, have a role as an individual, a husband, a father, a teacher, a church member, and a businessman. And each of these roles is important.

2.03_-_Karmayogin_A_Commentary_on_the_Isha_Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   can be nothing but means of bondage; only the pursuit of Godknowledge and the worship & adoration of God, to which   the name of works does not properly apply, are free from responsibility. But this reasoning too is not consistent with divine   teaching, with experience or with reason. For divine teaching   --   evil he could not choose evil of free choice and therefore had   no sense of sin and no more responsibility for his actions than   the pure animal. His fall from the state of innocence was the

2.04_-_ADVICE_TO_HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      MASTER: "As long as they feel pinched for food and clothing. But one need not take the responsibility of a son when he is able to support himself. When the young fledgling learns to pick its own food, its mother pecks it if it comes to her for food."

2.05_-_Habit_3_Put_First_Things_First, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset   Then he said, "Stephen, to do the jobs that you want done right would take several days. Which of these projects would you like me to delay or cancel to satisfy your request?"   Well, I didn't want to take the responsibility for that. I didn't want to put a cog in the wheel of one of the most productive people on the staff just because I happened to be managing by crisis at the time.      --      Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organizations.      --   Guidelines: Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include any formidable restrictions. You won't want a person to think he had considerable latitude as long as he accomplished the objectives, only to violate some long-standing traditional practice or value. That kills initiative and sends people back to the gofer's creed: "Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it."   If you know the failure paths of the job, identify them. Be honest and open -- tell a person where the quicksand is and where the wild animals are. You don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every day. Let people learn from your mistakes or the mistakes of others. Point out the potential failure paths, what not to do, but don't tell them what to do. Keep the responsibility for results with them -to do whatever is necessary within the guidelines.

2.07_-_The_Supreme_Word_of_the_Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      But there is another supreme reality of the Infinite that must also be recognised as an indispensable element of the liberating knowledge. This reality is that of the transcendent downlook as well as the close immanent presence of the divine government of the universe. The Supreme who becomes all creation, yet infinitely transcends it, is not a will-less cause aloof from his creation. He is not an involuntary originator who disowns all responsibility for these results of his universal Power or casts them upon an illusive consciousness entirely different from his own or leaves them to a mechanical Law or to a Demiurge or to a Manichean conflict of Principles. He is not an aloof and indifferent Witness who waits impassively for all to abolish itself or return to its unmoved original principle. He is the mighty lord of the worlds and peoples, loka-mahesvara, and governs all not only from within but from above, from his supreme transcendence. Cosmos cannot be governed by a Power that does not transcend cosmos. A divine government implies the free mastery of an omnipotent Ruler and not an automatic force or mechanical law of determinative becoming limited by the apparent nature of the cosmos. This is the theistic seeing of the universe, but it is no shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of the world's contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient and omnipotent, the sole original Being who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and governs himself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by its oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimately related to this Nature and closely one with her creatures, their

2.09_-_The_Release_from_the_Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      Such possession is not indeed the aim of the traditional Yoga of knowledge whose object is rather to get away from the above and the below and the all into the indefinable Absolute. But whatever the aim, the path of knowledge must lead to one first result, an absolute quietude; for unless the old action of Nature in us be entirely quieted, it is difficult if not impossible to found either any true soul-status or any divine activity. Our nature acts on a basis of confusion and restless compulsion to action, the Divine acts freely out of a fathomless calm. Into that abyss of tranquillity we must plunge and become that, if we are to annul the hold of this lower nature upon the soul. Therefore the universalised Jiva first ascends into the Silence; it becomes vast, tranquil, actionless. What action takes place, whether of body and these organs or any working whatever, the Jiva sees but does not take part in, authorise or in any way associate itself with it. There is action, but no personal actor, no bondage, no responsibility. If personal action is needed, then the Jiva has to keep or recover what has been called the form of the ego, a sort of mental image of an "I" that is the knower, devotee, servant or instrument, but an image only and not a reality. If even that is not there, still action can continue by the mere continued force of prakriti, without any personal actor, without indeed there being any sense of an actor at all; for the Self into which the Jiva has cast its being is the actionless, the fathomless still. The path of works leads to the realisation of the Lord, but here even the Lord is not known; there is only the silent Self and prakriti doing her works, even, as it seems at first, riot with truly living entities but with names and forms existing in the Self but which the Self does not admit as real. The soul may go even beyond this realisation; it may either rise to the Brahman on the other side of all idea of Self as a Void of everything that is here, a Void of unnameable peace and extinction of all, even of the Sat, even of that Existent which is the impersonal basis of individual or universal personality; or else it may unite with it as an ineffable "That" of which nothing can be said; for the universe and all that is does not even exist in That, but appears to the mind as a dream more unsubstantial than any dream ever seen or imagined, so that even the word dream seems too positive a thing to express its entire unreality. These experiences are the foundation of that lofty illusionism which takes such firm hold of the human mind in its highest overleapings of itself.

2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy   of the _mediocre._ Life always gets harder towards the summit,--the   cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilisation is a   pyramid: it can stand only upon a broad base, its first prerequisite is

2.10_-_THE_MASTER_WITH_THE_BRAHMO_DEVOTEES_(II), #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      responsibility for sins

2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace and calm Eternity, - the Gita which presents us with these terrible images, speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them as the lover and friend of all creatures. But there is too the sterner aspect of his divine government of the world which meets us from the beginning, the aspect of destruction, and to ignore it is to miss the full reality of the divine Love and Peace and Calm and Eternity and even to throw on it an aspect of partiality and illusion, because the comforting exclusive form in which it is put is not borne out by the nature of the world in which we live. This world of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil,      --   Essays on the Gita    or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of   India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it.

2.12_-_THE_FESTIVAL_AT_PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      Friends of Mani Sen gave the money to Rkhl , requesting him to buy some mangoes and sweets for the Master. Sri Ramakrishna said to M.: "I have definitely said to Mani that I would not accept the money. I feel free now. But Rkhl has accepted it. His is now the responsibility."

2.14_-_The_Unpacking_of_God, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy   3.'All holons are also parts, and as a part, all holons have instrumental value (also called extrinsic value). That is, all holons have value for others. All holons have part-value, or partness-value (as part of a larger whole, and that whole and its members depend upon each part: each part is thus instrumental to the existence of the whole, each part has extrinsic value, value not just in and for itself but for others). And the more partness-value a holon has-that is, the greater the number of wholes of which that holon is a part-the more fundamental that holon is for the Kosmos, because the more of the Kosmos there is that contains that part as a necessary constituent. An atom is more fundamental than an ape. (From which it follows, as we put it earlier, the more fundamental, the less significant, and vice versa.)   Likewise, as a part (in communion), each holon exists in a network of care and responsibility. Like rights, responsibilities are not something added to holons. Networks of responsibility simply define the conditions necessary to support the whole of which the part is indeed a part. Further, the greater the depth of a holon, then the more networks of communion it is involved in, and thus the greater its responsibilities in communion (correlative with its greater rights of agency).12   Thus, each and every holon in the Kosmos has equal Ground-value as a pure manifestation of Spirit or Emptiness.

2.15_-_LAST_VISIT_TO_KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      "As is the disease, so must the remedy be. The Lord says in the Git: 'O Arjuna, take refuge in Me. I shall deliver you from all sins.' Take shelter at His feet: He will give you right understanding. He will take entire responsibility for you. Then you will get rid of the typhoid. Can one ever know God with such a mind as this? Can one pour four seers of milk into a oneseer pot? Can we ever know God unless He lets us know Him?

2.16_-_Oneness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      But at the same time the integral knowledge gives us the awareness of that infinite existence as the conscious-force which creates and governs the worlds and manifests itself in their works; it reveals the Self-existent in his universal conscious-will as the Lord, the Ishwara. It enables us to unite our will with His, to realise His will in the energies of all existences and to perceive the fulfilment of these energies of others as part of our own universal self-fulfilment. Thus it removes the reality of strife and division and opposition and leaves only their appearances. By that knowledge therefore we arrive at the possibility of a divine action, a working which is personal to our nature, but impersonal to our being, since it proceeds from That which is beyond our ego and acts only by its universal sanction. We proceed in our works with equality, without bondage to works and their results, in unison with the Highest, in unison with the universal, free from separate responsibility for our acts and therefore unaffected by their reactions. This which we have seen to be the fulfilment of the path of Works becomes thus an annexe and result of the path of Knowledge.

2.17_-_The_Soul_and_Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      This duality is self-evident. Without any philosophy at all, by the mere force of experience it is what we can all perceive, although we may not take the trouble to define. Even the most thoroughgoing materialism which denies the soul or resolves it into a more or less illusory result of natural phenomena acting upon some ill-explained phenomenon of the physical brain which we call consciousness or the mind, but which is really no more than a sort of complexity of nervous spasms, cannot get rid of the practical fact of this duality. It does not matter at all how it came about; the fact is not only there, it determines our whole existence, it is the one fact which is really important to us as human beings with a will and an intelligence and a subjective existence which makes all our happiness and our suffering. The whole problem of life resolves itself into this one question, -- "What are we to do with this soul and nature set face to face with each other, this Nature, this personal and cosmic activity, which tries to impress itself upon the soul, to possess, control, determine it, and this soul which feels that in some mysterious way it has a freedom, a control over itself, a responsibility for what it is and does, and tries therefore to turn upon Nature, its own and the world's, and to control, possess, enjoy, or even, it may be, reject and escape from her?" In order to answer that question we have to know, -- to know what the soul can do, to know what it call do with itself, to know too what it can do with Nature and the world. The whole of human philosophy, religion, science is really nothing but an attempt to get at the right data upon which it will be possible to answer the question and solve, as satisfactorily as our knowledge will allow, the problem of our existence.      --      As the pure Witness, the soul refuses the function of upholder or sustainer of Nature. The upholder, bharta, is another, God or Force or Maya, but not the soul, which only admits the reflection of the natural action upon its watching consciousness, but not any responsibility for maintaining or continuing it. It does not say "All this is in me and maintained by me, an activity of my being," but at the most "This is imposed on me, but really external to myself." Unless there is a clear and real duality in existence, this cannot be the whole truth of the matter; the soul is the upholder also, it supports in its being the energy which unrolls the spectacle of the cosmos and which conducts its energies. When the Purusha accepts this upholding, it may do it still passively and without attachment, feeling that it contributes the energy but not that it controls and determines it. The control is another. God or Force or the very nature of Maya; the soul only upholds indifferently so long as it must, so long perhaps as the force of its past sanction and interest in the energy continues and refuses to be exhausted. But if the attitude of the upholder is fully accepted, an important step forward has been taken towards identification with the active Brahman and his joy of cosmic being. For the Purusha has become the active giver of the sanction.

2.20_-_2.29_-_RULES_FOR_HOUSEHOLDERS_AND_MONKS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      MASTER (affectionately): "I don't give initiation. If a guru gives initiation he must assume responsibility for the disciple's sin and suffering. The Divine Mother has placed me in the state of a child. Perform the iva Puja as I told you. Come here now and then.      --      "May I ask you one thing? Does a man watching magic really feel compassion when he sees suffering in the performance? Does he feel, at that time, any sense of responsibility? One thinks of compassion only when one feels responsibility. Isn't that so?"      --      "The idea of responsibility! Goodness gracious! Men like Sankaracharya and Sukadeva kept the 'ego of Knowledge'. It is not for man to show compassion, but for God. One feels compassion as long as one has the 'ego of Knowledge'. And it is God Himself who has become the 'ego of Knowledge'.      --      MASTER: "If it is His sweet will. But God doesn't take entire responsibility for a devotee unless the devotee is completely intoxicated with ecstatic love for Him. At a feast it is only a child whom one takes by the hand and seats at his place. Who does that with older people? Not until a man thinks so much of God that he cannot look after himself does God take on his responsibilities. Hazra doesn't inquire about his family. His son said to Ramlal: 'Please ask father to come home. We shall not ask anything of him.' These words almost brought tears to my eyes. Hazra's mother said to Ramlal: 'Please ask Pratap to come home just once. Also ask your uncle to request him to come home.' I told him about it, but he didn't listen to me.

2.22_-_The_Supreme_Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   553    godhead there concealed from himself, subliminal to his consciousness, immobilised behind the obscure veil of a working that is not wholly his own and the secret of which he has not yet mastered. He finds himself in the world thinking and willing and feeling and acting and he takes himself instinctively or intellectually conceives of himself or at least conducts his life as a separate self-existent being who has the freedom of his thought and will and feeling and action. He bears the burden of his sin and error and suffering and takes the responsibility and merit of his knowledge and virtue; he claims the right to satisfy his sattwic, rajasic or tamasic ego and arrogates the power to shape his own destiny and to turn the world to his own uses. It is this idea of himself through which Nature works in him, and she deals with him according to his own conception, but fulfils all the time the will of the greater Spirit within her. The error of this self-view of man is like most of his errors the distortion of a truth, a distortion that creates a whole system of erroneous and yet effective values. What is true of his spirit he attributes to his ego-personality and gives it a false application, a false form and a mass of ignorant consequences. The ignorance lies in this fundamental deficiency of his surface consciousness that he identifies himself only with the outward mechanical part of him which is a convenience of Nature and with so much only of the soul as reflects and is reflected in these workings. He misses the greater inner spirit within which gives to all his mind and life and creation and action an unfulfilled promise and a hidden significance. A universal Nature here obeys the power of the Spirit who is the master of the universe, shapes each creature and determines its action according to the law of its own nature,   Swabhava, shapes man too and determines his action according to the general law of nature of his kind, the law of a mental being emmeshed and ignorant in the life and the body, shapes too each man and determines his individual action according to the law of his own distinct type and the variations of his own original swabhava. It is this universal Nature that forms and directs the mechanical workings of the body and the instinctive operations of our vital and nervous parts; and there our subjection to her

2.24_-_Gnosis_and_Ananda, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      The very physical consciousness in man, the annamaya purusa, can without this supreme ascent and integral descent yet reflect and enter into the self of Sachchidananda. It can do it either by a reflection of the Soul in physical Nature, its bliss, power and infinity secret but still present here, or by losing its separate sense of substance and existence in the Self within or without it. The result is a glorified sleep of the physical mind in which the physical being forgets itself in a kind of conscious Nirvana or else moves about like a thing inert in the hands of Nature jadavat, like a leaf in the wind, or otherwise a state of pure happy and free irresponsibility of action, balavat, a divine childhood. But this comes without the higher glories of knowledge and delight which belong to the same status upon a more exalted level. It is an inert realisation of Sachchidananda in which there is neither any mastery of the prakriti by the Purusha nor any sublimation of Nature into her own supreme power, the infinite glories of the Para shakti. Yet these two, this mastery and this sublimation, are the two gates of perfection, the splendid doors into the supreme Eternal.      --   The mind-soul and mind-consciousness in man, manomaya purusa, can in the same direct way reflect and enter into Sachchidananda by a reflection of the Soul as it mirrors itself in the nature of pure universal mind luminous, unwalled, happy, plastic, illimitable, or by absorption in the vast free unconditioned uncentred Self within it and without it. The result is either an immobile cessation of all mind and action or a desire-free unbound action watched by the unparticipating inner Witness. The mental being becomes the eremite soul alone in the world and careless of all human ties or the secret soul that lives in a rapturous God-nearness or felicitous identity and in joyful relations of pure love and ecstasy towards all creatures. The mental being may even realise the Self in all three planes together. Then   he is all these things alternately, successively or at once. Or he may transform the lower forms into manifestations of the higher state; he may draw upward the childlikeness or the inert irresponsibility of the free physical mind or the free vital mind's divine madness and carelessness of all rules, proprieties, harmonies and colour or disguise with them the ecstasy of the saint or the solitary liberty of the wandering eremite. Here again there is no mastery, no sublimation of the Nature by the soul in the world, but a double possession, by the freedom and delight of the mental spiritual infinite within and without by the happy, natural and unregulated play of the mind-Nature. But since the mental being is capable of receiving the gnosis in a way in which the life-soul and physical soul cannot receive it, since he can accept it with knowledge though only the limited knowledge of a mental response, he may to a certain extent govern by its light his outer action or, if not that, at least bathe and purify in it his will and his thinkings. But Mind can arrive only at a compromise between the infinite within and the finite nature without; it cannot pour the infinity of the inner being's knowledge and power and bliss with any sense of fullness into its external action which remains always inadequate. Still it is content and free because it is the Lord within who takes up the responsibility of the action adequate or inadequate, assumes its guidance and fixes its consequence.

2.24_-_The_Message_of_the_Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      "This high consummation of the Yoga will at once solve or rather it will wholly remove and destroy at its roots the problem of action. Human action is a thing full of difficulties and perplexities, tangled and confused like a forest with a few more or less obscure paths cut into it rather than through it; but all this difficulty and entanglement arises from the single fact that man lives imprisoned in the ignorance of his mental, vital and physical nature. He is compelled by its qualities and yet afflicted with responsibility in his will because something in him feels that he is a soul who ought to be what now he is not at all or very little, master and ruler of his nature. All his laws of living, all his dharmas must be under these conditions imperfect, temporary and provisional and at best only partly right or true. His imperfections can cease only when he knows himself, knows the real nature of the world in which he lives and, most of all, knows the Eternal from whom he comes and in whom and by whom he exists. When he has once achieved a true consciousness and knowledge, there is no longer any problem; for then he acts freely out of himself and lives spontaneously in accordance with the truth of his spirit and his highest nature.

2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   These are the first major results of the spiritual transformation that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind. But if there is to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, of the consciousness, of an inner delight of existence, but a perfection of the life and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerable, even a premier importance. First, there is the place of personality in the gnostic being, - whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic nature.   Ordinarily, in the common notion, the separative ego is our self and, if ego has to disappear in a transcendental or universal Consciousness, personal life and action must cease; for, the individual disappearing, there can only be an impersonal consciousness, a cosmic self: but if the individual is altogether extinguished, no further question of personality or responsibility or ethical perfection can arise. According to another line of ideas the spiritual person remains, but liberated, purified, perfected in nature in a celestial existence. But here we are still on earth, and yet it is supposed that the ego personality is extinguished and replaced by a universalised spiritual individual who is a centre and power of the transcendent Being. It might be deduced that this gnostic or supramental individual is a self without personality, an impersonal Purusha. There could be many gnostic individuals but there would be no personality, all would be the same in being and nature. This, again, would create the idea of a void or blank of pure being from which an action and function of experiencing consciousness would arise, but without a construction of differentiated personality such as that which we now observe and regard as ourselves on our surface. But this would be a mental rather than a supramental solution of the problem of a spiritual individuality surviving ego and persisting in experience. In the supermind consciousness personality and impersonality are not opposite principles; they are inseparable aspects of one and the same reality. This reality is not the ego but the being, who is impersonal and universal in his stuff of nature, but forms out of it an expressive personality which is his form of self in the changes of Nature.   Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and universal; it is an existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various shapes of its being and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power or force, though still in itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken by the individual being as material for the building of his personality. Thus impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the pure The Gnostic Being substance of nature of the Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to constitute by their variations the manifestation of personality.

2.30_-_2.39_-_THE_MASTER_IN_VARIOUS_MOODS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      "To attain God a man must have certain favourable conditions: the company of holy men, discrimination, and the blessings of a real teacher. Perhaps his elder brother takes the responsibility for the family; perhaps his wife has spiritual qualities and is very virtuous; perhaps he is not married at all or entangled in worldly life. He succeeds when conditions like these are fulfilled.      --      M: "God takes upon Himself complete responsibility for one who totally depends upon Him. It is like a guardian taking charge of a minor. You also told us that at a feast a child cannot by himself find a place to eat his meal; someone finds a place for him."

2.3.08_-_The_Mother's_Help_in_Difficulties, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      It cannot work perfectly because the sadhaks themselves have not the right attitude towards food and kindred vital-physical things. But still there is a protection. If however the sadhaks go outside her formation, it must be on their own responsibility - the Mother does not and cannot sanction it. But this arrangement is for the Asram and not for those who are outside.

2.40_-_2.49_-_THE_MASTER_AT_THE_HOUSES_OF_BALARM_AND_GIRISH, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism      "A guardian is appointed only for a minor. A boy cannot safeguard his property; therefore the king assumes responsibility for him. God does not take over our responsibilities unless we renounce our ego.      --      (To Captain) "When a man attains the Knowledge of Brahman he shows certain characteristics. The Bhagavata describes four of them: the state of a child, of an inert thing, of a madman, and of a ghoul. Sometimes the knower of Brahman acts like a five-year-old child. Sometimes he acts like a madman. Sometimes he remains like an inert thing. In this state he cannot work; he renounces all action. You may say that jnanis like Janaka were active. The truth is that people in olden times gave responsibility to their subordinate officers and thus freed themselves from worry. Further, at that time men possessed intense faith."

3.01_-_Towards_the_Future, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Yes, sleep, child - a healing sleep. Life has been hard for you and you have great need of rest. (After a moment's silence)   What is the use of trying to deceive myself? I have to admit it: just as her voice thrilled my whole being, so too her presence fills me with a calm and profound happiness. And now she has fallen asleep, under my protection, her first conscious sleep. Her very trust gives me a responsibility, a responsibility which would be very sweet to me. But my wife! I know that she is strong and brave, I know that long ago she realised that what I feel for her is nothing more than friendly affection. She herself cannot be satisfied with that; the depths of her love remain untouched. Yet I have responsibilities towards her too. How can I tell her that my whole being is concentrated upon another? And yet I cannot conceal my feelings; falsehood is the only evil. Besides, it would be quite useless: a woman like her cannot be deceived. Oh, life is often so cruel!   464

3.04_-_The_Formula_of_ALHIM, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   Leo, and the Serpent. The great merits of this formula are that it avoids contact   with the inferior planes, that it is self-sufficient, that it involves no responsibility,   and that it leaves its masters not only stronger in themselves, but wholly free to

3.06_-_Charity, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga      It is true that some people are more capable than others of entering into relation with this field of ideas and manifesting it through their conscious cerebrality. But this is nothing other than an additional responsibility for them: since they are in possession of this wealth, they are its stewards and must see that it is used for the good of the greatest number.

3.11_-_Of_Our_Lady_Babalon, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   hare, wolf, or any convenient animal, by making a very simple   compact. You take over the responsibility for the animal, thus   building it up into your own magical hierarchy. This represents a   --   time, the Magician must realise that in undertaking the Karma of   any elemental, he is assuming a very serious responsibility. The   bond which unites him with the elemental is love; and, though it

3.12_-_Of_the_Bloody_Sacrifice, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy   2. There is also the questionof its magical freedom. Sexual intercourse creates a   link between its exponents, and therefore a responsibility.   3. It appears from the Magical Records of Frater Perdurabo that He made this

3-5_Full_Circle, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   One culture variable, already mentioned, is the degree of value mixture and of value dominance in each culture sample at a given time. The greater the dominance of one value-premise, and the others' corresponding absence or suppression at the time in question, the more clearly and conclusively the culture can be classified. The speed and direction (jointly called velocity) of a deviant value's emergence and challenge, determines the likelihood of the culture's transmutation: of its breakdown to a lower Period, its build-up to a higher Period, or its shift to a different Group in the same Period. Toynbee has expounded important laws of transmutation in Literate cultures (Period 5).--This variable is analogous to target velocity.   The second sighting variable, which is analogous to certain defects of the sighting mechanism, is the classifier's own mental-moral organization: his own grasp of the Periodic Law of Human Cultures. (In the history of chemistry, this mental variable produced the decisive difference between Newland's failure with his Octaves and Mendeleev's success with his Periodic Table, as described by Posin.--A famous example of this variation in anthropology is Ruth Benedict's own change of moral insight from 1934, when she copyrighted Patterns of Culture, to 1941 when she lectured on the same subject at Bryn Mawr College. In 1934 her sighting apparatus was cultural egalitarianism, which she and many others incorrectly labeled cultural relativism. It consists in flat contradiction of the Periodic Law. She stated this unequivocally in Patterns of Culture's concluding sentence, thus: "We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as a new basis for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence" (italics added). This flat denial of the Moral Law spread widely, and has intensified the breakdown symptoms in our culture which Toynbee called promiscuity, truancy, and drift. This is the Existentialists' disastrous way of dealing with the multiplicity of sighting mechanisms which constitutes each individual culture's and sub-culture's compass; namely, the false assertion that they are "equally valid" the abdication of responsibility of judging and assessing them relative to what Heisenberg calls a central order. (This subject is dealt with extensively in Chapter V.)   Frank Goble points out in The Third Force that by 1941, in her Bryn Mawr lectures, "Ruth Benedict was highly dissatisfied with the concept of cultural relativity, which was popular among anthropologists of her day, and with which her name has been closely associated. She struggled to develop a way of comparing various societies as unitary wholes or, in 20th-century terms, as "systems". She tried to correct her sighting error. Unfortunately, Benedict died in 1948. A part of her objective, however, was achieved by Ethel Albert a few years later, as shown above.

3.7.2.01_-_The_Foundation, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      And it is apparent, if we consider, that the individual's energy of action is not something miraculously separate and independent, it is not a power born of itself, living in itself, acting in its separate and wholly self-formed puissance. On the contrary it is the universal that acts in the individual energy and acts, no doubt with an individual application, but on universal lines and in harmony with its universal law. But if that were all the truth, then there would be no real individual and no responsibility of any kind except the responsibility of universal Nature to carry out the idea or to execute the force put forth in the individual as in the universal by the All-Soul, the cosmic Spirit. But there is also this soul of the individual, and that is a being of the Infinite and a conscious and efficient portion of the All-Soul, a deputy or representative, and puts forth the energy given to it according      --      But again, if that were all, if each man came into life with his present nature ready determined for him and irrevocable and had to act according to it, there would be no real responsibility; for he would do good according to the good and evil according to the evil in his nature, he would be imperfect according to its imperfection or perfect according to its perfection; and he might have to suffer the return of his good or evil, bear exactly the just consequences of his perfection or his imperfection, but mechanically and not by his choice: for his apparent choice would be the compulsion of the nature in him and could not be in any way, directly or indirectly, the result of his spirit's will.

4.03_-_Mistakes, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   Whenever you have made a mistake I always told you very frankly without hiding anything from you. Everybody makes mistakes and everybody has to learn and to progress. Moreover   I have given you a big responsibility. I appreciate fully what you have done but there is still much to learn and I am sure that you will be quite glad to acquire knowledge and experience. With my love and blessings.      --      After all, the whole, entire responsibility is the Lords and nobody elses. So there is nothing to worry about.

4.17_-_The_Action_of_the_Divine_Shakti, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      There is however a possibility of arriving at this result without the passage through the passivity of the mental Purusha, by a more persistently and predominantly kinetic Yoga. Or there may be a combination of both the methods, alternations between them and an ultimate fusion. And here the problem of spiritual action assumes a more simple form. In this kinetic movement there are three stages. In the first the Jiva is aware of the supreme shakti, receives the power into himself and uses it under her direction, with a certain sense of being the subordinate doer, a sense of minor responsibility in the action, -- even at first, it may be, a responsibility for the result; but that disappears, for the result is seen to be determined by the higher Power, and only the action is felt to be partly his own. The Sadhaka then feels that it is he who is thinking, willing, doing, but feels too the divine shakti or prakriti behind driving and shaping all his thought, will, feeling and action: the individual energy belongs in a way to him, but is still only a form and an instrument of the universal divine Energy. The Master of the Power may be hidden from him for a time by the action of the shakti, or he may be aware of the Ishwara sometimes or continually manifest to him. In the latter case there are three things present to his consciousness, himself as the servant of the Ishwara, the shakti behind as a great Power supplying the energy, shaping the action, formulating the results, the Ishwara above determining by his will the whole action.

5.01_-_The_Dakini,_Salgye_Du_Dalma, #The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, #Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, #Buddhism   If this relationship with the dakini sounds too foreign or fanciful, you may wish to psychologize it. That is all right. You can think of her as a separate being or as a symbol that you use to guide your intention and your mind. In either case, devotion and consistency are powerful assets on the spiritual journey. You may also do this practice with your yidam, if you do yidam practice, or with any deity or enlightened being; it is your efforts that make a difference in your practice, not the form. But it is also good to recognize that Salgye Du Dalma is especially associated with this practice in the Mother Tantra. There is a long history of practitioners working with her form and her energy, and making a connection with the power of the lineage can be a great support.   Imagination is very powerful, strong enough to bind one to the sufferings of samsara for an entire life, and strong enough to make the dialogue with the dakini real. Often practitioners act toward the dharma as if it is rigid, but it is not. The dharma is flexible and the mind should be flexible with it. It is your responsibility to find how to use the dharma to support your realization.   Rather than imagining how the day will go tomorrow, or the fight you had with the boss, or the evening ahead with your partner, it may be more helpful to create the presence of this beautiful dakini who embodies the highest goal of practice. The important point is to develop the powerful intention needed to accomplish the practice and a strong relationship to your true nature, which the dakini represents. As often as possible, pray to her for the sleep of clear light. Your intention will be strengthened each time you do.

5.4.01_-_Occult_Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   *   There is no question of responsibility.1 The "Something" does not act arbitrarily, paying no heed to the play of forces or the man's nature. "Selects" does not mean "selects at random". If a man puts himself on the side of or into the hands of the hostile influences and says, "This way I will go and no other. I want my ego, my greatness, my field of power and action", has not the Something the right to say, "I agree. Go and find it - if you can"? On the other hand, if the balance of forces is otherwise,   1 The correspondent wrote, in regard to the preceding letter: "If there is Something that looks, selects and uses our actions, then it is not the play of forces that is responsible for any action; the ultimate responsibility lies with this Something."

Agenda_Vol_10, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   they were!... Hollow, nothing but words. And what questions they asked me!... "What is   responsibility?..." One of the girls asked me, "What's the Divine?"   (They're all ultramodern people, you know, much too intelligent to believe in any godhead! They're   --   why? Because those young Americans who came here on a visit (did you hear about them?), a dozen or   so... I saw them all: quite ordinary people. They asked me, "What's responsibility?!"... Things of that   sort.   --   ***   I'd like you to take the responsibility of the Bulletin.   (various details follow)

Agenda_Vol_11, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   I think this poor boy has no authority there. Thats my impression.   Yes, but then, if the thing is printed with any mistakes, what am I to say? Its my responsibility!   Yes, and it would be better to... We can try to tell him... In the past, I used to see him once a week, so I   --   Well, its the only hope.   If they come and tell me, YOU have to take the responsibility, ah, then I would say, They are quite   right. Thats quite different. They have been beside the point. Its not that.   --   have no personal property. Like that on paper, its very fine, but when it comes to doing it in practice...   The problem is always the same: those given the responsibility should be people with a... universal   consciousness, of course, otherwise... Wherever there is a personal consciousness, it means someone   --   Its an impersonal person, I dont know; theres no personal relationship with it, but its someone   whose responsibility is to see to this bodys well-being, and especially to its relations with others,   because the body has reached the point where... it really couldnt care less.   --   doing what this Consciousness wants it to do, and so there are, as it were, people (or someone) whose   responsibility is to see that things can be understood in the transitory state we are in. There.39   (silence)

Agenda_Vol_12, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga      conclusion that we [Aurovillians] can take upon ourselves the responsibility for the excavation and   construction work of the four pillars; then a commercial firm such as EEC [I dont know what it is,   --   the family. On what ground do you claim to decide where he shall go or where he shall stay?   Your pretension to have the responsibility for him or her before God is an arrogant and   114Only 12 days later, on December 2, will India launch a general offensive.   --   grotesque absurdity. Each one is responsible for himself before God unless he freely chooses to   place the responsibility upon another in whom he trusts. No one has the right to impose himself   on others as a religious or spiritual guide against their free will. You have no claim at all to

Agenda_Vol_2, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   are. The day they get away from it, they too will smile!   Of course, I have a kind of responsibility because people expect me to organize everything, so I try   to put things in their place. That's why I told them I preferred they didn't hold seminars here, because it   --   They have put together a brochure saying, 'We will facilitate your relations with the Mother'!! Luckily,   the draft was sent to me. I said, 'I do not accept this responsibility.' I agreed to be President because   money is involved and I wanted to be a guarantee that all these people who make propaganda don't put   the money into their own pockets for their personal use; so I agreed to be President - to guarantee that   the money would really go to work for Sri Aurobindo, that's all. But no spiritual responsibility; I have   nothing to teach to anyone, thank God!   --   the intermediary for all who wish to come into direct contact with her'! They wanted to print this and   distribute it, just like that! So I took my brightest red ink and wrote: 'I do not accept this responsibility,   you cannot make this promise.' And that was that. I cut it. And now here's A., doing the same thing!   --   No, it's the old tradition - you step back from Nature and Nature does whatever she wants. It doesn't   concern you, you have no responsibility, 'you are not that.' It's the old idea.   Sri Aurobindo was completely against it. Somewhere he makes fun of a man who said he was the

Agenda_Vol_3, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   confident serenity. On the material plane there were attacks, but even these he took upon himself. Well,   I saw it all, all those thirty years of life; not for a SECOND did I have any sense of responsibility, in   spite of all the work I was doing, all the organizing and everything. He had supposedly passed on the   responsibility to me, you see, but he was standing behind - HE was actually doing everything! I was   active, but with absolutely no responsibility. I never felt responsible for a single minute - he took the   full responsibility. It was really....   For the first seven years he was doing the work, not me. He was the one who saw people; I looked   --   Later, when he withdrew and put me in front, there was naturally a bit more activity, as well as the   semblance of responsibility - but it was only a semblance. What security! A sense of total, total   security - for thirty years. Not once.... There was just a single scratch, so to speak, when he had that   --   saw what had happened, when he went out of his body and entered into mine (the most material part of   him, the part involved with external things) and I understood that I had the entire responsibility for all   the work AND for the sadhana7 - well, then I locked a part of me away, a deep psychic 8 part that was   living, beyond all responsibility, in the ECSTASY of the realization: the Supreme. I took it and locked   it away, I sealed it off and said, "You're not moving until... until all the rest is ready."   --   gives me the illusion of a body (Mother laughs).... I entrust it to the person I walk with. In other words,   it's not my responsibility: the other person has to make sure it doesn't fall, doesn't bump into anything -   you see what I mean. And the consciousness is a limitless consciousness, like a material equivalent or   --   I have noticed a slight change, a small movement in the consciousness of the person or persons in the   room. But I always hesitate to throw the responsibility onto something external, because that takes   three-quarters of the possibility of control away from you.   --   and then, having no wisdom, need to follow it blindly.   Had I taken the responsibility (I purposely didn't, for other reasons), I would have said, "Keep him   till tomorrow morning." And I would have done something overnight. But naturally, this is one case in

Agenda_Vol_4, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga      ...Obviously, the whole difficulty is the mixing of two things: on one hand, the responsibility of   everything, the entire organization, all these people hanging on to me (and naturally giving me work,   --   Agreed, then, we'll try and learn to laugh with the Lord.   I know - I know He wants me to learn not to take seriously the responsibility ("responsibility" isn't   the right word), the formidable task of finding 8,000 rupees a day to meet the Ashram's expenses - in   --   That's what I always tell those who criticize the government: "You deserve to be put in the place of   the Prime Minister, or any other minister, with decisions to make; and with the responsibility placed on   you, suppose you suddenly had to decide on things of which you know nothing - you'd soon see what   --   like automatons, so you can get something out of them. But unfortunately they think they are... they   have the sense of their responsibility, so they think they are very superior - then it's terrible!   Anyway...

Agenda_Vol_5, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   were going to be done "just like that," harmoniously. Then his departure - the blow of a sledgehammer   on the head.... And the entire weight of the responsibility here, on the body. Voil.   That means quite a preparation - which is as wise as all the rest.   --   not the one who does, and that what little is done - little or big, it doesn't matter - is done by the Lord;   and the responsibility is fully His. That makes you happy. With that, you are happy.   Voil.   --   Anyway, everything depends on you.   Thank you! (laughing) Thank you for the responsibility.   (silence)   --   inside himself, in the depths of his being, that he must find that light - the light that knows what should   be said and how it should be said. And then that feeling of responsibility and of complicity with   falsehood is finished, it disappears completely. And necessarily, inevitably, absolutely, he will say the

Agenda_Vol_6, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   without success. Finally, when I saw there was no way, I said to the Lord, "Look after her and do what   needs to be done, I beg You" - I handed over the responsibility to Him. And then, the same evening the   attack started, and I saw it was her dancing. So I thought, "We really had something to learn!" And I   --   and much more difficult at the same time, because it isn't blatant, it isn't evident, it's not an opposition   from which you can choose, it's... truly, totally and integrally leaving the entire responsibility to the   Lord.   --   far easier. But for man it's very difficult. Because there was a whole period in the evolution when in   order to progress he had to take on the responsibility for himself. So the habit has formed, it has taken   root in the being.

Agenda_Vol_7, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   her liver will never be cured." So faced with such a suggestion, I said, "I am not taking any   responsibility: go and get your suggestion cured in Hong Kong!"   They are terrible.   --   back here.... They wrote all this to me (it's the husband who wrote; as for her, she was preparing to   come back here). I said, "I don't want to take the responsibility, the suggestion is too strong, let her go   and get the suggestion cured in Hong Kong."

Agenda_Vol_8, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   there (gesture with the hands open upward and forming a kind of upside down triangle): the only   support is the Divine. The only support. The only help, the only responsibility. All the rest.... There   isn't one thing coming from or towards a human being that isn't mixed; and the moment it's mixed, it   --   Now there is integrally, even for the most material consciousness, the body consciousness, this: to   leave the entire responsibility to the Lord - what He wants will be, and that's all. When He wants us to   do something, we do it, but after all... We do it simply because He tells us to do it. And what will   --   township what it needs (in proportion to what they produce, of course), and it is the township's   responsibility to feed everyone. That means people won't have to buy their food with money, but they   will have to earn it.

Agenda_Vol_9, #The Mothers Agenda, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga   come too late. It's T. who did the translation, but she refused to read it out [at the inauguration],   because, she said, it was "too heavy a responsibility"! (Mother laughs) They are all like that. Finally it   was read out by S. But then, we have a Communist architect, a Russian, who has been working a great   --   Most of the time, it's a sort of laziness, something unwilling to make an effort, to make a resolve: it   prefers to leave the responsibility to others. In English I would call it the remnant, the residue of the   Inconscient. It's a sort of spinelessness (gesture of groveling) which accepts a general, impersonal law:   --   be left independent, and should be given advice only in so far as they ASK for it.   They must know that steering their own life is their responsibility."   ***

Big_Mind_(non-dual), #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Heart. I am the manifestation of them. When Big Mind acts, it always acts with compassion. I am that action.   It is all my responsibility. If a voice is not clear about its functions, its duties, what it is supposed to do, it is my responsibility to help it become clear. If it's lazy, it's my job to motivate it. If it's doing too much, it's my responsibility to slow it down and make sure it gets proper rest, proper nutrition, proper exercise. These are all my responsibilities because I am the captain of this ship.   If someone doesn't know whom they're working for, it's my responsibility to make it clear to them that the Controller and the Protector are working for me. They are not the head of the company. The Controller thinks he is the CEO, but I hired him to do a specific job, which was to control. I am the boss.   FACILITATOR: Are you the boss of the self?

Big_Mind_(ten_perfections), #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   FACILITATOR: It sounds like a far cry from not caring.   GENEROSITY: I think it's the counterbalance. The more I don't care, the more I can care, the more I can give. The more detached I am, the more attached to the liberation of all beings I can be. How could I handle the enormity of the responsibility if I cared too much? You know, I would be limited by my very caring. In other words, when I manifest not caring, I can fully and truly care. So I don't see that as a 'far cry.' I see them as absolutely one.   That's the interplay of Big Mind and Big Heart right there. Big Mind doesn't care.   --   So I might say something seemingly negative about someone or might appear to be greedy or stingy at times, if that were the right thing to do in that moment, the most appropriate thing. I see that everything is relative, that my position or role in a situation, the time, the place, and how much or how little I do, make my response either appropriate or inappropriate. The only guideline for this is my own best judgment, based on the wisdom I have from Big Mind and the compassion coming from a literal understanding of not doing harm, not creating suffering.   I appreciate and respect others' possessions and property. I give freely and generously. I don't act self-centeredly or egotistically. I am truthful unless the circumstances are such that it is more appropriate for me not to be. I am sober, attentive and mindful, and I don't allow myself to get too intoxicated by alcohol, or my own ideas or notions. I refrain from talking about others' errors or faults, and I find ways to be kind and considerate in speech toward others. I don't elevate myself and blame others. I don't put others down in order to build myself up. I am simply generous and nice to others. I do not find fault, and I take full responsibility for action and reaction, for cause and effect. I am generous and giving. I am joyful, friendly and compassionate toward others.   FACILITATOR: Do you ever have doubts about your past actions, and think that after all they may not have been the best course?   WISE OR APPROPRIATE ACTION: Sure. Because what's right or wrong does change according to the situation, according to time and place, and as time moves on what was right one moment may not appear to be right in the future, or what was right in the past may not seem to have been the best decision now, and the best decision now may not be the best decision in the future. It goes back and forth, but I don't know if it does a lot of good to dwell on that. You know, you make the best decision you can as you go along, given the tools you have to work with. I think we have to be as true to that as we can be, and be willing to suffer the consequences, the karmic consequences, when our choices are not the best. But all we can do is work with what we've got.   I think that a lot of religions teach shoulds and should nots, dos and don'ts, out of fear. I have never found that this serves the greater purpose. It's OK in the short term, but in a way it just produces a lot of rigidity and a lot of fear in people. A much more mature way is encouraging each individual to take full responsibility for cause and effect, for action and reaction, for consequences. So the responsibility is thrown back on each individual to make the wisest and most compassionate choices given their own wisdom and compassion. Shoulds and should nots really bind us - 'I should be this, I shouldn't be that, I should do this, I shouldn't do that.' Dropping all that is complete liberation. Wise and appropriate action is who I am   FACILITATOR: No guarantees?   --   Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."   Sometimes we put others down in order to make ourselves feel better or more important. Sometimes we find fault or blame others in order to evade responsibility for our actions. It is rather easy to find someone's faults if we are looking for them.   Somehow it is more difficult to be nice and say kind words to people, and yet we all like to hear nice and kind things about ourselves. Loving and compassionate speech is the hallmark of a mature human being. Being more kind and compassionate toward all beings and speaking lovingly to others is ultimately the path of the human being.

Blazing_P1_-_Preconventional_consciousness, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   to circumstances. Somebody gets into trouble because he runs around with the wrong   people. Self-criticism is not characteristic. If he acknowledges responsibility for doing   wrong, he is likely to blame it on some part of himself for which he disclaims responsibility,   my eyes or my figure. This tendency may help explain the imaginary companion some

Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   unlike people at the Self-protective stage, there is real concern for the well being of others.   One takes responsibility for others. Dependency needs are high. Fear of rejection leads   conformists to be overly nice and to repress negative feelings. There is unquestioned   --   locating the conflict internally and assuming the stage 4 functions of psychological selfadministration (I decide for myself to abstain). But when she experiences abstinence as   difficult, the sense of self-responsibility caves in; and the half of herself that wants to abstain   is delegated to the other (the children), the emotion living again in stage 3 field of   --   the Self-Protective Stage, but rarely does the person blame himself. Occasionally one will find   total self-rejection at the lowest levels, but without a corresponding sense of responsibility for   actions or their consequences. (Self-rejection may occur in depressed persons of any level;   --   long-term, self-evaluated goals and ideals, differentiated self-criticism, and a sense of   responsibility. Only a few persons as young as thirteen or fourteen years reach this stage.   The internalization of rules is completed at the Conscientious Stage. Where the SelfProtective person obeys rules in order to avoid getting into trouble and the Conformist obeys   --   the extent of feeling obliged to shape anothers life or to prevent him from making errors.   Along with the concepts of responsibility and obligations go the correlative concepts of   privileges, rights, and fairness. All of them imply a sense of choice rather than being a pawn   --   Qualities: Primary elements of adult conscience are present, including long-term goals,   ability for self-criticism, and a deeper sense of responsibility. Future-oriented and proactive;   initiator rather than pawn of system; blind to subjectivity behind objectivity; feel guilt when   --   having definite traits that distinguish one uniquely from others. One learns to understand   oneself backwards (responsibility guilt) and forwards in time (plans, dreams) within the   roles (prototypes) and functions provided by ones culture. [Conscientious stage] individuals   --   voluntarily entering into roles that entail these responsibilities. (Obligation or duty as   commitment and responsibility is differentiated from what is typically expected of a role   occupant.) 49   --   for it is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the   burden of responsibility for his or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes.   Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must face certain

Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Conformist to the Conscientious Stage, are now seen as partly antagonistic to the striving for   achievement and the sometimes excessive moralism and responsibility for self and others at   the Conscientious Stage. Moralism begins to be replaced by an awareness of inner conflict. At   --   sometimes to the point of being unable to get out of endless loops, striving to take   responsibility for myself ()72

BOOK_II._--_PART_I._ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy   sensuality.* It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the   responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect; "the   restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid   --   sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.* But while saving man from   mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility -the result of his free will -- besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir to. This torture   Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the tabernacle

BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy   Miocene period. With these the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the "Mindless" -- this time with full   responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the species of apes now known as Anthropoid.   It may be useful to compare this very simple theory -- and we are willing to offer it even as a

BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy   the wildest kind; for who has ever even heard of the book of Dzyan?   The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility for what is contained in this work,   and even to face the charge of having invented the whole of it. That it has many shortcomings she is   --      right of free-agency and responsibility, since man and angel are alike under Karmic Law.*   "And there was war in Heaven. . . . Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon   --   more especially against those of our latter-day Materialism, very often miscalled Science, whereas, in   reality, the words "Scientists" and "Sciolists" ought alone to bear the responsibility for the many   illogical theories offered to the world. In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting

BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy   and tribe, like their Eastern brethren of the Fifth Race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of   comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while now, several of them have reached their   Iron Age, the Kali-Yuga, an age BLACK WITH HORRORS. . . . .

BS_1_-_Introduction_to_the_Idea_of_God, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      What happens in the Old Testament, at least in part, is that consciousness is associated with the divine. Now you think, well, is that a reasonable proposition? Thats a very complicated question, but at least we might note that theres something to the claim, because there is a miracle of experience and existence thats dependent on consciousness. People try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well. And heres something else to think aboutI think its really worth thinking about. People do not like it when you treat them like theyre not conscious. They react very badly to that. You dont like it if someone assumes that youre not conscious, and you dont like it if someone assumes you dont have free willthat youre just absolutely determined in your actions, theres nothing thats going to repair you, and that you dont need to have any responsibility for your actions.

Evening_Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      The reader is requested to note that Sri Aurobindo is not responsible for these records as he had no opportunity to see them. So, it is not as if Sri Aurobindo said exactly these things but that I remember him to have said them. All I can say is that I have tried to be as faithful in recording them as I was humanly capable. That does not minimize my personal responsibility which I fully accept.      --      Sri Aurobindo: You can say matter knows nothing about good and bad, or sick and healthy. But the human body, I mean the physical consciousness, is not matter. It is conscious, and therefore it can have its own responsibility with regard to diseases.      --      They could not grasp the argument that the spiritual power of Vashishta was responsible for the destruction. The original story is that the Cow, Kamdhenu, did not want to go to Vishwamitra. Vishwamitra wanted to take it by force. But Vashishta refused to resist. So the Cow asked him to allow her to resist Vishwamitra. Vashishta said: You can do whatever you like. She called upon the psychical powers to resist and the Asuras came on account of the spiritual power of Vashishta. Because one saves himself from the act of killing, his responsibility is not less on that account. The question is whether one resists or not. If one resists it may be by physical force or soul force that is quite another matter.      --      Sri Aurobindo: Then, you want to throw the whole burden on me and evade your responsibility?      --      Sri Aurobindo: Now that we have all come to the lower vital and the physical planes where the struggle is most acute I am speaking from there and not from any higher standpoint. (Short pause: then to a Disciple: ) No, K you cant evade your responsibility. (laughter).      --      Disciple: Probably he wants to know what is the responsibility of the sadhakas?      --      Sri Aurobindo: No, it was directly transmitted into the pen. It is a great relief to get out of that responsibility.      --      Sri Aurobindo: I dont mean responsibility in general but that of thinking about everything. Some thoughts are given or reflected from outside. It is not that I dont ask for knowledge. When I want knowledge I call for it. The Higher faculty sees thoughts as if written on a wall.      --      For the Yogi who has to conquer these things they will come, otherwise there would be nothing to overcome. It would be no real conquest at all. One can always feel the difficulties as opportunities, and in one sense one can say that whatever happens is for the best. Hostile forces also are recognized as hostile, but from another standpoint they become the Divine power throwing out attacks for the work to be done. Ultimately all powers are from the Divine, they assist in the work. They throw up difficulties to test the strength. It is the Divine that has created the opposition and it is the Divine who sends you the defeat so that you may conquer the difficulties hereafter. This is necessary also to counter the egos sense of responsibility. At one time I experienced the hostile forces as the gods trying to test my strength. You have to act not for success but for the sake of the Divine, though it does not mean that you must not work for success. Arjuna complains to Sri Krishna in the Gita that he speaks in double words: saying do not be eager for the result but at the same time he said fight and conquer.      --      Disciple: Then, can one say that one has no responsibility. One can do as one likes , in that case one becomes a fatalist.      --      Sri Aurobindo: That is generally the case when you state some Truth you have to express it in contradictory terms (laughter). Truth is not always consistent, but the contradiction you notice does not mean that there is no responsibility, or no morality, no right, no wrong. The individual is responsible, for, he accepts the action of the Gunas of nature.      --      Sri Aurobindo: Of course, the only Aryans are the Germans. It is they who feel the responsibility and bear the consequences.      Disciple: Can one be free if one acts without feeling responsibility?      Sri Aurobindo: You cant get rid of responsibility like that, even though you may say, you are not responsible.      You must become free if you want to be free from responsibility. There are three ways, or rather several ways, of attaining that freedom. One is by the separation of the Purusha from Prakriti and realizing it as free from it; another is by realizing the Self, The Atman or the Spirit, from the Cosmic movement. Thirdly by the identification with the Transcendent Above, i.e. by realizing the Parmatma. You can also have this freedom by merging into the Shunyam through Buddhistic discipline.      --      Many yogis when they go beyond into the Spirit or the Cosmic consciousness, allow Cosmic nature to act through them without any sense of individual responsibility. They remain concentrated in, or identified with the Higher Consciousness uncontrolled And you find as X found that the spiritual man uses foul language: of course, the yogi or the spirit in him is not bound by the rules of decency. That is why such yogis act like Jada, Pishacha or Bala allowing nature to play freely in them.

Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    possible medium: the mystery of incarnation.    Between immoral fatality, and Draconic responsibility, which would    conclude the damnation of all beings, there is only one possible mean:   --    Nero was the accomplice of the whole Roman people, and those who should    have prevented them incurred the whole responsibility for the frenzies    of this monster. Seneca, Burrhus, Thrasea, Corbulon, theirs is the real

Liber_71_-_The_Voice_of_the_Silence_-_The_Two_Paths_-_The_Seven_Portals, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga    who cultivated the rice had to destroy a lot of vermin too. One cannot    escape responsibility in this vicarious way. It is peculiarly silly,    because the whole point of Buddha's position is that there is no

LUX.05_-_AUGOEIDES, #Liber Null, #Peter J Carroll, #Occultism      He takes complete responsibility for his present incarnation and must consider every experience, thing, or piece of information which assails him from any source, as a reflection of the way he is conducting his existence. The idea that things happen to one that may or may not be related to the way one acts is an illusion created by our shallow awareness.

Maps_of_Meaning_text, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   in theory, to treat his neighbour as himself. The principles that govern his society (and, increasingly, all   others15) remain predicated on mythic notions of individual value intrinsic right and responsibility   despite scientific evidence of causality and determinism in human motivation. Finally, in his mind even   --   of what was supposed to occur of what was desired to happen. It is therefore signalling of motivational   significance, or affective importance, that constitutes what is perhaps the major responsibility of the limbic   system that, and the (integrally related) inculcation and renewal of memory [integrally related, as it is   --   force that motivates the commission of atrocity planned rape and painful slaughter during the waging of   war. She is aggression, without the inhibition of fear and guilt; sexuality in the absence of responsibility,   dominance without compassion, greed without empathy. She is the Freudian id, unconsciousness   --   all, a new environment. That new environment is the society of men, where women are sexual partners and   equals instead of source of dependent comfort; where the provision of food and shelter is a responsibility,   and not a given; where security final authority, in the form of parent no longer exists. As the childhood   --   scope and importance of our errors, we are properly humble; in truth, we are merely unwilling to bear the   weight of our true responsibility.   5.2.1. The Adversary in Action: Voluntary Degradation of the Map of Meaning   --   advantages that accompany increased freedom may seem frightening and of dubious value, given the   comparative responsibility and lack of security that are part and parcel of maturity.   As maturation takes place, the environment transforms. As the developing individual masters his   --   sheltered, as well, from the terrible world. Culture intercedes, in the form of proscriptions for behavior,   when mortality nonetheless threatens, but adherence to such requirements means increased responsibility,   separation from the good mother, and sacrifice of the primary dependent relationship. Culture moulds the   --   The decadent looks to subvert the process of maturation looks for a way out of group affiliation.   Group membership requires adoption of at-least-adolescent responsibility at least of the responsibilities   associated with respectable behavior and this burden may seem too much to bear, as a consequence of   --   course, the journey to the land of living water. The decadent makes his intellectual superiority to the   superstitious of the past an article of faith, instead, and shirks his responsibility. [That is to say it is the   desire to shirk that responsibility (and the heroic sacrifice it entails), that constitutes motivation for belief   in intellectual superiority.] The suffering rebel stance that such adoption allows, as a secondary   --   letting my own interests influence my decisions as little as possible, and I then believed that I had   somehow avoided personal responsibility for the state of the modern world, because I was not really      --   that he does not have to do anything for himself. The decadent believes that freedom can be attained   without discipline and responsibility, because he is ignorant of the terrible nature of the undifferentiated   ground of reality, and is unwilling to bear the burden of order. When he starts to suffer as he certainly   --   defining their true talents and deviances as (threatening and frustrating) impediments to their ambition.   The stunted personality will experience life as a burden as a responsibility too heavy to bear and turn to   resentment and hatred, as a justifiable alternative.   --   in preaching and acting as we did? Was it not our love for men that made us resign ourselves to the idea   of their impotence and lovingly try to lighten the burden of their responsibility, even allowing their weak   nature to sin, but with our permission? Why have You come to interfere with our work?549   --      for every vital decision; removes the responsibility for action from the individual, and therefore prevents   him or her from discovering the potential grandeur of the soul. Life without law remains chaotic,   --   as prima materia, Devouring the Dead King.627 This devouring of the Dead King by the now-recognized   beast of the underworld is very much akin to Solzhenitsyns discovery of his personal responsibility for   the Gulag that imprisoned him. For a typical modern, an equal shock might be produced by his discovery of   --   cause such suffering?   Perhaps we could reserve answer to the question of Gods nature, his responsibility for the presence of   the evil in creation, until we have solved the problem of our own. Perhaps we could tolerate the horrors of   --   voluntarily bear the terrible weight of our mortality. We turn from that capacity and degrade ourselves   because we are afraid of responsibility. Thus the necessarily tragic preconditions of existence are made   intolerable.   --   that you wish could be, and in the real world at the same time, and it often seems a bad bargain to destroy   fantasy for reality. It is desire for lack of responsibility that underlies this evasion, in part but it is also   fear of possibility. At least this is how it seems to me.   --   produced what might be described as a secondary gain, which has played an important role in maintaining   the confusion. That gain is abdication of the absolute personal responsibility imposed in consequence of   recognition of the divine in man. This responsibility means acceptance of the trials and tribulations   associated with expression of unique individuality, as well as respect for such expression in others. Such   --   but the lies he tells himself. The root of social and individual psychopathology, the denial, the   repression is the lie. The most dangerous lie of all is devoted towards denial of individual responsibility    towards denial of individual divinity.   --   The wisdom of the group can serve as the force that mediates between the dependency of childhood and the   responsibility of the adult. Under such circumstances, the past serves the present. A society predicated upon   belief in the paramount divinity of the individual allows personal interest to flourish and to serve as the

Sayings_of_Sri_Ramakrishna_(text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism   seriously taken ill and is about to die, and says to his mother, "Why madam, there is no cause for anxiety   at all, I take upon myself the responsibility of saving your son's life." Next He smiles when two brothers,   who are busy partitioning their land, take a measuring tape, put it across the land and say, "This side is   --   suffering is almost equal to the frog's." So if an unenlightened man takes upon himself in his   foolhardiness the responsibility of saving another, there is no end to the misery of both: Neither does   the ego of the disciple vanish, nor are his worldly ties cut asunder. If the disciple comes under the   --   conditions of realisation will become perfect. If you want to renounce the world, and if your family   depends upon you, perhaps your brother will assume its responsibility for you. Perhaps your wife will      --   both with and without formSome Divine formsDivine immanence The Divine and man's moral   responsibility   Brahman (The Impersonal or Supra-Personal Absolute)   --      The Divine and Man's Moral responsibility   895. Q, If God has become all, is there no sin, and no virtue?   --   Whether you live in the world or renounce it, everything' depends upon the will of Rama. Throwing your   whole responsibility upon God, do your work in the world.   1096. A thief entered the palace of a king at the dead of night and overheard the king saying to the

Talks_026-050, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism     M.: It is inscrutable. No motive can be attributed to that Power no desire, no end to achieve can be asserted of that one Infinite,     All-wise and All-powerful Being. God is untouched by activities, which take place in His presence; compare the sun and the world activities. There is no meaning in attributing responsibility and motive to the One before it becomes many. But Gods will for the prescribed course of events is a good solution of the free-will problem (vexata quaestio). If the mind is restless on account of a sense of the imperfect and unsatisfactory character of what befalls us or what is committed or omitted by us, then it is wise to drop the sense of responsibility and free-will by regarding ourselves as the ordained instruments of the All-wise and All-powerful, to do and suffer as He pleases. He carries all burdens and gives us peace.

Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1, #unset, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Rao and Dr. Savoor.   As these notes were not seen by Sri Aurobindo himself, the responsibility for the Master's words rests entirely with me. I do not vouch for absolute   accuracy, but I have tried my best to reproduce them faithfully. I have made   --   SRI AUROBINDO: No, it was transmitted directly into the pen. It is a great relief   to get out of the responsibility.   DR. MANILAL: Oh yes, Sir.   SRI AUROBINDO: I don't mean responsibility in general, but of thinking about   everything. Some thoughts are given, some are reflected from above. It is   --   DR. BECHARLAL: Could there not be some danger in that attitude? We may   shirk our responsibility and lay it on the Divine,   SRI AUROBINDO: I was speaking about the Bhakta. For the Bhakta whatever   --   that you may conquer hereafter. This is necessary in order to go beyond the   ego's sense of its own responsibility.   At one time I experienced the hostile forces as gods trying to test my   --   will be driven out and persecuted everywhere. So Hitler by his mass persecution of the Jews may be bringing about the Golden Age!   NIRODBARAN: Then has one no responsibility? Can one do as one likes. In that   case one becomes a fatalist.   --   SRI AUROBINDO: Truth is not always consistent. But contradiction here does   not mean that there is no responsibility or no morality, no right and wrong.   The individual is responsible because he accepts the action of the Gunas, the   --   through the personality or nature. If it is acting through my nature, where is   my responsibility?   SRI AUROBINDO: But the individual in Nature has the freedom to accept Nature or to refuse. Arjuna refused to fight and eighteen chapters of the Gita   --      SRI AUROBINDO: Of course, all Aryans are Germans. To get rid of responsibility you must get rid of ego, that is to say, of the mental, vital and other personalities.   NIRODBARAN: If one could act without responsibility one would be free.   SRI AUROBINDO: It is not easy. You can try and see. You may say you are not   responsible but internally you will feel that you are.   In order to be free from this responsibility you must become free first in   consciousness. There are three ways of attaining that freedom: first, by separating the Purusha from Prakriti and realising its freedom from it; second, by   --   the Spirit of cosmic consciousness, allow the cosmic nature to act through   them without any sense of individual responsibility. They remain concentrated in or identified with the higher consciousness and their nature sometimes moves in an uncontrolled way; then you find them using the foul language of which Dilip complains. The Yogis are not bound by manners or the   rules of decency. They act like Jada, Bala, Unmatta or Pishacha, because   --   don't help.   SATYENDRA: It is better to foist all responsibility on God for all creation good   and bad. Dr. Manilal objects to this because of the creation of Rakshasas.   --   SATYENDRA: He has written about it in his book. Just as he was removing   things the police came, he said. He seemed to be a man on whom responsibility was sitting very lightly.   SRI AUROBINDO: Then he knew that the police were watching him but didn't   --   couldn't be vigilant enough. Sisir Mitra and Nolini don't believe that you   would have been so careless with such a heavy responsibility on you.   SRI AUROBINDO: As I said, I had nothing to do directly with the movement. I

Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   SRI AUROBINDO: As I remarked, the Government has not given her the   chance of a rest cure in jail. The Government refuses to take up responsibility for her.